The Emergence of the Concept and Practice of Criticism in Modern Historiography

Abstract

This article focuses on the history of the historical discipline and traces the emergence and development of the concept and practice of criticism, which significantly transformed the production of historical knowledge in the nineteenth century. Requiring historians to adopt a critical perspective toward their sources, this concept and practice originated in a number of intersecting scholarly fields in the early modern period and was later systematized as a constitutive element of the historical discipline by such figures as Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke in the first half of the nineteenth century. Exploring this constitutive element, which paved the way for the formulation of other tenets of academic historiography, the present article aims to reveal the central yet often neglected role of criticism in the making of the historical discipline.