Abstract
The turn of the XIX and XX centuries is the time of rapid development of historical science. This period is characterized by a crisis of classical scientific instruments and the search for new methods and approaches to understanding the historical process. The liberal direction of historical science was at the forefront of this process. Historians - representatives of this trend tried to adapt the heuristic means of classical rationality to the changing intellectual climate in historical science. The study of these searches is of interest for today, when many researchers, trying to find an answer to the challenge of postmodernity, are building a neoclassical model of explaining the past. The article explores the fundamental principles of the liberal historical paradigm. Most of the liberal historians were based on positivist methodology. It is this direction of liberal historiography that has become the subject of this article. The theoretical bases of scientific views of N.I. Kareyeva, P.N. Milyukov, E.V. De Roberti and other positivist historians. In a situation of clashes with empirio-criticism and neo-Kantianism, they defended the fundamental principles of the classical view of the historical process. Their scientific worldview continued to be based on the principle of historical pluralism, within which they developed the concept of the multifactority of the process of social evolution. Another important principle of historical explanation, which they defended in their polemics with opponents, was the principle of reliance on facts, the desire to avoid unconfirmed metaphysical generalizations. At the same time, the need to adjust their scientific attitudes in accordance with the changed intellectual climate led to the emergence of contradictions in their theory of history. Antimetaphysical aspirations were combined with the construction of schemes, the bases of which, in fact, were speculative constructions that went beyond the world of phenomena. (English)