Hippolyte Taine 1828 – 1893

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher and the principal exponent of positivism in nineteenth-century French humanistic scholarship. After early controversies over his rationalist philosophical views, he produced his celebrated History of English Literature, On Intelligence, and the six-volume Origins of Contemporary France. His influential thesis that human and cultural phenomena are products of race, milieu, and moment shaped the methods of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural history and literary criticism, while his sober assessment of the French Revolution colored conservative historiography for decades.