Empiricism and history / Stephen Davies

Includes bibliographical references (p. 152-160) and index.

Introduction
Empiricism and debates about history
Empiricism, knowledge and induction
Empirical knowledge and the human past
1 The Creation of Empiricai History
Historical writing before the coming of empiricism
The historical revolution and its origins
The course and growth of the ’historical revolution’
The definition of empirical method
The rise of empirical antiquarianism
Speculative history and the Enlightenment response to antiquarianism
The combination of speculative history and antiquarianism
2 The Perfection of Empirical History
Difficulties and problems
Ranke and his work
The growth of professional history
The spread of professional hisstory
Critics of empirical history
The positivist challenge
The Idealist alternative
Dilthey and ultra-historicism
The persistence of empirical method
3 The Transformation of Biography in Empirical History
The relationship between history and biography
Classical and medieval biography
Empirical biography in the nineteenth century
The nature and qualities of empirical biography
Prosopography and psychohistory
Empirical historical biography - the case of Hitler Empirical historical biography - the case of Gladstone
Alternatives to empirical biography
4 The Empirical History of Institutions
The nature and importance of institutions
Empirical history and institutions
Ecclesiastical history
The origins of legal history
Constitutional history - the fall of the Whigs
Administrative history
The history of the family and household - an empirical success story
The history of family relations
History of criminal law and punishment
5 Political History - The Master Topic?
What is political history?
Political history - non-empirical and structural approaches
Empirical political history
Why political history is important for many empirical historians Seventeenth-century England - the challenge to empiricism
Seventeenth-century England - the empirical response
Eighteenth-century Britain
The French Revolution (?)
6 Economic History and Empiricism
The nature and origins of economic history
Early economic history in France and England
Economic history and historical economics in Germany
The formation of empirical economic history in Britain
The early years of professional economic history
Empirical debate - standard of living and quality of life
The debate of enclosures
Other empirical debates
Empirical research and the growth of knowledge
The empirical history of slavery and ’cliometrics’
The future of empirical economic history
7 History of ideas - The Empirical Turn?
A Trojan Horse?
The origins of intellectual history
The nature of traditional intellectual history
A. O. Lovejoy and the notion of ’unit ideas’
The empirical revolution in history of ideas
The impact of empiricism on history of ideas
Critics and sceptics
Other types of intellectual history