Historiographic Schools

Abstract

The present and past of historiography is often presented in the literature as a pattern of clusterings of writers and their key concepts into what have become known as “schools” or “traditions” or “discourses” or “networks,” or “approaches” of thinking about how to write historiography. Within this literature these terms have appeared in a somewhat unexamined way. The complex relationships between history, philosophy, and historiography has, at least in many and various accounts by historians of historiography (such as Thompson 1942; Collingwood 1946; White 1973; Breisach 1983; Kelley 1991; Iggers 1997; Bentley 1997; Burns and Rayment-Pickard 2000), given rise over time to a dense, changing pattern of clusters of thought.Clusters that are variously called “schools,” “traditions,” “discourses,” “approaches,” and “networks” of thought (hereafter all called “schools”) seem to be ubiquitous in the history of ideas generally (not just historiography), at least as revealed by students of the history of ideas (cf. Collins 1998). That is, intellectuals apparently rarely have been isolated individuals without some sort of group affinity that situates and influences their thinking. Indeed, it's a truism that intellectual thought (indeed, all thought) always depends to a large degree upon prior and related contemporary thought. The history of thought is an evolutionary process.