Historicism

Historicism is the view that privileges time over space in social analysis. Some aspects of this view may be traced to the Christian eschatology of the medieval era and its linearization of historical time; however, in many respects, this notion—still implicit in much of social theory—had its origins in the 19th century. As the technological triumphs of the steamship and railroad relegated space to the background through massive timespace compression, the social sciences accordingly came to emphasize historicist approaches in which time was synonymous with growth, progress, change, and novelty. Historicism consists of a despatialized consciousness in which geography figures weakly or not at all, or, as Soja (1993) defines it, as “an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination” (p. 140). Thus, Michel Foucault held that with the rise of modernity, time became equated discursively with change and fecundity, while space was relegated to the passive and static, a distinction that rests, of course, on an artificial and analytically misleading distinction between the two dimensions.

A central part of this process involved the birth of modern history as an account framed in linear, not cyclical, time (which was the norm in many societies), that is, by portraying time as an inevitable sequence from the past to the present to the future. Typically, historicist thought linearized time and marginalized space by positing the existence of temporal “stages” of development, anticipating modernization theory by more than a century. Historicism tended to portray the past as a progressive ascent from savagery to civilization, a trend made most explicit in British Whiggish accounts of history. This maneuver robbed the understanding of social change of any sense of contingency, framing the past as a train of events leading inevitably to the present. For the French utopian thinker Condorcet, for example, there were 10 distinct periods ranging from savagery to rule by science. Reading progress into the future, historians such as Herbert Spencer tended to portray history as an inexorable linear movement from simplicity to complexity, from primitiveness to civilization, from darkness to light.

In the same vein, historicists such as Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and Arnold Toynbee offered sweeping teleological accounts of world history that paid little attention to space, human consciousness, or the contingency of social life. In his formulation, for example, Hegel transformed the ancient doctrine of perpetual change into a doctrine of the development of rational consciousness. Time, in this view, is not simply a measure of change but is synonymous with change, a view that became widely popular in 19th-century historical scholarship. Hegel's work turned attention from eternal Platonic ideals to the concrete specifics of historical circumstances, even if the causal motor he attributed to this, the transcendent world spirit of reason, was itself profoundly Platonic in inspiration. Hegel specified three phases in history: (1) despotisms, in which very few were free (when the world geist was centered on the Middle East); (2) oligarchies, in which some were free (when the geist centered on Asia); and (3) democracies, in which most were free (when the geist had shifted to Europe). His work valorized the nation-state as the embodiment of the world spirit, culminating in the apex of Prussia. Marx, too, engaged in this practice by categorizing the historical record in a series of modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism) that unfolded in the strict, unyielding course of history. Like other Enlightenment intellectuals, Marx, too, stressed the progressive character of history. This notion deeply influenced many historians, especially German historians, in the late [Page 1434]19th and early 20th centuries and had linkages to related schools of thought such as diffusionism.

...