Pattern and Meaning in History : Wilhelm Dilthey's Thoughts on History and Society

'One may state Dilthey's significance in most general fashion by characterizing his work as the first thorough-going and sophisticated confrontation of history with positivism and natural science. Dilthey's sweep was universal: he strove to reduce to order the multifarious realms of knowledge, the conflicting traditions of cultural study, that he had embraced. Thus Dilthey laid out a program that no mortal – and certainly no one whose mind had been formed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century – could hope to bring to completion. Yet despite its inconclusiveness, Dilthey's work exerted enormous influence. The distinction he had drawn between natural and cultural science became standard for historians and, to a lesser extent, for social scientists also. After Dilthey historians no longer needed to apologize for the "unscientific" character of their discipline: they understood why its methods could never be quite the same as those of natural science. And the contemporary tradition of intellectual history grew naturally out of Dilthey's teaching.' – H. Stuart Hughes

ALAN WARDE, University of Manchester

ROSEMARY DEEM, University of Lancaster

SUE PENNA, University of Lancaster

KEITH SOOTHILL, University of Lancaster

ANDREW SAYER, University of Lancaster

JOHN URRY, University of Lancaster

SYLVIA WALBY, University of Leeds

His main research in recent years has been in advocating and developing a new paradigm for the social sciences, the new mobilities paradigm