Another attack came from those who believed that history should model itself after the natural sciences, especially physics. In their view, the reliance on intuition ensured that historiography would always be imprecise. Such critics also believed that the invocation of notions such as Spirit, Volk, or God was a mere mystification and that the focus on the individual or the particular rather than the general was misguided. Although very few historians fully embraced this position, some had ambitions in that direction. Among them was Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), whose 12-volume Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1901: “German History”) elicited a furious response from historians in Germany. Lamprecht’s transgressions were two-fold: he criticized the prevailing idealist approach to history, and he made social and cultural life, rather than the formation of the state, the central theme. His opponents accused him of having socialist sympathies (which was doubtful) and of attempting to undo the tradition of historiography that had made Germany admired throughout the world. Lamprecht sought to find laws of collective psychology governing the behaviour of Germans. His approach found few followers in Germany but had somewhat more influence in the United States. It was in any case a symptom of a widespread desire to find a different and more scientific basis for history. France
The most important voices calling for a new scientific history were heard in France and the United States. France had its own tradition of documentary criticism, stemming from the humanist scholars of the 16th century and stimulated by the founding of the École des Chartes (School of Paleography) in 1821. More resistant to German influence than any other European country, it also produced Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the prophet of scientific laws in history.
Comte, inventor of the word sociology and often regarded as the founder of the discipline, propounded an elaborate tripartite view of historical development. Humanity, he declared, had already passed through two stages, the theological and the philosophical. In the former, divinities or spiritual forces were believed to be the causes of natural and human events. In the philosophical period, natural laws were discovered, but the world of human events was still held to be indeterminate, and thought was confused by the belief in essences, teleologies, and other unobservable forces. The advent of the positive period was the French Revolution, which liberated humans from their theological fancies and philosophical mistakes. Henceforth, Comte prophesied, humans would rely only on what their senses told them and would seek out the laws that governed the human world. The aggregate of these laws would be sociology. Observations would be provided by historians; but historians, incapable of fully understanding their own discoveries, would rely on sociologists to place their observations under appropriate laws. This program, not surprisingly, did not appeal to historians, but it did offer an ideal for uniting all aspects of society in a single analytical framework.
Auguste Comte, drawing by Tony Toullion, 19th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.H. Roger-Viollet
In 1900 the French philosopher Henri Berr founded the social-science journal Revue de Synthèse Historique, which attracted contributions from some French historians. Berr’s program for “historical synthesis” was more ambitious than any single historian could achieve; he called for teams of scholars from various disciplines to engage in empirical historical research with the aim of synthesizing their discoveries. Berr argued that no discipline could proceed without some sort of logical method that would involve hypothesis and synthesis as well as analysis. In this respect he agreed with the leading figure in French social science, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who established the journal L’Année Sociologique at about the same time. Although many French historians remained more traditional in their practice, Berr in 1907 recruited both Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1866–1944) as collaborators on the Revue. Together these men would challenge and revolutionize the study of history in France and in the rest of the world.
While at the University of Strasbourg, which then was on the margins of the French historical profession, Bloch and Febvre produced important works of their own, often focused on what became known as the history of mentalités, or popular attitudes and unconscious preconceptions. Although both eventually attained chairs at universities in Paris, it was not until after World War II that they achieved a significant following—by then Bloch had been shot by the Nazis for his participation in the French resistance. After the war, the Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, which they had founded in 1929 as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, became the most influential historical journal in the world (the title was changed again in 1994, to Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales). Its impact was vastly enhanced by the capture by the Annalistes of the newly reconstituted Sixth Section of the École des Hautes Études (School of Higher Studies). Eventually, as a result of bureaucratic centralization in France and the willingness of the government to commit funds to higher education in order to gain cultural prestige, the directorate of the Sixth Section was virtually able to supervise historical research in the country. The United States
Whereas in 1875 there was hardly anything that could be called a historical profession in the United States, by 1900 the American Historical Association (AHA) and its journal, the American Historical Review, as well as a number of university Ph.D. programs in history, had been established. No clique of senior professors in the great universities could have achieved the sort of dominance in the United States that was possible in France or Germany, but there was nevertheless a struggle to create a group of historians, highly trained in the approved German manner, to claim the national history from the hands of the great amateurs such as Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman. For a while amateurs coexisted amicably with the professionals (Bancroft was the second president of the AHA), but they soon withdrew to found more-congenial forums such as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now the Journal of American History). This prompted former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, who served as president of the AHA in 1912, to complain, not without reason, that the professionals were squeezing all the life out of history; their expertise was bought at the cost of pedantry in the profession and boredom among the public.