Historicism

Historicism is a current of thought holding that ideas, institutions, values and social phenomena can only be fully understood by attending to their historical development, that is, to the processes through which they arose and changed. Its basic premise is historicity: nothing human is understood apart from the time and context in which it occurs.

The term was coined in the late eighteenth century by Friedrich Schlegel, who used it for the approach with which Winckelmann studied ancient art, recognizing its distinctive character instead of judging it by foreign standards. Over time the word came to designate quite different things. Its antecedents are usually traced to the Romantic rejection of the universalist rationalism of the Enlightenment, Herder's critique of Kant's philosophy of history, Burke's reflections on the French Revolution, and the historical school of law associated with Savigny, which held that law grows out of the history of each people rather than from abstract codification.

In practice two main traditions can be distinguished. The first is the historicism of nineteenth-century historians, with Ranke as its central figure, who sought to understand the past on its own terms through source criticism and hermeneutics, avoiding anachronism. The second is the historicism of philosophers of history such as Hegel and Marx, who placed each event within a global process of development, sometimes with the aim of discovering general laws or meanings of human becoming.

This distinction matters because the expression has generated considerable confusion. Karl Popper, in The Poverty of Historicism, used it to criticize theories that claim to find laws of historical development capable of predicting the future, and argued that such doctrines can encourage determinism and endanger open societies. Other authors, such as Leo Strauss, objected to the relativism they saw in treating each epoch as closed upon itself. For defenders of the tradition, by contrast, historicism is a tool of rigor, since it obliges us to read texts and ideas in their context before judging them.

Today the concept remains current in philosophy, historiography, anthropology, sociology and literary theory, where the so-called New Historicism renewed it from critical perspectives. The central debate endures: whether our understanding of the past can be objective and universal, or whether it is always conditioned by the historical moment from which we look.