Tag Archives: anti-historical approaches

HISTORY AS A SCIENCE
Questions of the Theory and Methodology of History

It seems that the need to recognize history as a science does not require additional arguments, but the rapid events happening around us now force us to return to this issue again.

Scholars who once questioned the science of history relied on the fact that, unlike the natural sciences, the laws and even the basic regularities characteristic of the natural sciences are not applicable to the realm of history, which is created by human will and reason. Here, beyond very general laws, only the force of custom is at work. However, if this particularity of history makes it difficult to deduce laws from it, this does not mean that history is not a science. Moreover, when in the 19th century positivist philosophy (O. Conte, H. Spencer and others) attempted to interpret history from the point of view of the laws of natural science, such obvious vulgarization was soon subjected to harsh criticism by the Baden Neo Kantian schools, and in the 20th century – by the Annales school.

From all this, it became clear that, like nature, history is also a reality, but in our thinking. Consequently, while nature and the natural sciences are governed by immutable laws, history is primarily governed by human reason and will, something that nature lacks.

The whole problem is that the subjective factor has moved from the realm of history to historiography.

Currently, against the backdrop of chaotic events unfolding around the world, there is a growing desire among representatives of countries and peoples pursuing aggressive goals to transform historical science from an instrument of falsification into a weapon of political propaganda. Lacking a scientifically proven historical past, our neighbors are already resorting to the tactic of hiring scientists and entire research institutes and turning their grandiose fabrications into the subject of large scale electronic propaganda. Therefore, in this publication, while comprehensively criticizing the propaganda practices of Azerbaijani “historians,” we consider this as a new challenge to historical science.