Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and his student, Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), were both famous in their day for their contributions to what modern social scientists call the “idiographic” method of inquiry, which deals with the description of particulars, in contrast to a “nomothetic” method based on general laws. As key figures in the so-called Southwest German school of neo-Kantian philosophy they developed the idiographic method to distinguish research in the human sciences from that in the natural sciences, the latter of which, they said, was governed by the “nomothetic” method. What is more, in their most famous works – “History and Natural Science” (1894) and The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (1902) – Windelband and Rickert, respectively, argued that the idiographic method held out to historians the possibility of providing their disciple with a philosophically informed methodological alternative to the naturalism of positivist historiography, to the apriorism of philosophy of history, and to the mere compilation of facts that had long been associated with antiquarianism. The great German scholar Max Weber (1864–1920) followed Windelband and Rickert in this and, as we shall see shortly, had frequent recourse to their work as he developed his own understanding of method in the social sciences.

Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), another well-known German thinker, also fully appreciated the methodological acumen of Windelband and Rickert. But while discussing their work in his essay “Modern Philosophy of History” (1903), Troeltsch placed them at the end of a nineteenth-century tradition of German thinking about the relationship between philosophy and history. His view was that Windelband and Rickert had translated into philosophical “principles” methodological guidelines that German historians had “instinctively” operated with earlier in the century. As Troeltsch made clear, over the course of the century these historians had used philosophical principles to give methodological rigor and systematic unity to their discipline. According to Troeltsch, therefore, the work of Windelband and Rickert is the culmination of a long German meditation on historical method to which philosophically minded historians (e.g., J. G. Droysen [1808–84]) and historically minded philosophers (e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey [1833–1911]) had contributed.