Is There Life After Feyerabend: A Dialogue About the Historical Method

Abstract

The discussion about modern situation with methods of historical research takes place in the form of a dialogue of two practicing historians with philosophical background. The topic of historical methods is considered by two participants of the dialogue in the broad context of the history of science. The main theses stated in the dialog are as follows: The idea of the existence of a special historical method, or a set of methods, is a distinctive feature of the Soviet school of history. The genealogy of the historical method, as well as the conditions of its possibility, is connected with the process of self-determination of history as positive knowledge. Positivism presupposed the unity of the method for the whole body of science: from astronomy to sociology. This positivist idea was perceived by Marxism. According to F. Engels' formula, the historian is obliged to open connections in the facts themselves, like any natural scientist. In this way, history from the field of metaphysics and the genre of inspirational literature becomes a scientific discipline. It has to discover the universal universal laws of the historical process. The first generation of Soviet Marxist historians (M. Pokrovsky, N. Rozhkov) fully identified themselves with naturalists; they identified their opponents and predecessors with the owners of false consciousness — ideologists. They used a ready-made a priori scheme: the doctrine of historical formations and class struggle. But they did not subject it to reflection. The result of this approach was a dismissive attitude to the content of historical sources, enshrined in Stalin's 1931 directive. In the 1930s, the disciplinary status of history was criticized by K. Popper for lack of prognostication. After that the status of the empirical base of other social disciplines was fixed for a long time. The reaction to this was the formulation of special methods of historical research that were not critically accepted by Soviet and post-Soviet university science. The presence of these methods returned the status of a theoretical discipline to history. In the final part of the dialogue, this position is deconstructed on the basis of the postpositivist philosophy of science by P. Feyerabend.