Analytical Philosophy of History (1945-1970): The Covering Law Model and Its Critics

From 1945 to 1970, the agenda for the theory of history was decisively shaped by analytical philosophy of science. This tradition focused intensely on the epistemological problem of verification and the methodological problem of scientific explanation. The single most influential reference point was Carl Hempel's 1942 article, which argued that all legitimate scientific explanations are based on covering laws. For approximately three decades, particularly in the English-speaking world, both positivist allies and hermeneutic opponents defined their positions in relation to Hempel's model. Key critics, including W. H. Walsh, William H. Dray, Louis O. Mink, and Michael Scriven, engaged deeply with its implications for history's disciplinary status.

This debate, originating from the philosophy of science, carried strong prescriptive overtones but offered weak descriptive analysis of actual historical practice. Discussions remained tightly focused on epistemological and methodological questions derived from the analytical agenda. Core issues included whether historians' explanatory claims could be justified without reference to general laws, what logical form such explanations might take if they were not law-based, and how history could claim objectivity if it did not comply with the positivist unity of scientific method.

Although the debate lost momentum by the late 1950s, it evolved into a renewed "explanation versus understanding" debate in the following decades. Analytical philosophy was then employed to explicate the logic of understanding human action. Thinkers like Mink, Walsh, Dray, F. A. Olafson, and G. H. von Wright proposed alternative explanatory models for history, such as colligatory, rational, and teleological explanations. Despite this shift, the focus remained firmly on epistemology and methodology.

A characteristic feature of this period was the disconnect between philosophical and historical debates. Historians championing "history as a social science" in the 1970s, such as Charles Tilly and David Landes, rarely engaged with the philosophical controversy over covering laws. Conversely, philosophers seldom referenced contemporaneous debates among historians about the relationship between history and social science.

The intellectual landscape differed significantly on the European continent, where neo-Kantian, phenomenological, and hermeneutical philosophies of history persisted. In Germany and France, Max Weber's neo-Kantian theory, which distinguished between individualizing and generalizing methods and characterized history as individualizing, was defended and elaborated by philosophers like Raymond Aron, Henri Marrou, and Paul Ricoeur. This tradition maintained a continuous influence unlike the sharper analytical turn in the Anglophone world.

A major paradigm shift began in the 1960s as the dominance of logical positivism in the philosophy of science waned. The rise of Karl Popper and, more decisively, Thomas Kuhn, blurred the philosophical contours of central concepts like "science," "explanation," and "objectivity." Kuhn’s work undermined the idea of one global scientific method and rationality, replacing it with the historical presupposition that science consists of varied local practices with their own logics.

From this post-positivist perspective, "science" and "objectivity" transformed from philosophical givens into new historical and conceptual problems. In this contextualizing spirit, disciplinary practices became objects of anthropological study within social studies of science. This intellectual climate made it imperative for the theory of history to change as well, paving the way for the transformative shifts that emerged in the early 1970s with the rise of narrative and linguistic approaches.