Historicism Research Paper

This use of the word primarily to refer to the past explains why it was employed to refer to different things: (a) the conception of history present in the German historical school; (b) the positions of (often widely differing) writers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke, and (to some extent) Max Weber; (c) the conception of history found in Hegel or Marx (this is the use Popper makes of the term); and (d) (a usage confined to Italy) a speculative tradition going back to Vico and Hegel, and leading up to Benedetto Croce. Up until the years between the wars, there were no writers who described themselves as ‘historicist,’ and up until that time, the word had rather negative connotations. The first attempt to provide a thoroughgoing overhaul and redefinition of historicism as a historical movement was Friedrich Meinecke’s Entstehung des Historismus (1936, trans. Historicism, London 1972), a work which, however, produced more criticism than consensus.

2. Historicism And The Historical School

There is no doubt, however, that historicism is not just a historiographical tendency—even though it has certainly had widespread influence on historians—for it is primarily a general conception of reality, or at least of Man and the human world, a conception whose roots are to be found in late eighteenth-century German culture. (The inclusion of Vico as a historicist is a retrospective operation, and one that is highly controversial.) Historicism in fact emerged in close connection with that reaction against French culture that started to make its voice heard clearly with Johann Gottfried Herder. In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774), Herder argued against views of history which saw it as the progress of humanity out of a savage state towards civilization, but espoused a developmental perspective which maintained there was an analogy between the life of humankind and the life of an individual. According to Herder the various epochs that came after one another—seen as paralleling the gradual passage from childhood to youth and then virile manhood—correspond to the succession of peoples. Each historical epoch was said to bear the imprint of the national character of a particular people, which was destined, in the same way as humanity as a whole, to run through a life cycle. Herder linked up this organicist perspective with the idea that history was the working out of the design of Providence. Thus each people was seen as carrying out an indispensable task in the history of humanity, imparting in the process the mark of its peculiar nature—its ‘spirit’. The idea of ‘a people’s spirit’ (Volkgeist) therefore came to mean the essence of a particular people, the fundamental traits which underlay and united all the forms that people took in the course of its development.

It was precisely this idea which was taken up by the historical school. Whereas Hegelian philosophy of history developed Herder’s providential perspective, and tried to show the essential rationality of history, demonstrating that underneath the apparently accidental succession of events was the development of spirit, Friedrich Carl von Savigny interpreted law as the individual creation of a particular people—thus rejecting the natural law tradition. In a similar way, Wilhelm Roscher and other exponents of the historical school among economists saw economic life as the expression of a particular people, and thus a pattern which could not be understood independently from other aspects of that people. Most influentially of all, Leopold von Ranke gave a theoretical framework to romantic historicism in a series of works—from Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Volker on 1494 bis 1535 (1824) to his unfinished Weltgeschichte (1881–5). Rather than seeing each people as having an essence, Ranke saw each epoch as possessing its own individual character. He believed each age was characterized by dominant ‘ideal’ tendencies, and that the people who lived in a particular age were shaped by these tendencies. He denied that it was possible to interpret the succession of epochs as having any teleological development, and denied that earlier ages could be seen as laying the way for later ones, or later ones the necessary outcomes of earlier epochs. Each epoch has its own value, and is, as Ranke put it, in an immediate relationship with God. The divine presence in history did not imply, therefore (as Hegel believed) that there was a ‘progressive’ evolution from one age to another.

A common thread in Romantic historicism was the belief that all knowledge about Man, society and the state must be historically based. Historicism thus put forward an alternative approach to that which had become dominant in the second half of the eighteenth century—exemplified in writers such as Montesquieu or Adam Smith—which took modern natural science as the pattern to follow. Its epistemological model not only implied that historical knowledge was different from knowledge of natural phenomena, but also insisted on the need to bring all disciplines studying Man back to a historical basis. This meant that knowledge of this kind was inevitably ‘partial’, for it took objects—economic life, say, or law, or the organization of the state—which could only be abstractly isolated from the historical process. Only historical knowledge could lead to understanding of the historical process, it was claimed, or understanding of any epoch in its totality. And only historical knowledge could reveal the deep underlying meaning of events and of the relationship between them. The historicism of the historical school thus remained faithful to the organicist framework it inherited from Herder. Indeed, it ensured that a shadow of divinity fell upon history—since it was only God who could give a sense to humanity’s journey.

3. Modern Historicism

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century a decisive turn took place in historicism. There was an encounter with the neo-Kantian movement and it was felt that what were called the ‘sciences of the spirit’ or ‘sciences of culture’ needed to be given an epistemological foundation. This turn started with Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883). Dilthey positioned himself in the tradition of the historical school, but he abandoned its organicist assumptions. Still more importantly, he rejected any attempt to use history as the basis for a metaphysical perspective which saw history as containing a deus ex machina—whether this consisted of a transcendent will (as in Christian ideas) or an immanent one (as in Hegel). Dilthey tried to apply the kind of critique that Kant had made of natural science to the sciences of the spirit. He therefore thought it was necessary to supplement the critique of pure reason with a ‘critique of historical reason’—a critique which would ‘provide foundations’ for the disciplines concerned with Man, society and the state. However, this enlargement of the critical enterprise demanded a shift in approach, according to Dilthey, to permit a non-metaphysical nalysis of the historical world.

A kind of historicism thus began to emerge which was different from, and in many ways opposed to, that of the Romantic period. This new historicism was active in two fields—in epistemology and methodology, and in analysis of the structure of the historical world. In both fields work was produced which was often very diverse. Dilthey was more tied than were other new historicist writers to the historical school, and he saw knowledge of history as part of the Geisteswissenschaften (seen as including psychology and the various social sciences as well as history). He thus tried to identify what it was about knowledge of this kind that made it different from knowledge in the natural sciences. He saw the natural and human sciences as differing both in their object and in their method. Whereas natural sciences took as their object phenomena which belonged to a world outside human beings, and were rooted in external experience, in the sciences of the spirit the knowing subject and the object belonged to the same world; knowledge thus came from the lived experience knowing subjects had of their own inner states. Dilthey took up Droysen’s idea that historical knowledge was ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) rather than explanation (the kind of knowledge which could be achieved in the natural sciences). Other writers, however, such as Wilhelm Windelband and his pupil Heinrich Rickert, who were more directly influenced by the neo-Kantian movement, took up Ranke’s idea that history is a search for individual identities (the identity of an age) and transposed it into the theory that history was a kind of knowledge oriented towards the individual—as against natural science, which is the search for general laws. Still others, such as Simmel, focused on the social sciences and especially sociology, and posed a problem which was analogous to Kant’s problem regarding how nature was possible—asking how society was possible.

These various positions are related to different approaches to the structure of the world of history. Dilthey developed the critique of ‘historical reason’ into a historical critique of reason, and thus came to a theory of historicity which later influenced Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. The historical world—that is to say, systems of culture, systems of social organization, historical epochs—was seen by Dilthey as the outcome of a process whereby life was objectified (became ‘objective spirit’). Yet life as an attribute specific to human beings was itself a process which evolved in time. Man is thus a historical being, and his life is historically conditioned by the tendencies of a particular epoch. This led Dilthey to deny that there could be any absolute values—a position which was quite different from that of Windelband and Rickert, who took the neo-Kantian movement in the direction of a theory of values. Dilthey’s denial of the possibility of absolute values was echoed on the other hand by Simmel, who produced a psychological interpretation of the Kantian a priori and asserted that knowledge was just as relative as other forms of life. After 1910 Simmel came to espouse an immanent-type philosophy of life, founded on the dialectic between life, ‘more-life’ and ‘more-than-life.’

In the period between the two world wars, German historicism again changed track and returned to the metaphysical perspectives of Romantic historicism. The work of Oswald Spengler, published just after the First World War, stressed the radically relativistic implications of historicism, and portrayed history as the terrain in which heterogeneous cultures played themselves out—each one carrying its own set of values, which were peculiar only to the people living within the particular culture in question. Spengler was influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche: from Goethe he adopted the idea of the opposition between the ‘world of nature’ and ‘the world of history,’ and also the analogy between cultures and organisms, and he drew on Nietzsche to make a distinction between culture and civilization (Zivilisation), with civilization being seen as the inevitable decline of any culture. Troeltsch and Meinecke opposed the relativism of Spengler and tried to re-assert the absolute nature of values from within the historical process itself. Troeltsch advocated a ‘material’ philosophy of history that would create a ‘cultural synthesis’ between the various national components of European civilization. Meinecke went back to Ranke’s work and investigated the relationship between the structure of the historical process and God. For both writers, the fact that values were situated in history did not imply that they could not be transcendent, and thus escape becoming outmoded by the course of historical development or becoming.

4. Beyond Historicism

In the first two decades of the twentieth century Max Weber took another path, going ‘beyond historicism’ as Wolfgang Mommsen put it. Weber broke decisively with Romantic historicism, took up Menger’s critique of the historical school in economics and rejected the organicist assumptions of so much historicism. Weber did not draw on Dilthey—who was still linked to the historical school—but rather on Rickert’s distinction between historical knowledge and natural science. For Weber, however, historical knowledge consisted of a set of disciplines that needed not only the explanation of historical phenomena but also what he called nomological knowledge. The focus on individual phenomena therefore in no way meant that general concepts and laws could not be used: these are, indeed, essential if events and the relations between events are to be explained. These general concepts and laws differed from those of natural science in that they took the form of ideal-types. However it was they that made up the basis of ‘pure’ economics and sociology—these being seen as generalizing disciplines which tended to distinguish them from historical research proper. Weber’s position was similar to, but more rigorous than, Simmel’s. Both wished to restore the relationship with the social sciences which the emphasis on the individual nature of historical phenomena (the inheritance of Romantic historicism) seemed to imply was impossible.

Weber also broke with Rickert’s theory of values on another terrain—that of the interpretation of the status of values. Rickert had sought to ground historical knowledge in universal values, which were transcendent and independent of the course of history. For Weber, on the other hand, values were the criteria for choosing from the infinite range of empirical data—and thus a criterion whereby a historical object was constituted. Far from being absolute, therefore, values possessed a validity that coincided with the possibility of their finding concrete form in human action. Weber also denied that values were organized in systems, as Rickert believed, for values are multiple, as are the spheres of values. Between the various value spheres, and between individual values within each sphere, there was ‘collision’ of values. This is true even within the sphere of ethics, which is dominated by the split between ethics of intention or conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik). Given that there is a plurality of conflicting values, Weber argued that people have to choose; and choosing certain values inevitably means rejecting others. For Weber, history was thus the stage on which people positioned themselves vis-a-vis values, adopting certain values as criteria in their own action, thus putting them into effect.

5. Historicism Outside German Culture

Like that of Troeltsch and Meinecke, Weber’s thought was cast in the framework of modern historicism. This was not the case for Croce, who was in intellectual dialogue with Hegel’s philosophy of history—although he also put forward a ‘reform’ of the Hegelian dialectic. Croce denied the existence of a nature existing outside spirit—so even ideas are included in spirit. So reality as a whole was identified with spirit—and this, in turn, was identified with history. In epistemological terms, knowledge was seen as historical knowledge. The sciences (whether abstract sciences such as mathematics or political economy, or empirical sciences, such as the natural sciences) were denied any cognitive validity: Croce argued they simply had an ‘economic’ function. Croce termed his thought ‘absolute historicism’—that is to say, it asserted the thoroughly historical character of reality and knowledge as a whole. Croce’s thought was absolute in another, perhaps deeper, sense. For Croce saw history as the ‘unfolding’ of a first principle, spirit, which becomes real by moving from one to another of its eternal forms—whether art, logic, economic activity or ethical action. He saw individuals as—at best—simple instruments of these processes. History for Croce was about spirit, not about individuals, even though it did deal with individual’s ‘works’.

Croce worked out the principles of his ‘absolute historicism’ in the years following the late 1920s—so at a time when modern German historicism had virtually come to an end. The distance between the two types of historicism became clear in the debate which followed publication of Meinecke’s Entstehung des Historismus. This debate made it clear that Croce and the German historicists thought of historicism in different terms, and also had differing interpretations of the history of historicism. Croce saw his historicism as opposing not only the ‘abstract rationalism’ of Enlightenment culture, but also the irrationalism which he saw as being present in the historical school, and also in Meinecke. Meinecke saw historicism as originating in the passage from the natural law tradition to Romantic thought, and thought of its greatest triumphs as being the works of Goethe and Ranke. Croce, in contrast, was critical of Ranke’s approach to history, which he saw as being unproblematic, and he imagined a direct line of inheritance running from Hegel to his ‘absolute historicism’ (although the genealogy was complicated by Vico—the national progenitor).

In this same period, historicism (especially German historicism) started to spread to the Latin and the English-speaking countries. This produced some significant accounts and re-statements, e.g., at the hands of Jose Ortega y Gasset in Spain, or Raymond Aron in France. Croce’s historicism (although not fully distinguished from Dilthey’s) found an echo in Britain, in Robin G. Collingwood’s work. However, by this time, historicism was almost at an end. In 1944 Karl Popper published a book with the significant title, The Poverty of Historicism, which took up the criticisms which neopositivists (particularly Otto Neurath) had made of the traditional distinction between historical knowledge and natural science. After the war historicism was subjected to head-on attack from various sides (e.g., in the critiques of Leo Strauss and Karl Lowith). In the second half of the twentieth century it has been rare for writers to admit to describe their philosophical positions as ‘historicist’, even though some have taken up themes and forms of analysis which are similar.

6. From Historicism To ‘Historical’ Social Science

At the same time as its influence in philosophy was declining, historicism became important again for historians, especially in Germany. Central was the reference to Max Weber and his insistence on the need to link historical research and the social sciences, and on the need for history to employ concepts and theories developed by the social sciences. Instead of making the traditional distinction (and contraposition) between historical disciplines and the natural sciences, or that between historical understanding and ‘systematic’ knowledge of society, Weber favored a strong link between the latter two kinds of knowledge; this approach was taken up by historians such as HansUlrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and others. In a 1969 essay Wehler proposed a definition of history as ‘historical social science’ and argued that history ought to be seen as one of the social sciences, yet at the same time have its specificity recognized. He thus emphasized historiography’s affinity to economics, sociology or political science, in so far as it necessarily drew on theories, and took most of them from other social sciences.

One of the consequences of this current of thought was that it opened the way for a return to Marxism: not Marxism as a general theory of history, but as a set of theories which could be tested in the interpretation of specific historical processes. In other words, Marxist concepts were used in a ‘Weberian’ fashion, as ideal types. Theories thus had a purely functional value and could not guarantee the validity of research. This brought out the problem (stressed especially by Kocka) of how to check the findings which theoretically guided research led to, and the related problem of how the validity of theories could be assessed. Kocka’s solution was that it is not theories which legitimize findings, but rather findings which demonstrate the heuristic efficaciousness of theories.

These works left aside many of historicism’s classic problems, and rejected many of its methodological stances, such as its opposition between explanation and understanding. Their aim was to show that historical writing had its scientificity, albeit scientificity of a special, ‘sui generis’ kind. They had nothing in common with the revival of Dilthey in hermeneutics championed by Hans-Georg Gadamer. And they were firmly opposed to the notion of history as ‘narrative,’ proposed by Hayden White and many other American scholars (in work that, not surprisingly, also often embraced a hermeneutic perspective). Nonetheless, this did not stop writers like Jorn Rusen recognizing the narrative character of historical writing, and seeing this as the feature which marks history out from other social sciences. But Rusen does not deny either the need for theories nor the scientific character of historical research: on the contrary, he aims to show that the narrative structure of historiography is perfectly compatible with the use of general theories, and does not absolve historians from the duty to empirically check the results of their research.

Historicism has thus not so much been extended as ‘superseded.’ For not only does ‘historical social science’ reject Ranke’s ideal that the historian should be purely ‘objective’. It goes so far as to claim that history can and should be critical (or ‘emancipating’ in Habermas’ terms): that is to say, critical vis-à-vis traditional history-writing and its methodological principles, including the separation between history of ideas and social history, but also critical towards traditional historiographical interpretations of Germany’s past. This has led to a significant shift in attitudes towards the Enlightenment. As we have seen, historicism was born partly out of polemic with Enlightenment culture, which it considered anti-historical. In contrast, Horst Walter Blanke has recently tried to link ‘historical social science’ up to Enlightenment historiography and the Enlightenment conception of history. This marks a sharp break with the traditional conceptions and categories of historicism—especially (but not exclusively) those of Romantic historicism. Thus, historicism did not only decline as a general philosophical approach, but also as a paradigm of historical research and writing.

Bibliography:

1. Antoni C 1959 From History to Sociology. The Transition in German Historical Thought. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI
2. Aron R 1938 Essai sur la theorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. J Vrin, Paris (2nd edn., 1950 entitled La philosophie critique de l’histoire. Essai sur une theorie allemande de l’histoire)
3. Blanke H W 1991 Historiographiegeschichte als Historik. Fromman-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstaff, Germany
4. Engel-Janosi F 1944 The Growth of German Historicism. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
5. Hughes H S 1958 Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, 1st edn. Knopf, New York
6. Iggers G G 1968 The German Conception of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. The National Tradition of History. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT (orig. edn. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, DTV, Munich, Germany)
7. Iggers G G 1984 New Directions in European Historiography, rev. edn. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT
8. Kon I S 1964 Die Geschichtsphilosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts—Kritischer Abriss. Akademie Verlag, Berlin
9. Lee D E, Beck R N 1953–4 The meaning of historicism. American Historical Review 59: 568–77
10. Rand C G 1964 Two meanings of historicism in the writings of Dilthey, Troeltsch and Meinecke. Journal of the History of Ideas 25: 503–18
11. Rossi P 1956 Lo storicismo tedesco contemporaneo. Einaudi, Turin, Italy (new edn., 1994 Edizioni di Comunita, Milan)
12. Rossi P 1960 Storiave storicismo nella filosofia contemporanea. Lerici, Milan (new edn., 1991, Il Saggiatore, Milan)
13. Rossi P 1989 ‘Historismus’ und ‘storicismo’: zwei Denktraditionen. In: Esch A, Petersen J (eds.) Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft in der Kultur Italiens und Deutschland. Max Niemeyer, Tubingen, Germany
14. Rothaker E 1960 Das Wort Historismus. Zeitschrift fur deutsche Wortforschung 16: 3–6
15. Rusen J 1993 Konfigurationen des Historismus. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany
16. Tessitore F 1991 Introduzione allo storicismo. Laterza, Rome and Bari, Italy
17. Wittkau A 1992 Historismus. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gotingen, Germany