Historicism is an approach to understanding social, cultural, philosophical, and historical phenomena in terms of their historical development. It emphasizes that ideas, institutions, and values are best understood by examining the historical processes through which they appeared and developed. Historicism is applied in disciplines including philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, and literary studies. It is often contrasted with, but may also complement, different approaches, such as functionalism, which explain phenomena in terms of the functions they perform rather than their historical development. The term was introduced in the late eighteenth century and has acquired several distinct meanings over time. Nowadays, historicism encompasses a variety of philosophical and scholarly traditions, including Hegelian historicism, anthropological historicism, New Historicism, and Protestant historicist interpretation of biblical prophecy, and has been particularly associated with thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Franz Boas. Historicism has been the subject of extensive philosophical debate. Karl Popper used the term to describe theories that seek laws of historical development capable of predicting the course of history, arguing that such approaches encourage historical determinism and threaten the open society. Other critics, including Leo Strauss, have challenged historicism for its implications for historical explanation, political philosophy, and objectivity.
History of the term The term historicism (Historismus) was coined by German philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. Over time, what historicism is and how it is practiced have developed different and divergent meanings. According to Schlegel, Winckelmann’s approach to historicism marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy by recognizing the unique character and distinctiveness of antiquity. In contrast, other eighteenth-century philosophers distorted the true nature of the ancient world by reinterpreting it through philosophical concepts. Schlegel particularly warned against theoretical views that were not linked to specific individuals and lacked a historical foundation. The following year, Novalis, while outlining different methods, employed the term Historismus, although he did not assign a precise meaning to it in this context. Elements of historicism appear in the writings of French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) and Italian philosopher G. B. Vico (1668–1744), and became more fully developed with the dialectic of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), influential in 19th-century Europe. The writings of Karl Marx, influenced by Hegel, also occasionally include historicism. The term is also associated with the empirical social sciences and with the work of Franz Boas. Historicism tends to be hermeneutic because it values cautious, rigorous, and contextualized interpretation of information; or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental and immutable interpretations. In the twentieth century, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the English thinker R. G. Collingwood, and the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset adopted historicism as an approach aimed at enhancing the understanding of human thought and experience. Karl Popper, in his work The Poverty of Historicism, addressed historicism in relation to Hegel and Marx’s attempts to justify authority through laws of historical development, though Popper departed from 19th century German historicism and then contemporary thinkers such as Collingwood in defining historicism as a predictive science. In his Idea of History, Collingwood distinguished between history as an attempt to rethink the past from psychology as a natural scientific study of the lower echelons of the mind. Popper was worried about historicism's assault on open democratic societies, while his contemporary Collingwood was concerned with understanding the past. The Soviet Encyclopedia presented the term from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, emphasizing the notion of “legitimate development.” In American literary studies, New Historicism emerged as a postmodern interpretive approach that foregrounds the specificity of historical and cultural contexts, while making limited reference to earlier European debates.
Variants
Hegelian
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
