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A Science of American History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Extract

The prospect of a science of history that would chart the past and enable the future to be projected has invariably intrigued the historian. Technically, this would leave history unencumbered by its mass and the historian concerned only with lines of development delineated by historical science. With the road map of the future before him, the status of the historian would grow as indispensable counselor of politicians and statesmen, bringing the science of human development to bear upon their deliberations. Henry Adams imagined a situation in which state and church, capital and labor, and all other important social groupings and institutions would ask anxiously of the historian: Am I justified in history and will I live on?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1959 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. Selection from Meinecke's Values and Causalities in History in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present (New York, I957), p. 272.

2. "History and Immortality," Partisan Review (Winter, I957), pp. II-35.