What is the contemporary knowledge of the theoretical history?
score:7
Your question deals more with historiography, and philosophy of history, whereas most of the questions on this site are about specific historical events. That is the short answer to your question and my reasoning for that answer is what follows.
My history classes focused mainly on three things: particular geographic areas of the world, particular time periods, and historical analysis. Most history classes offered in the US will be on a particular topic such as "World War I History," or "History of Modern Mexico: from Porfirio Diaz to the present day." Within each of these classes you would study what happened and attempt to discern the cause and effect of the event/events. This consisted of the evaluation of primary and secondary sources to determine their utility in producing a logical explanation of the sequence of events, with more deference being given to primary sources.
History is a highly controversial, and inexact, field of study as it is most commonly written by the victors, and primary sources from the defeated, enslaved, and killed are typically more difficult to come by.
The theories you noted are very interesting, but I did not encounter them in an academic setting at the undergraduate level. Perhaps at the graduate level of history study you would be more likely to encounter such theories. As I said earlier, the theories you mentioned deal more with historiography and philosophy of history, and it seems they provide a lens through which one can try and view history. In that regard the two theories are similar to other historiographical approaches to the study of history such as economic history, and cultural history.
None of what I said is meant to discredit the two approaches you cited. Rather it seems to me that the most common approach to the study of history is by employing the historical method and making sure to explain your assumptions, data, and reasoning.
Upvote:0
After five years I'll add more information to complement @ihtkwot answer.
When you take a social science and try to give it a scientific aproach, your first problem will be the repetition of the phenomena in order to confirm an hypothesis... only after that you can create a law which describes that phenomena.
In a good case, if you have several samples you might use statistics to describe in numbers that phenomena, and if you have a good correlation between the theory and the reality you will be able to say that your hypothesis is actually a law.
In a social science like history you have so few samples to describe each event, that you'll always have problems trying to find a pattern or confirm an hypothesis. That's why Toynbee accepts that limitation and tries to confirm his theory by comparative method, where he tried to find similar events to compare, but he knew that these events are not exactly the same.
Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari might be authors who have tried to find laws of history lately.
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