 In the early development of positivism, Auguste Comte (1830 [1998]) distinguished himself by rejecting the search for universal explanations or methods in science and defended, in contrast with many later positivists of the Vienna Circle, the existence of a variety of research methods specific to each fundamental scientific domain. Other major figures of the French tradition of historical epistemology, such as Gaston Bachelard (1949) and Georges Canguilhem (1965), also defended a lack of methodological unity of the sciences, emphasizing “regionalist” modes of rationalism.