“Historicism” as a Term. It is difficult to give a
concise meaning to the term “historicism” (German,
Historismus). Meinecke, Heussi, and Antoni in their
studies of historicism assumed that the term originated
in the late nineteenth century and became well known
only in the twentieth century in connection with the
“crisis of historicism,” the deep uncertainty regarding
the value of Western historical traditions and the pos-
sibility of objective historical knowledge. In fact the
term is considerably older and was well established in
Germany by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Until 1918, the term often, but not always, had a
negative meaning. Friedrich Schlegel in 1797 speaks
of historicism as a “kind of philosophy” which places
the main stress on history. Beginning in the 1830's,
Ludwig Feuerbach uses the term extensively in a criti-
cal sense, coupled with “empiricism” and “positivism,”
to denote historical relativism and the uncritical
acceptance of the world as it presents itself. In a neu-
tral sense, Braniss in 1848 sharply distinguishes be-
tween “naturism” which seeks to understand all
phenomena, including historical ones, in terms of na-
ture and “historicism” which seeks to comprehend all
reality, including natural reality, historically. Histori-
cism, he suggests, rejects the idea of static “Being” as
the essence of reality and views “Being” itself as resting
upon action (
That, Act). Carl Prantl in 1852 speaks
of a “true historicism” which recognizes individuality
in its “concrete temporal-spatiality” (
concrete Zeitlich-
Räumlichkeit) and differs both from a shallow empiri-
cism or realism for which nothing exists except “tangi-
ble concreteness” and from a system-building idealism
in the Hegelian manner which ignores “factuality.” By
the middle of the nineteenth century, historicism is
identified with the methodological approach of the
Historical School of law (Savigny, Eichhorn) and of
economics. I. H. Fichte, the son of the philosopher,
in 1850 criticizes the Historical School of law for its
exclusive concern with Roman and Germanic law and
calls for a “true historicism” which through a “com-
parative history of law according to ethnographic and
world historical standards” would investigate how “the
practical ideas which operate everywhere in human
consciousness” find their expression “in every people,
but according to its spiritual individuality and its ex-
ternal conditions of life.” Historicism in the bad sense
is identified with the abandonment of theory, particu-
larly in economics and law. Thus Eugen Dühring in
1866 accuses the Historical School of economics of a
purely “descriptive” and “false historicism” having a
different logic for every age; it therefore in the end
seems to want to have no logic and “renounces convic-
tions and principles.” Carl Menger in 1884 attacks
Gustav Schmoller, the most important economist of the
Historical School, in a polemical work,
DieIrrtümer
des Historismus in der deutschen Nationalökonomie
(1884; “The Errors of Historicism in German Political
Economy”), and Adolf Wagner subsequently identifies
these errors as the confusion of economic theory with
economic history (cf. Heussi, 1932).
With the approaching World War I, the emphasis
shifts. Ernst Troeltsch in 1913 (Aufsätze..., p. 628),
sees in “historicism” the dominant attitude of the nine-
teenth and the twentieth centuries. The core of histori-
cism consists in the recognition that all human ideas
and ideals are subject to change. This attitude, Karl
Mannheim suggests about ten years later, has led to
the rejection of the stable, transcendent norms to which
medieval Christianity had clung and which in a secu-
larized form the rationalist philosophers of the En-
lightenment had maintained. Historicism is now
identified with cultural relativism. In the course of the
nineteenth century, Troeltsch observes, historical
scholarship showed how all institutions and ideas were
historically related and thus destroyed all points of
reference. Nevertheless, for Troeltsch, historicism con-
stituted a tremendous advance in man's understanding
of himself. There was no escape from man's historical
character. The task to which Troeltsch now devoted
himself, after the war, in his massive, uncompleted
work Der Historismus und seine Probleme, was to find
new norms for a modern world through the study of
history. In his DieEnstehung des Historismus (“The
Origins of Historicism”) Friedrich Meinecke now
hailed historicism as the “highest attained stage in the
understanding of things human” (Entstehung..., p.
4) and the most important intellectual development
in Europe since the Reformation. He saw the core of
historicism in the replacement of a “generalizing” by
an “individualizing” approach. Through its focus on
individuality and on development, historicism had
liberated modern man from the rigid unhistorical
naturalistic conception of man and of ethics which had
dominated Western thought since Roman antiquity,
and which, Meinecke maintained, still dominated
Western European thought and practice. Although
Meinecke saw the beginnings of an historicist attitude
in the renewed general interest in history in eighteenth-
century Europe, he saw the fulfillment of historicism
in Germany in Goethe and Ranke, and identified his-
toricism with the classical tradition of German histori-
cal thought. Meinecke's book thus became a reaffirma-
tion of his faith in the superiority of the German
intellectual and cultural heritage over the Western
European heritage at a time when his confidence in
Germany's political development had already been
deeply shaken.
Outside of Germany, the term had little of an
indigenous history. In Italy, Benedetto Croce used the
term istorismo in 1902 in his Estetica to contrast an
historical against a rationalistic or formal approach to
art. He later identified historicism (istorismo) with the
German tradition of historical thought (cf. Antoni,
Storicismo, 1969) and coined a variation of the term
(storicismo) to describe his own philosophic position,
which we shall briefly discuss later. In the English-
speaking countries, the terms “historism” and “histori-
cism” began to be used after 1900, the former to
describe German thought, the latter as a translation
of Croce's use of istorismo and storicismo. By the
1940's, the term “historicism” had replaced “historism”
almost entirely. Karl Popper gave the term “histori-
cism” a meaning, which has not been generally
accepted, as a theory of historical predictability and
determinism in contrast with the usual meaning of the
term which denotes the opposite, individuality, spon-
taneity, and the avoidance of generalizations. But when
Popper wrote the manuscript of The Poverty of Histor-
icism, the term “historism” was still often used to
denote the German tradition and Popper explicitly
distinguished his use of the term “historicism” from
the conventional use of “historism.”
Particularly in Germany, but also elsewhere, histori-
cism has come to be understood essentially in the sense
in which Troeltsch and Meinecke understood it as an
outlook on the world (
Weltanschauung) which recog-
nizes the historical character of all human existence
but views history not as an integrated system but as
a scene in which a diversity of human wills express
themselves. Historicism has come to be understood not
only as an idea but also as an intellectual and scholarly
movement which dominated historical, social, and
humanistic studies in nineteenth-century Germany, and
which recognized that “the special quality of history
does not consist in the statement of general laws or
principles,” but in the grasp, so far as possible, of the
“infinite variety of particular historical forms immersed
in the passage of time” (Meyerhoff, 1959). The term
as used by Meinecke, Troeltsch, Antoni, and others
denoted a scholarly and intellectual movement many
of whose exponents in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, e.g., Vico, Herder, Ranke, Savigny, Droysen,
never used the term to describe their own outlook
although it was applied to them in the nineteenth
century by some of their critics. As a scholarly move-
ment, historicism rejected positivistic attempts to ex-
plain social behavior by theoretical models applicable
to various societies; as a movement of political thought
it rejected not only natural law theory but any attempt
to formulate norms of political behavior or rights of
men.
