Hechtius (1795–1798) – the beginnings of historical-philosophical-idiographic research in comparative education

Origins and traditions in comparative education: challenging some assumptions

“…Of a similar genre of historical research on the field's methodological origins is the work of Christel Adick (2017) on the ancestry of the 'four steps of comparison model' largely attributed to George Z. F. Bereday (1964) in the Anglo-American literature, but to Franz Hilker (1962) in German scholarship. Similar to the previous two articles (Cowen 2017;Lenhart 2017), this article embeds the methodological discourses of Hilker and Bereday in their professional life stories and elucidates the two scholars' fruitful 'symbiotic' relationship. Key to this relationship was the multilingual competency of Hilker and Bereday.…”

“…Following this thread of embodied comparative education, the second article by Volker Lenhart (2017) proposes Friedrich August Hecht's historical-philosophical-idiographic methodology as an alternative foundational epistemology to Jullien's positivist approach. Lenhart situates Hecht's epistemology in the socio-historical context of the late 18 th century, antedating Jullien's work by two decades.…”