Tradition

Historicism

Overview

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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists; a title which the latter do not reject, though they by no means…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Historicism is; the author is tied to Historicism in the knowledge graph.
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In its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and invention. And at bottom…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Historicism is; the author is tied to Historicism in the knowledge graph.
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What is called the 'pragmatic' writing of history has in modern times frequently sinned in its treatment of great historical characters, and defaced and tarnished the true conception of them by this fallacious separation of the outward from the inward. Not content with telling the unvarnished tale of the great acts which have been wrought by the heroes of the world's history, and with acknowledging that their inward…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Historicism is; the author is tied to Historicism in the knowledge graph.
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Historicism

Overview

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Philosophers who discussed Historicism

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