Abstract
August Ludwig von Schlozer (1735–1809) is still most often remembered as the inveterate opponent of Russian anti-Normanists and specifically and personally, of Mikhail V. Lomonosov. We consider this view too limited and simplified. Schlozer has the right to be recognized as one of the most prominent German scholars and the leader of the Gottingen school of history at the end of the 18th and early 19th century. It was he and his followers who first developed and introduced the concepts of “world history”, “general history”, “history of mankind”, “auxiliary historical disciplines”. Schlozer and his colleagues were the first to begin elevating history to the rank of a separate field of study. The article employs an innovative approach borrowed from thesaurus analysis in the humanities, now actively used by research groups and schools at Moscow University for the Humanities (Valery A. Lukov, Vladimir A. Lukov and others). We prove that the thesaurus approach can act as a subject-oriented research tool in interpreting and understanding of the period of constitutionalization of history as a discipline. The incompleteness of knowledge systems was a feature typical for this period. We focus specifically on Schlozer’s concepts and thesaurus constants. The article also traces the curious phenomenon of “double reception” of Schlozer’s ideas during his stay in Russia in 1761–1767. On the one hand, Schlozer developed constructive methods of historical criticism of historical texts, which were widely used by the Russian historical school later on, in the 19th century. On the other, Schlozer was himself heavily influenced by Russian historiography, especially by systematical works on Russian history by Mikhail V. Lomonosov and Vasily N. Tatishchev. It is worth mentioning that Schlozer and Lomonosov had a similar take on some important events and concepts (the role of the Slavs in world history, the image of the historical process as a great river, the understanding of history as a multi-level and multi-factor system, etc.). The synthetic, systemic and synchronous approaches to research proposed by Schlozer found their new development in the heritage of Russian historical school.
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