For many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the project of establishing a science of history and society, comprising hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained by theories in the physical sciences, acquired an almost obsessive importance. The age of religious and metaphysical conjectures concerning the destiny of human affairs had, in their opinion, come to a close. The task that now presented itself was one of constructing, upon the basis of hard observable facts, interpretations that would not only rescue the human studies from ignorance, uncertainty, and primitive superstition but also create an instrument for predicting and controlling the fate of humanity. Thus, the idea of establishing a universally valid social science, capable of accounting for the phenomena of history in terms of causal principles comparable to those employed in the natural sphere, came to be linked with the promotion of reformist and revolutionary ideals. Figures such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and the marquis de Condorcet in the 18th century and Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Thomas Buckle in the 19th century all believed that it was feasible to apply scientific procedures to the study of human development. But equally—though in widely different ways—they were deeply concerned with practical objects and committed to changing existing institutions and ways of life. To these thinkers, theory was complementary to practice; knowledge was power.

Yet even in the 19th century, when speculation of this type was at its height, there were informed skeptics—Joseph de Maistre and Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, and later the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt—who challenged the optimistic and rationalistic presuppositions on which it was founded. It was pointed out that notions such as that of the perfectibility of humanity or of the existence of some foreseeable goal toward which the course of events was inexorably leading were not empirically established truths but mere articles of faith; in subscribing to them, historical theorists often appeared to be tacitly importing into their allegedly scientific interpretations teleological conceptions of a kind that it had been their declared intention to banish forever from social enquiry. These objections were repeated and amplified in the 20th-century by critics such as Karl Popper, who also maintained that the theorists in question were, in any case, working with an unacceptably crude notion of scientific reasoning and that their high-sounding generalities conspicuously failed to measure up to the requisite standards of conceptual precision and observational testability.

Although such strictures have considerable force, they should not obscure the significant contribution that had been made toward extending human knowledge and understanding. The tendency, for example, to insist upon the relevance of scientific modes of procedure to the areas of historical and social investigation at least achieved the salutary effect of throwing into relief the inadequacy of previous work in these domains; moreover, it indirectly brought to the fore the entire question of the status of history as a legitimate form of thought. For, if history should prove resistant to attempts to assimilate it to other accredited branches of enquiry, it would be necessary to show why this was so and to exhibit those features of historical thinking that lent it its distinctive and irreducible character.

The new science: Vico and Herder

Among the 18th-century theorists, two writers can indeed be picked out who—while remaining firmly within the speculative tradition—at the same time possessed sufficient genius and prescience to realize that the solution to the problem of establishing history as a reputable discipline might be found by pursuing a course different from one modelled upon the methodology of the natural sciences. Partly because of the obscure and scholastic manner in which it was written, the Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) of Giambattista Vico was a work whose importance remained for a long time wholly unrecognized, and it was not until the 20th century that its significance and originality were fully appreciated.

Central to the book is the contention that the kind of knowledge that humans can achieve of their own actions, creations, and institutions is of a radically different type from the knowledge that is acquired by the observation and investigation of the nonhuman or natural world. Knowledge of the former variety is, moreover, held to be in principle superior to that of the latter. For, in Vico’s opinion, in order truly to know something it is necessary in some sense to have made it: it followed that, whereas the reality studied by the physical scientist is the creation of God and therefore only properly known by God, the “world of nations” that forms the subject matter of history is the creation of humans and is therefore something that humans can “hope to know.” Thus, Vico was led to stress the differences rather than the analogies between historical and other forms of enquiry; in particular, he emphasized the need for the historian to enter imaginatively into the spirit of past ages, re-creating the outlooks and attitudes that informed them as opposed to seeking to impose upon them inappropriate or falsifying interpretations—“pseudomyths”—that derived from the cultural ethos of his own time. Vico propounded a cyclical theory of human history, according to which “nations” or societies pass through determinate stages, and he combined this with the idea that a providential principle is in some manner immanent within the various forms of life that humans construct. He employed such conceptions, however, in a fashion that treated human nature as historical and emphasized that human powers and capacities do not conform to a fixed or static pattern but are necessarily subject to change and development in the course of time.

In a similar vein, the German writer Johann Gottfried von Herder, in his influential Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man), implied that it was vital to view human actions and achievements from a standpoint that took proper account of “time, place and national character”—in other words, cultural milieu and the inevitable limits imposed by historical situation and circumstance. In its general direction, Herder’s historical thought reflected the Enlightenment preconceptions of humans as progressive beings. Herder’s chief importance lies, however, in his insistence upon the misconceptions involved in treating the products of past thought and action as if they were the manifestations of an unchanging human consciousness and as if they could be explained by reference to abstract laws eternally valid for humans everywhere. According to Herder, such an approach failed to recognize the complex influences that act upon human beings as members of particular historical societies; each of these societies possessed its unique life-style, subtly but inescapably determining the mentalities of those born within its confines in a manner that rendered futile all attempts to reduce human propensities and needs to the terms of some simple set of abstract formulas.

Many of Vico’s and Herder’s ideas appear familiar today, but it is easy to forget that the emergence of what has come to be known as the “historical sense” is a comparatively recent phenomenon, one that represents a genuine revolution in European thought. It is largely because of this revolution that social and political theories of the kind elaborated by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th century now seem oddly artificial, so remote are the categories in which they sought to explain human life and behaviour from those that have subsequently found acceptance.