Between empiricism and theory. The methodological discussion of historians seventy years later

The paper provides an overview of a methodological debate taking place during the 7. General Congress of Polish Historians held in 1948 in Wrocław. The article differentiates between arguments stressing the importance of empirical basis for historical research and the voices emphasising the significance of theoretical considerations.

Nowadays, we are eye-witnesses of the process which we shall refer to as the secularism of political science. Obviously, this concept can be construed in two ways. One is institutional secularism, which eliminates the influence of religion, or more broadly put – ideology, on the theoretical work of contemporary researchers. Such a viewpoint is imposed by the liberal discourse so we must be mindful of the fact that it is a viewpoint motivated ideologically. Such a perspective results not only in the separation of humanities from social science but also the ranking and positioning of scientific disciplines in the global knowledge circulation, exemplified by the Polish inclusion of religion into the category of science of culture under the new administrative division of scientific disciplines. The other one can be denominated as scientific secularism, with its credo originating from logical positivism (logical empiricism), and it will be the reference point for the text of this article. Its effect is the demarcation focused on the exclusion of the theoretical content of political science research, which is often regarded as political philosophy in the English-language literature and speculation in Poland. The aim of this article is the meta-theoretical analysis of the political science research programme from the perspective of the features potentially linking the varied academic achievements and the inference methodology of contemporary political scientists.