The Decline of Historicist Attitudes. The impact of
historicism on contemporary thought was lessened
considerably in recent decades, particularly since the
end of World War II. In a sense the modern outlook
continues to be historicist, if by historicism is meant
merely the recognition that all human ideals and insti-
tutions are subject to historical change. But the impli-
cations which classical historicism drew for scholarly
method as well as for ethics and politics have been
questioned by many contemporary scholars. This has
occurred as the intellectual, social, and political condi-
tions of the pre-industrial, pre-democratic, and in many
ways still Christian setting within which classical
historicism arose gave way to a complex, technological
society in which politics was much more broadly based
and the relative importance of the European nation
state on the world scene had declined.
We have mentioned, above, the skepticism regarding
the possibility of objective historical knowledge which
followed the collapse of the idealistic presuppositions
of classical historicism. This skepticism led in two
directions. Theodor Lessing immediately after World
War I asserted that history has no objective meaning
and that all historical writing is myth-building. Simi-
larly Carl Becker, Charles Beard, and Karl Popper held
that since subjectivistic and perspectivistic factors
always enter into historical knowledge no science of
history is possible. But the main currents of histori-
ographical thought went in other directions. Historians
sought new methods which took into account that the
historian is not a detached passive observer but an
active investigator, that historical inquiry like other
forms of scientific inquiry requires hypotheses and
generalizations, in short, that history is inseparable
from theory.
Nevertheless there have been few attempts to con-
struct an historical science seeking historical laws such
as historians in the nineteenth century, e.g., Henry
Thomas Buckle, had proposed. But historians and cul-
tural scientists very often have concerns different from
those of their predecessors. Scholarship has become
much more concerned with the study of complex social
processes, not merely with comprehending unique
processes but with explaining typical recurrences and
defining trends of development. The questions asked
by philosophic historians in the eighteenth century
have thus become relevant again. The attempt has,
however, been made to devise methods by which these
questions can be approached empirically and analytic-
ally. The positivistic tradition has reasserted itself in
political science and economics—particularly outside
of Germany—which have moved increasingly in the
direction of the quantitative behavioral sciences. But
within disciplines less oriented by behavioral science,
and also in linguistics, literary and aesthetic criticism,
and law, once dominated by an historicist approach,
there has been a growing movement away from a
descriptive to an analytic, structural approach.
In historical writing, methods and concepts derived
from Max Weber, Karl Marx, the French Annales
circle, and the American social sciences have had an
increasing influence. Weber, Marx, and to a lesser
extent Annales historians (Bloch, Febvre, Braudel) all
had roots in German historicism and in basic ways they
both preserved and modified historicist concerns. Max
Weber was closest to the historicist tradition in his
insistence that “knowledge of cultural processes is
inconceivable except on the basis of the meaning which
the reality of life, which always takes on individualized
forms, has for us in specific, individual relationships”
(“Objectivity,” p. 80). But he also stressed that knowl-
edge requires concepts and that human behavior is not
unpredictable in the sense in which Ranke and the
Historical School had held it to be. The task of the
social scientist for Weber is to formulate concepts
specifically suited to the meaning and value-laden
phenomena with which the social sciences deal, to
work out the patterns of behavior and development
which follow ideally from the central value and
thought structures of the social unit, and then to study
empirically the approximation of the historical
phenomena to the theoretically constructed types. It
was thus possible to combine the historicist search for
the comprehension of the “uniquely individual charac-
ter of cultural phenomena” (ibid., p. 101) with rigorous
methods of social inquiry.
In a sense Marx had undertaken something very
similar in Volume I of Capital. Moreover, Marx and
Weber had each provided in their work important
methodological suggestions for the application of
historical methods to comparative intersocietal and
intercultural studies of social and civilizational de-
velopment. The Marxism which has been an influence
on contemporary historical scholarship has often been
relatively free from the mechanistic, unilinear views
of history attributed to Marx after his death. Modern
interpreters of Marx—Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, and
the Frankfurt School—have pointed out that Marx
almost consistently rejected natural law models.
Throughout the body of Volume I of
Capital—although
perhaps not in the prefaces—Marx insists that social
phenomena, even the apparently biological ones such
as population trends (cf. Marx [1967], I, 632), cannot
be explained in terms of abstract laws but must be
studied historically. The differences with classical
historicism are, of course, clear in Marx's insistence that
theory is inseparable from practice and that the task
of the scholar does not consist so much in contemplat-
ing the world as in analyzing its social contradictions
and changing it.
Finally the structuralism of the French Annales
circle needs to be mentioned as a serious attempt to
combine important elements of the positivistic and
historicist traditions. For the Annales group, history
was concerned not only with the narrative recreation
of unique chains of events but even more so with the
analysis and comprehension of long enduring historical
structures. More radically than either Weber or the
Marxists, the Annales historians sought to broaden the
concern of the historian to all aspects of human life,
including the material and biological aspects in their
cultural context, and to study comparatively all soci-
eties and cultures, primitive as well as civilized,
European as well as non-Western. History was once
more to become the key to all knowledge, but a history
which in integrating the methods of all the sciences
dealing with man—physiology, cultural anthropology,
depth psychology, linguistics as well as economics and
sociology—sought to create the foundation of a new
historical “science of man.”
The historicist stress on the neutrality of values has,
however, survived relatively intact, and has been
shared by many scholars close to the classical positivist
tradition as well. On the other hand, the idealistic
assumptions upon which the precept of value neutrality
had rested in classical historicism were seriously shat-
tered by Max Weber. Weber agreed that all cultural
phenomena are value-laden and that any study of soci-
ety involves the comprehension of its value outlook.
But he rejected the historicist notion that the values
of historical societies represent unique expressions of
divine will or historical logic. In any ultimate sense
all values are irrational and history appears as the
perennial conflict between irreconcilable systems of
value (Weber [1946], p. 147). The rationality of value
systems can be judged only in a purely instrumental
sense, by their efficacy as means toward ends, and
logically by their inner consistency. Weber thus in-
tensified the positivism about values which is inherent
in the historicist position. This positivism of values has
been challenged in recent years, most notably by the
Frankfurt School—H. Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, T.
Adorno, J. Habermas—who have emphasized the ele-
ments of historicism in Marx's thought, a historicism
rooted, however, in Hegelian philosophy which rejects
the value neutrality of both classical historicism and
classical positivism. The Frankfurt group have called
for a “critical theory” which does not content itself
with observing the world as it appears empirically but,
in the manner of the Marx of the early writings or
of the Capital, proceeds to examine the rationality of
social institutions in terms of a conception of human
needs and human freedom. Yet they, like Marx, have
rejected the concept of a fixed human nature and have
argued that the norms themselves must be created from
human “practice” within objective historical situations.
The question remains whether a dialectical method
without rational norms which have intrinsic validity
beyond the historical situation can overcome the di-
lemmas of historicism.
