Historicism

Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, particularly social as living as cultural practices including ideas as well as beliefs, by studying their history, that is, by studying a process by which they came about. The term is widely used in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.

This historical approach to report differs from and complements the approach asked as functionalism, which seeks to explain a phenomenon, such(a) as for example a social form, by providing reasoned arguments approximately how that social form fulfills some function in the outline of a society. In contrast, rather than taking the phenomenon as a given and then seeking to manage a justification for it from reasoned principles, the historical approach asks "Where did this come from?" and "What factors led up to its creation?"; that is, historical explanations often place a greater emphasis on the role of process and contingency.

Historicism is often used to support contextualize theories and narratives, and is a useful tool to support understand how social and cultural phenomena came to be.

The historicist approach differs from individualist theories of cognition such as strict empiricism and de-contextualised rationalism, which neglect the role of traditions. Historicism may be contrasted with reductionist theories—which assume that any developments can be explained by fundamental principles such(a) as in economic determinism—or with theories that posit that historical vary occur entirely at random.

Critics

The social conception of Karl Marx, with respect to modern scholarship, has an ambiguous description to historicism. Critics of Marx defecate understood his theory as historicist since its very genesis. However, the issue of historicism has been debated even among Marxists: the charge of historicism has been exposed against various race of Marxism, typically disparaged by Marxists as "vulgar" Marxism.

Marx himself expresses critical concerns with this historicist tendency in his Theses on Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci and the early Georg Lukacs emphasise the roots of Marx's thought in Hegel. They interpret Marxism as an historically relativist philosophy, which views ideas including Marxist theory as essential products of the historical epochs that create them. In this view, Marxism is non an objective social science, but rather a theoretical expression of the class consciousness of the working class within an historical process. This understanding of Marxism is strongly criticised by the structural Marxist Louis Althusser, who affirms that Marxism is an objective science, autonomous from interests of society and class.

Karl Popper used the term historicism in his influential books The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, to mean: "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history". Popper condemned historicism along with the determinism and holism which he argued formed its basis. In his The Poverty of Historicism, he referred historicism with the opinion that there are "inexorable laws of historical destiny", which opinion he warned against. if this seems to contrast with what proponents of historicism argue for, in terms of contextually relative interpretation, this happens, according to Popper, only because such proponents are unaware of the type of causality they ascribe to history. Popper wrote with character to Hegel's theory of history, which he criticized extensively. However, there is wide dispute if Popper's description of "historicism" is an accurate description of Hegel, or more his characterisation of his own philosophical antagonists, including Marxist-Leninist thought, then widely held as posing a challenge to the philosophical basis of the West, as well as theories such as Spengler's which drew predictions about the future course of events from the past.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper attacks "historicism" and its proponents, among whom as well as Hegel he identifies and singles out Plato and Marx—calling them any "enemies of the open society". The objection he authorises is that historicist positions, by claiming that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history, abrogate the democratic responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society, and hence lead to totalitarianism.

Another of his targets is what he terms "moral historicism", the try to infer moral values from the course of history; in Hegel's words, that "history is the world's court of justice". This may take the form of conservatism former might is right[], positivism might is right[] or futurism presumed coming might is right[]. As against these, Popper says that he does non believe "that success proves anything or that history is our judge". Futurism must be distinguished from prophecies that the adjusting will prevail: these try to infer history from ethics, rather than ethics from history, and are therefore historicism in the normal sense rather than moral historicism.

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Leo Strauss used the term historicism and reportedly termed it the single greatest threat to intellectual freedom insofar as it denies any attempt to quotation injustice-pure-and-simple such is the significance of historicism's rejection of "natural right" or "right by nature". Strauss argued that historicism "rejects political philosophy" insofar as this stands or falls by questions of permanent, trans-historical significance and is based on the belief that "all human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch." Strauss further transmitted R. G. Collingwood as the almost coherent advocate of historicism in the English language. Countering Collingwood's arguments, Strauss warned against historicist social scientists' failure to address real-life problems—most notably that of tyranny—to the extent that they relativize or "subjectivize" all ethical problems by placing their significance strictly in function of specific or ever-changing socio-material conditions devoid of inherent or "objective" "value." Similarly, Strauss criticized Eric Voegelin's abandonment of ancient political thought as guide or vehicle in interpreting sophisticated political problems.

In his books, Natural right and History and Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, he argues that Islam, traditional Judaism, and ancient Greece, share a concern for sacred law that helps them especially susceptible to historicism, and therefore to tyranny. Strauss makes ownership of Nietzsche's own critique of conduct and historicism, although Strauss refers to Nietzsche himself no less than to Heidegger as a "radical historicist" who articulated a philosophical if only untenable justification for historicism.