Beiheft 14

Essays on Historicism

Cover image: Leopold von Ranke (circa 1860), photographer unknown, from New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division

+ LEONARD KRIEGER, Elements of Early Historicism: Experience, Theory, and History in Ranke, History and Theory 14 (December 1975), Bei. 14, 1-14.

The tension between individualism and universalism in historicism goes back to Leopold Ranke's version of the movement's early stage. Ranke's experience of the Revolution of 1830 helped to effect the first of the many resolutions which this tension would receive, but it helped also to endow this resolution with the one-sided individualistic distortion which has burdened the movement ever since. The initial emphasis on the individual as particularizing comes from Ranke's conservative reaction to revolution as a universalizing aspect of history. But despite this overt emphasis, Ranke actually moved toward universal truths in his history, harmonizing them with his historical individualities.

+ PIETRO ROSSI, The Ideological Valences of Twentieth-Century Historicism, History and Theory 14 (December 1975), Bei. 14, 15-29.

Popper is wrong in regarding historicism as a unified idea. On the contrary, later historicism was associated with a variety of ideologies. Meinecke's historicism is closely associated with the development of the German state. Croce emphasizes the development of liberty, looking to the French Orleans monarchy as a model. Meinecke's argument is directed against the idea of natural law, Croce's against the Enlightenment. These were united in the conservative, anti-democratic rejection of the principles of 1789. Weber's system gives rise to a multiplicity of ideological positions. Unlike the retrospective philosophical attitudes of Meinecke and Croce, which use the past to justify the present, Weber's emphasis on understanding the present as a product of the complexities of the past and as a factor in the creation of the future leads away from conservative politics.

+ JOHN PASSMORE, The Poverty of Historicism Revisited, History and Theory 14 (December 1975), Bei. 14, 30-47.

Popper's use of the word "'historicism" is too encompassing. Does "historicism" refer to a theory of the social sciences, a way of doing them, or a "'well-considered and close-knit philosophy?" Here the term is taken to mean a theory about the aims of the social sciences. But even with reference to his other works, Popper's argument proves not to be against historicism as he defined it, but rather against one of the other varieties of Historismus. Nor does the doctrine involve or entail much that Popper seems to think it does. Notwithstanding this critique, Popper has sketched a number of arguments which might be further developed into a refutation of 11 (evolutionary historicism."

+ HAYDEN V. WHITE, Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination, History and Theory 14 (December 1975), Bei. 14, 48-67.

Historicism is often regarded (e.g., by Popper) as a distortion of properly "historical" understanding; but if one attends to the rhetorical aspects of historical discourse, it appears that ordinary historical narrative prefigures its subject by the language chosen for description no less than historicism does by its generalizing and theoretical interests. Descriptive language is, in fact, figurative and emplots events to suit one or another type of story. Rhetorical analysis shows even an apparently straightforward passage (by A. J. P. Taylor) to be an encodation of events in the form of pseudo-tragedy. Generic story-types constitute the latent meaning of narratives and are understood by readers, often subliminally, through the figurative language of the story. The acknowledgement of linguistic determinism resolves a number of problems of historical theory and entails a qualified relativism of historical accounts.