The purpose of the article is to study the diachronic and synchronic intellectual context of writing one of the last monographs of the historian, sociologist, methodology of science Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev (1850-1931) “The General methodology of the Humanities”. The work was written in the late 1910s-early 1920s and was not published due to censorship restrictions. Its text is held in the Research Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library. The book summarizes the methodological research of Nikolay Kareev. The course fits well into the new practice of teaching humanities in reformed universities (faculties of social sciences) and in the field of methodological research of the “old professors” in 1920s. The article aims to study the diachronic and synchronic intellectual context of this book. The authors turn to the tradition of teaching the methodology of history, designated in the works as the predecessors of Nikolay Kareev (A.S. Lappo-Danilevsky, K.N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, V.I. Lamansky, etc.), and his contemporaries (P.A. Sorokin, L.P. Karsavin, S.L. Frank). They conclude that despite the “General Methodology” being an original course. Text solved different problems of the humanities from the point of view of positivism and corresponded to the methodology of XIX century, rather than theoretical and methodological search of the period of the crisis of positivism.