Historiography is composed of scientific-determined and traditionalist-underdetermined parts. The historiography of science records several revolutionary transitions of traditionalist sciences into paradigmatic sciences. Is such a transition from tradition to science possible or even likely in historiography as well?

Philosophers have lost interest in the question concerning the possibility and limits of scientific historiography because it was raised originally within the context of two intellectual debates that petered out a generation ago, the epistemic foundations of Marxism and the viability of the positivist unified model of science and knowledge. Popper (1964) and Berlin (1960) attacked the idea of scientific historiography as a proxy for Marxism-Leninism. Some strands of Marxism, especially of the Soviet variety, claimed to be scientific and predict scientifically the downfall of capitalism. Liberal philosophers attempted to pull the epistemic rug from under this claim by proving that scientific historiography is impossible. During the sixties, science lost its prestigious status as the exclusive paradigm of knowledge, at least among left-leaning intellectual elites. Most Western Marxists of the no-no-nonsense variety, following the Frankfurt School, ceased to present themselves as scientists and to take seriously the Bolshevik presentation of dogma as dialectic science. Instead, Western Marxists have criticized “late” capitalism or argued for egalitarianism. Accordingly, anti-Marxist philosophers lost interest in proving that the Marxist vision of a science of society and history is an impossible fantasy, especially after the collapse of late Communism in 1989 and the ensuing ascendancy of right-wing eschatological philosophy of history (Fukuyama, 1992; Huntington, 1996).