Historical methodology: chronology, continuity and change, multiperspectivity, historical judgement
This domain tests the meta-level: whether you can justify the categories you use - periodisation, continuity and change, perspective and the distinction between factual and value judgements - while writing a clear, evidence-based argument.
Core rules and concepts
- Chronology is constructed: dates such as 1789, 1871, 1914, 1933, 1945, 1989 mark political breaks but may obscure structural continuities (industrialisation, welfare-state growth, gender orders). Always state which dimension a break refers to.
- Event versus structure: Braudel's longue durée against event history; distinguish key-date history from process history. Weimar's 1923 is a crisis date, but inflation also exposes structural fiscal fragility.
- Continuity and change: test both directions. E.g. 1945 is a rupture in the political system, but personnel, administration and mentalities show continuities (Konrad Adenauer's career, the survival of administrative elites).
- Multiperspectivity: distinguish actors' perspectives from observer and retrospective perspectives; the same event must be reconstructed from different standpoints (soldier and officer; coloniser and colonised; perpetrator, victim, bystander). Does not mean that all accounts are equally valid - evidence and plausibility differentiate them.
- Judgement: separate Sachurteil (factual-judgement, grounded in evidence and justified criteria) from Werturteil (value judgement), in Weber's sense. A value judgement is permissible if criteria are stated, alternatives weighed and the verdict is argued, not asserted.
Worked example
Judge Bismarck's 1883–89 social-insurance legislation. Reasoning: (1) Sachurteil: the laws created the first state pension and health system, financed by contributions; they stabilised workers' loyalty and constituted a durable institution surviving 1890 and 1945. (2) Werturteil: whether "state socialism" was progressive or manipulative depends on stated criteria - social protection for its own sake or the goal of weakening Social Democracy (Anti-Sozialistengesetz context). (3) Method: present evidence for both, then choose and justify a criterion. (4) Caution: avoid judging by present-day welfare expectations (anachronism), and avoid the opposite error of refusing any evaluation.
Traps that cost marks
- Claiming a period "began" without defining which dimension changed.
- Collapsing multiperspectivity into relativism ("every view is true").
- Leaving value judgements unmarked as such, or using them to replace evidence.
- Anachronism: importing current categories into 1789, 1914 or 1942 unchecked.