Historicism
Historicism, in a narrow sense, is a position which holds that all knowledge and cognition are historically conditioned. It is also widely used in diverse disciplines to designate an approach from historical perspective. The term is used both in pejorative and neutral sense. Historicism in the most narrow sense designates a philosophical position appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, primarily in Germany, held by a number of thinkers in diverse disciplines such as philosophy, history, law, and economics. Historicism challenged a progressive view of history that interpret history as a process of linear, uniform progress according to universal laws, a view widely held by thinkers of modern times since the Enlightenment. Historicism stressed unique diversity of historical contexts and called for the needs of finding and adopting particular methods and theories appropriate to each unique historical context according to its region and people.
Historicism also often challenged the concept of truth and the notion of rationality of modernity. Modern thinkers held that reason is interpretation free universal faculty of mind that can find truth which was held to be universal and unchanging. Historicism posed a question of this notion of rationality and truth, and argued for the historical contextuality of knowledge and reason. How and to which extent knowledge is historically conditioned is a perennial question. Historicism is an explicit formulation of historicity of knowledge. The major challenge to historicism is relativism. If all knowledge is conditioned by history, there is no objectivity or universality in knowledge. The earlier formulation of historicism was made by Vico ( 1668 – 1744) and Herder, and the historicity of knowledge is one of central issue which continually debated today.
Historical background
Archetype of historicism is found in Vico ( 1668 – 1744) and Herder (1744 – 1803) . Vico criticized a concept of truth that transcends history and argued that truth was conditioned by human history. Herder rejected central ideas of the Enlightenment such as ahistocial view of man, concept of universal rationality, and belief on the progress of human history according to the development of reason. These ideas of Enlightenment were built upon the presupposition that there was only one kind of rationality applicable to all people and culture, and human history is a linear process of progress whose pattern of development was the same for all. Herder argued for the unique values of each historical period and cultures, and conceived history as the aggregate of diverse unique histories. Herder stressed how events and knowledge are contextualized in its unique historical period and authentic interpretation of the past and the era required the understanding of its unique contexts.
In the nineteenth century Europe, particularly in Germany, historicism flourished in various disciplinary areas. In the field of law, Savigny (1779 – 1861) deveoped the German Historical School of Law in oppositin to theorists of Natural law of the Enlightenment, and argued that laws reflect unique history and customs of people and race just as languge was unique to region and people.
In economics, Friedrich List (1789 - 1846) criticised the idea of the universal economic laws of classical economics and argued that economic princiles and policies had to be made accoding to unique historical contexts of country and people. List’s ideas influenced Gustav von Schmoller (1838 – 1917), a German economic theorist who held a historicist perspective.
Major theorists in history are Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886), Johann Gustav Droysen (1808 – 1884), and Friedrich Meinecke (1862 – 1954). They opposed a progressive view of history, which interprets history as a process of uniformal development based upon the progress of reason. They were also critical to speculative interpretation of history as exemplified by Hegel. They argued that there were diverse and unique characteristics in each region and people, which were irreduceable to abstract uniform patterns based upon abstract speculative ideas in philosophy. Ranke, for example, approached history based upon critical examination of primary documents and sources as opposed to Hegel’s spectulative approach.
Willihelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911) attempted to establish a conceptual formulation of historicism in philosophy. Dilthey challenged the concpet of reason as interpretation free, neutral, a-historical faculty. This concept of rationailiyt can be traced back to the ideals the Enlightnement. Dilthey direct target was Kant who held the same concpet of rationailiy as the Enlightenment’s. In his unfinished work, The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Dilthey tried to carry out the task of critique of historical reason, which he presented in contrast to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Dilthey argued that event in history is unique and cannot be repeated. To understand the event, one must leave one’s present context of understanding or horizon of understanding and view it from the historical context that surrounded the event. Hermeneutics is the method or the art to interpret historically contextualized events of human life.
For Dilthey, experience is essentially interpretive and rationality is also socially, historically contextualized and conditioned. Based upon this insight, Dilthey developed the tradition of hermenrutics, prepared by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Hermeneuticity of rationality was carried on by Heidegger, and Gadamer. Although Dilthey was criticised by Husserl for being historicism, other philosophers of hermeneutic tradtions do not generally fall into the category of historicism.
Among Neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Windelband (1848 – 1915) and Heinrich John Rickert (1863 – 1936) tried to formulate methodlogical differences between historical science and natureal science. Windelband characterized historical sciences as a type of discipline which “discribes unique individual characteristics” of events and natural sciences as that which “explans phenomena by laws.” Rickert distinguished sciences into natural science and cultural science, and subsumed historical seicen under cultural science.
Ernst Troeltsch (1865 – 1923), a German Protestant theologian, in his Der Krisis des Historismus (The Crisis of Historicism) defined historicism in contrast to rationalism. He characterised rationalism as an attempt to find common universal laws by ignoring unique qualitative differences of diverse human experiences. Troeltsch
Problem of historicism: relativism
The problem of historicism is relativism. Relativism undermines the concept of truth which human beings have been seeking for. Throughout history, human beings have been seeking for certain type of knowledge called truth which is eternal and unchanging. If all knowledge is conditioned by history, knowledge has to be relative to particular factors of the given era or time of history and there is no universally valid, eternally unchanging knowledge. Critics see historicism as a danger that undemines the foundation of truth. Some also attempt to overcome relativism while recognizing historicity of knowledge. (The general problem of relativism is, however, as old as philosophy. We can find the prime example of the battle against relativism in Plato who challenged varieties of relativist claims of Sophists.)
Variants of historicism
Popper's attack on historicism
Karl Popper used the term historicism in his 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.
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.
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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