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.
Art historian David Summers, building on the work of E. H. Gombrich, defines historicism negatively, writing that it posits "that laws of history are formulatable and that in general the outcome of history is predictable," adding that historicism poses "the idea that history is a universal matrix prior to events, which are simply placed in order within that matrix by the historian." This approach, he writes, "seems to make the ends of history visible, thus to justify the liquidation of groups seen not to have a place in the scheme of history" and has led to the "fabrication of some of the most murderous myths of modern times."
History of the term The term historicism (Historismus) was coined by German philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel.Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175: "[The word 'historicism'] appears as early as the late eighteenth century in the writings of the German romantics, who used it in a neutral sense. In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel used 'historicism' to refer to a philosophy that stresses the importance of history..."; Katherine Harloe, Neville Morley (eds.), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 81: "Already in Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments about Poetry and Literature (a collection of notes attributed to 1797), the word Historismus occurs five times." 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.Kahan, Jeffrey. "Historicism." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4 December 22, 1997, p. 1202 In the twentieth century, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the English thinker R. G. Collingwood, and the Spanish philosopher José 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
Hegel viewed the realization of human freedom as the ultimate purpose of history, which could be achieved only through the creation of the perfect state. Historical progress toward this state would occur through a dialectical process: the tension between the purpose of humankind (freedom) and humankind's current condition would produce the attempt by humankind to change its condition to one more in accord with its nature. However, because humans are often not aware of the goal of humanity and history, the process of achieving freedom is necessarily one of self-discovery.
Hegel saw progress toward freedom as conducted by the "spirit" (Geist), a seemingly supernatural force that directs all human actions and interactions. Yet Hegel makes clear that the spirit is a mere abstraction that comes into existence "through the activity of finite agents". Thus, Hegel's determining forces of history may not have a metaphysical nature, though many of his opponents and interpreters have understood him as holding metaphysical and deterministic views.
Hegel's historicism also suggests that any human society and all human activities such as science, art, or philosophy, are defined by their history. Consequently, their essence can be sought only by understanding said history. The history of any such human endeavor, moreover, not only continues but also reacts against what has gone before; this is the source of Hegel's famous dialectic teaching usually summarized by the slogan "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis". (Hegel did not use these terms, although Johann Fichte did.) Hegel's famous aphorism, "Philosophy is the history of philosophy", describes it bluntly.
Hegel's position is perhaps best illuminated when contrasted against the atomistic and reductionist opinion of human societies and social activities self-defining on an ad hoc basis through the sum of dozens of interactions. Yet another contrasting model is the persistent metaphor of a social contract. Hegel considers the relationship between individuals and societies as organic, not atomic: even their social discourse is mediated by language, and language is based on etymology and unique character. It thus preserves the culture of the past in thousands of half-forgotten metaphors. To understand why a person is the way he is, you must examine that person in his society: and to understand that society, you must understand its history, and the forces that influenced it. The Zeitgeist, the "Spirit of the Age", is the concrete embodiment of the most important factors that are acting in human history at any given time. This contrasts with teleological theories of activity, which suppose that the end is the determining factor of activity, as well as those who believe in a tabula rasa, or blank slate, opinion, such that individuals are defined by their interactions.
These ideas can be interpreted variously. The Right Hegelians, working from Hegel's opinions about the organicism and historically determined nature of human societies, interpreted Hegel's historicism as a justification of the unique destiny of national groups and the importance of stability and institutions. Hegel's conception of human societies as entities greater than the individuals who constitute them influenced nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and its twentieth-century excesses. The Young Hegelians, by contrast, interpreted Hegel's thoughts on societies influenced by social conflict as a doctrine of social progress, and attempted to manipulate these forces to cause various results. Karl Marx's doctrine of "historical inevitabilities" and historical materialism is one of the more influential reactions to this part of Hegel's thought. Significantly, Karl Marx's theory of alienation argues that capitalism disrupt traditional relationships between workers and their work.
Hegelian historicism is related to his ideas on the means by which human societies progress, specifically the dialectic and his conception of logic as representing the inner essential nature of reality. Hegel attributes the change to the "modern" need to interact with the world, whereas ancient philosophers were self-contained, and medieval philosophers were monks. In his History of Philosophy Hegel writes:
In modern times things are very different; now we no longer see philosophic individuals who constitute a class by themselves. With the present day all difference has disappeared; philosophers are not monks, for we find them generally in connection with the world, participating with others in some common work or calling. They live, not independently, but in the relation of citizens, or they occupy public offices and take part in the life of the state. Certainly they may be private persons, but if so, their position as such does not in any way isolate them from their other relationships. They are involved in present conditions, in the world and its work and progress. Thus their philosophy is only by the way, a sort of luxury and superfluity. This difference is really to be found in the manner in which outward conditions have taken shape after the building up of the inward world of religion. In modern times, namely, on account of the reconciliation of the worldly principle with itself, the external world is at rest, is brought into order — worldly relationships, conditions, modes of life, have become constituted and organized in a manner which is conformable to nature and rational. We see a universal, comprehensible connection, and with that individuality likewise attains another character and nature, for it is no longer the plastic individuality of the ancients. This connection is of such power that every individuality is under its dominion, and yet at the same time can construct for itself an inward world."Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3", By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, M. A., University of Nebraska Press, 1995