Henry Thomas Buckle

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821 to 1862) was an English historian and a major figure in the positivist movement in historical scholarship. Born in Lee, Kent, he was kept from school by delicate health and educated himself by reading and travel, while becoming one of the foremost chess players in England before the age of twenty. After his father died in 1840 he resolved to write a great historical work, and by 1851 this had grown into a history of civilization. The two volumes of his History of Civilization in England appeared in 1857 and 1861. Buckle applied the methods of natural science to history in an effort to find the universal laws that govern society and its development, and he held that physical factors such as climate and food shape how a civilization develops. His method drew on the empiricism of John Stuart Mill and the belief of Auguste Comte that society should be studied by scientific procedures. His fame fell quickly after he failed to absorb the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, and he died of a fever at Damascus in 1862.