The paper considers the vision of the world and the person of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian, one of two Polish students of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse the essential categories and objects which structure his thinking about reality, such as liberty, Providence, moral laws, state, nation, and humanity. At the end, I try to compare the worldview of Plebański with the worldview of historicism.

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 aim of this paper is to partially capture the state of theoretical debate amongst Polish historians on their own discipline in the second half of 20th century. To achieve this we analyse the content of the first twenty five volumes of journal Historyka published in the period when Celina Bobińska was its editor-in-chief (1967–1995). We assume that Historyka – the only journal dedicated to the theory of history and history of historiography – was situated in the centre of exchanges on academic historical practices. We do not treat its content as a reflection of contemporary studies in the theory of history, but as a dominant position in the self-understanding of the discipline competing with other utterances. The paper is a reconstruction of this offer, which is composed of the definitions of subjects of historical studies, descriptions of productive methods, hierarchy of masters of historical writings and their influential books.