II.

The 18th and 19th Centuries

Historians became interested in other cultures during the Age of Enlightenment. The development in the 18th century of a secular point of view and principles of rational criticism enabled the French writer and philosopher Voltaire and his compatriot the jurist and philosopher Montesquieu to transcend the provincialism of earlier historical thinking. Their attempts at universal history, however, suffered from their own biases and those prevalent in their culture. They tended to deprecate or ignore irrational customs and to imagine that all people were inherently rational beings and therefore very much alike.

Early in the 19th century, philosophers and historians identified with the romantic movement criticized the 18th-century assumption that people were the same everywhere and at all times. The German philosophers Johann von Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel emphasized the profound differences in the minds and works of humans in different cultures, thereby laying the foundation for the comparative study of civilizations.