As it developed in the nineteenth century, the study of history was influenced by many of the intellectual movements of that restless century. One of the most influential, a set of ideas known as positivism, was developed in the mid-century by the French thinker Auguste Comte (1798–1857). At the heart of Comte’s theories was an attempt to apply scientific method to human behaviour with a view to discovering ‘laws’ of society comparable to and as binding as the ‘laws’ of nature. This was underpinned by the assumption that, like scientific laws, social laws could be ‘objective’ – that is, true in themselves irrespective of the ideas, biases and prejudices of an individual observer.
While Comte was perhaps the person most determined to establish laws of society, many other thinkers shared the concept. As early as 1784, the eminent philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) talked about ‘human actions, like every other natural event’ being ‘determined by universal laws’. He even proposed that history could be understood better by looking at society as a whole rather than through studying individuals – in other words, something very close to what today is called call structuralism:
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