| PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
| A German version of this book was published in 1993 and in the meantime has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. The German text had its basis in a paper I delivered at a panel discussion in April 1990 at the Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium on "Rationality and History," which dealt with the question of the postmodernist challenge to historical studies. The English version is not a translation of the German but in many ways a different book, the result of additional reading and discussions as well as the critical distance I have gained from the German text in the past three years. |
| Two observations: Although the book attempts a comparative examination of historical thought that is international in its scope, it restricts itself to languages I can read. Hence the focus is on Great Britain and North America, France and Belgium, German-speaking Central Europe and Italy, with occasional references to Polish and Russian works in translation. But even here, my choice of authors is by necessity highly selective, focusing mainly on historians who exemplify important trends in historical scholarship. |
| I am very grateful to the students and colleagues who during the past six years permitted me to test my theses and who commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. I am particularly thankful to the members of my seminar at the University of Leipzig who read and commented on a draft of the German manuscript during my guest semester there in the summer of 1992 and to a large number of colleagues and friends on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan who also read the manuscript and offered critical suggestions, including Werner Berthold, Gerald Diesener, Christoph Dipper, Wolfgang Ernst, Dagmar Friedrich, Akira Hayashima, Wolfgang Hardtwig, Frank Klaar, Wolfgang Kttler, Jonathan Knudsen, Iris Pilling, Lutz Raphael, Anne-Katrin Richter, Hans Schleier, Ulrich Schneckener, Fernando Snchez Marcos, Christian Simon, B. Strath*, Rudolf von Thadden, Wiebke von Thadden, Edoardo Tortarolo, Johan van der Zande, and Peter Walther. I wish to thank Ottavia Niccoli |
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