The Author discussed in his article the problem of ethic foundations of promoters of psychohistory. He argues that psychotherapeutic inclinations of scholars resulted in the alienation of this approach within historical sciences, what — in the end — did not prevent psychohistorians from becoming active outside the closed circle of the discipline.
The paper considers the idea of history as a science of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian and Polish student of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse assignments that Plebański set as history, the place of history in science in general, the problem of objectivity in history, and other major issues related to the study of the past in the thought of Plebański.
The paper examines the special historiographic evidence: the lost last book by the well-known Polish historian and methodologist Professor Jerzy Topolski entitled “Methodology of History at the Beginning of the 21st Century”. Only its working outline in the form of an extensive table of contents has survived, but this does not prevent the author from making interesting hypotheses as to its meaning.