The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present

Notes

Notes CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1 The term "historicism" is of such recent usage in America that it was not yet included in any of the standard dictionaries of the 1950's. Only in the 1930's, when American historians, social scientists , and theologians, shaken in their confidence in the past, increasingly looked to European thought, did the term become widely known in this country. Since then, it has been so rapidly adopted and has acquired so many often contradictory meanings that it defies definition. Widely varying uses of the term, as they appeared in German, Italian, and English writings, have been appropriated by the American literature. Definitions of the term have generally agreed that historicism, to quote the 1961 edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, is a "theory that all socio-cultural phenomena are historically determined." But beyond this, there has been little consensus on the meaning of the word as it relates to the objectivity of knowledge, the rationality of values, or the lawfulness of historical development. Most, if not all, writers have agreed that historicism involves the position that historical cognition, too, is an historical, time-bound act. Some have drawn from this relativistic implications for the theory of historical knowledge. Thus, Karl Mannheim, in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , interpreted Ernst Troeltsch's historicism as meaning that ideas are only "reflex functions of the sociological conditions under which they arose." Others have stressed the emphasis which historicism places upon the irrational and the intuitional. While this may be true of the use Friedrich Meinecke made of the term, it hardly holds for Benedetto Croce. History for Croce is thought, but such thought is by no means irrational. "Historicism is a logical principle," he writes in History as the Story of Liberty (New York, 1955), which was widely read in paperback form in this country. "It is, in fact, the very category of logic; it is logicality in its full acceptation, the logicality of the concrete universal" (p. 74). He concludes in almost Hegelian fashion: "Our history is the history of our Soul and the history of the human Soul is the history of the world" (p. 117). For the most part, historicism has been identified with ethical relativism, with the recognition "that there are no absolute values, 295 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY categories, or standards" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary , p. 1075). In Ortega y Gasset's words; ". . . Man has no nature, what he has is ... history." ["History as a System" in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, eds., Philosophy and History (Oxford, 1936), p. 313]. But Morris Cohen still spoke of historicism as an exaggerated "faith that history is the main road to human wisdom" in The Meaning of History (LaSalle, 111., 1947), p. 11. In general, historicism has been identified with the recognition that the subject matter of history is life in its unique, many-sided reality, and that the spontaneity of life makes impossible the reduction of history to general laws, as found in the natural sciences; cf. Hans Meyerhoff, Introduction to The Philosophy of History in our Time: An Anthology , pp. 10-11 (New York, 1954). Karl Popper, in The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1957), defines historicism as "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which further assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns,' the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (p. 3). The term "historicism" was preceded in English by the term "historism," but even "historism" was rarely used. It appears in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. J. M. Baldwin, ed. (New York, 1901-1905), refers to "historism" as a term "used mainly in the German Historismus." Charles Beard and Alfred Vagts discussed German "historism" in "Currents of Thought in Historiography," American Historical Review, 42 (1936-1937), pp. 460-483, which contained an extensive discussion of Meinecke's Entstehung des Historismus (Miinchen, 1936). Meinecke in a letter to the American historian Koppel Pinson (Berlin, May 7, 1937) in Ausgewdhlter Briefwechsel in Werke, VI (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 171-173, labels their discussion a caricature of his own thought. The term "historicism ," which largely replaced "historism" in the late 1930's, seems to have come into English from Italian rather than German. Benedetto Croce extensively uses the term "historicism" in History as the Story of Liberty, first published in English in 1941. The translator had rendered the title of...