Historicism

Historicism is a theory of discerning the past truth from the study of history with man at the pivot. It was applied by 18th-century philosophers of Enlightenment and gained momentum since then, with the insistence that history is knowledge. It is the implication of the knowledge of history in explaining, besides history, a vast range of traditional subjects, like theology, philosophy, art, and literature.Historicism is a sort of tag attached to different disciplines, meaning things in the said discipline can be explained and understood by the knowledge of history. Previously, it was believed that such knowledge is apocalyptic. In history, it is applicable to Darwinian interpretation of social evolution and Marxist interpretation of dialectic materialism.

Broadly, the theory of historicism means that man may learn from history something the great religions believed that they learned from revelation. The application and value of history increased a hundredfold by this theory. As such, this is a theory of historical inevitability, a sort of historical determinism. It is the science of answering questions through historical records and repudiates the early belief of God guiding the steps of human beings (apocalypse). On the contrary, it theorized the materialistic view of the universe, insisting that man himself made certain laws through experiments and systematic observations that guided his steps, giving meaning to human life. Man is constantly thriving to derive and explain these laws. The scientific methodology of history as a collection of a mass of data together with constantly increasing ability to classify and analyze those data—encompassing facts related to socioeconomic changes, the beginning and growth of institutions, lands, and the people bearing upon individual and mass psychology—have made the task easy.

The historians have discovered uniform tendencies governing movements of religious enthusiasms. They are the same for the rise of Christianity,Islam, and Buddhism. Also, the same is applicable for the rise of nationalism in Europe, America, and Asia. This implies that there are certain laws through which historical events occur and can be explained.

Historicism derives its roots from the law of change, which proclaims that what existed in the past would not exist today—and in the same manner, what exists today would not exist tomorrow. One should think historically about this law of change, and a historian should not accept the verdict of past authors without criticism. Historicism claims that there can be a preimagination of social future on the basis of historical understanding of the law of change. The German philosophers, however, conceived of the term historicismdifferently. Dilthey, being influenced by the 17th-century religious mysticism, believed in the historical concept of the solidarity of human race and its inevitable progress through an inner strength. He is the theoretician of that moderate spirituality that escaped positivism and thus, in turn, generated the so-called crisis of historicism.

For Ernest Troeltsch, historicism was the radical historicization of our knowledge and thought. All objects are determined by the past and are directed toward an unknown future; hence, state, law, art, and all others are dissolved in the stream of history intelligible to us as constituent parts of historical development. Troeltsch considered naturalism and historicism as the two great scientific creations of the modern world, conceiving them as homologous and juxtaposed. Though he was against the idea of unlimited historicism, he perceived it as an absolute universal and extrahistorical truth, which was the presupposition of any historiography (the conquest of historicism).

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