English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism

Students of historiography could be forgiven a little confusion over the nature of the English historiographical tradition. They are told, by some, that English historians have been educated in a peculiarly tenacious positivist tradition,1 while others deny that positivism had any influence at all upon historiography.2 The general intellectual history of the nineteenth century has been written in terms of the dominance of two great philosophical schools, idealism and positivism;3 history has been described as divided into distinct schools, romantic, idealist, and positivist, in the nineteenth century;4 and the English historian's supposed obsession with amassing facts is assumed to place him firmly in the positivist camp. On the other hand, the English historian is also supposed to be peculiarly immune to philosophical influence -a naive, if professional, searcher after facts, demonstrating a weakness sometimes presumed to be an extreme form of national myopia, namely an insular blindness to the philosophy of others. Sometimes the confusion is resolved by reference to the scientific character of positivism and its hostility to metaphysics and other philosophical systems.5 Unfortunately, no two writers agree on the meaning of positivism, definitions ranging from Comtism to

Art · Binary opposition · Epistemology · Literature · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Positivism · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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• The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870)

  Open Access•Allen W Wood, Songsuk Susan Hahn•Cambridge History of Philosophy…•2012

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