Historicism
Variants of historicism
Popper's attack on historicism
Karl Popper used the term historicism in his influential books The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, to mean: "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (p. 3 of The Poverty of Historicism, italics in original). Karl Popper wrote with reference to Hegel's theory of history, which he criticized extensively. However, there is wide dispute whether Popper's description of "historicism" is an accurate description of Hegel, or more a reflection of his own philosophical antagonists, including Marxist-Leninist thought, then widely held as posing a challenge to the philosophical basis of the West, as well as theories such as Spengler's which drew predictions about the future course of events from the past.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper attacks "historicism" and its proponents, among whom as well as Hegel he identifies and singles out Plato and Marx — calling them all "enemies of the open society". The objection he makes is that historicist positions, by claiming that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history, abrogate the democratic responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society, and hence lead to totalitarianism.
New Historicism
Since the 1950's, when Lacan and Foucault argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system, which individuals are inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used historicism to describe the view that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context that they are raised in, answers cannot be found by appeal to an external truth, but only within the confines of the norms and forms that phrase the question. This version of historicism holds that there are only the raw texts, markings and artifacts that exist in the present, and the conventions used to decode them. This school of thought sometimes goes by the name of New Historicism.
The same label, new historicism is also employed for a school of literary scholarship which interprets a poem, drama, etc. as an expression of the power-structures of the surrounding society. Stephen Greenblatt is an example of this school.
Modern historicism
Within the context of 20th century philosophy, the conflict over whether ahistorical and immanent methodologies were sufficient to understand meaning — that is to say, what you see is what you get positivism — or whether context, background and culture are important beyond the mere need to decode words, phrases and references. While post-structural historicism is relativist in its orientation, that is, it sees each culture as its own frame of reference, a large number of thinkers have embraced the need for historical context, not because culture is self-referential, but because there is no more compressed means of conveying all of the relevant information except through history. This view is often seen as being rooted in the work of Bennedetto Croce.
Recent philosophers in this tradition include Thomas Kuhn.
Biblical historicism
In Christian circles, the term historicism refers to the confessional Protestant form of prophetical interpretation which holds that the fulfillment of biblical prophecy has taken place throughout history and continues to take place today; as opposed to other methods which limit the time-frame of prophecy-fulfillment to the past or to the future. The historicist method is what led reformers throughout Europe to declare that the pope was the man of sin sitting on the seven hills of Rome. Examples of famous Christians and sects declaring the pope to be the antichrist include the Waldensians, Albigenses, Lollards, Lutherans, Calvinists, Hussians, and a host of individuals, including the father of the modern English Bible William Tyndale and even articles of faith such as the Westminster Confession of Faith. Protestant sites that continue to declare the pope as the antichrist using the historicist method include those listed below under the External links.
See also
- sociocultural evolution
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method
- Ronald J. Pestritto Woodrow Wilson and the roots of modern liberalism 2005
- Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies (in 2 volumes). (ISBN 0-691-01968-1) Routledge.
- Popper, Karl. 1993. The Poverty of Historicism. (ISBN 0-415-06569-0) Routledge.
- G.W.F Hegel Philosophy of History
- Franz Boas The Mind of Primitive Man 1911
External links
Hegel
- The Hegel Society of America
- Site Hegel
- Hegel in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- gwfhegel.org
- Hegel page in 'The History Guide'
Anthropology
Popper
New Historicism
- New Historicism Explained
- Defining Historicism by Claes G. Ryn
- M. D. Murphy, Historicism
Biblical Prophecy
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