Examines the problem of historiography understood as a science, beginning with Comte and the French positivist historians. Surveys the debate provoked by their ideas in Italian intellectual circles, where some writers contended that there was no such thing as a positivist historiography because such historiography betrayed every theoretical and methodological principle of positivism. Argues that there is a positivist historiography just as there is an idealist one, although a true historian would refuse to package the past in any preestablished system.