Forty years ago there were all sorts of debates about historicism. They’ve largely disappeared, or are met with stifled yawns. But, I think, it is largely an unacknowledged problem within historiography.
Frederick Beiser (Hegel 2005, p.29-30) gives a brief schematic of historicism, which is a useful place to start, as follows:
Although the term ‘historicism’ has acquired many different meanings, we need only to focus on its meaning in the late 1790’s and early 1800’s. We can best summarise that meaning in three methodological points.
1. History. Everything in the social and political world has a history. All laws, institutions, beliefs and practices are subject to change, and each is the result of a specific historical development. Hence nothing in the social and political world is eternal.
2. Context. We should examine all human beliefs, practices and institutions in their historical context, showing how they arose of necessity from their specific economic, social, legal, cultural and geographic conditions. We must see them as parts and products of a wider whole.
3. Organicism. Society is an organism, an indivisible whole, whose politics, religion, morality and legal system are inextricably intertwined. Like all organisms, it undergoes a process of development, having a birth, a childhood, maturity and decline.
Three initial observations about this:
1. Universal/relative: Historicity – being historical – has become the grounding principle. But does history escape this history? Is historicity itself subject to history? But eitherway, it cannot be absolutely relative. Put another way, it is only relatively relative. There is an order of likenesses which allow us to identify things such as ‘institutions’, ‘laws’ and so on across times and cultures, let alone ‘history’ in the first place. An absolute relativity would disable us from saying anything whatsoever.
2. Context and Organism: Process and relationship have become interesting of their own accord. Through its organicism it lends a focus to individual elements in their specificity indiscriminently. An overarching story is atomised, each part tolerating or promoting more interest than the whole.
3. Similarity with our current day: Although Beiser is talking about the historicism prevalent in Hegel’s day, I think this description fits remarkably well with both the assumptions of cultural history, and a general, educated, liberal outlook today.
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