Historicism

Historicism is an approach to understanding social, cultural, philosophical, and historical phenomena in terms of their historical development. It emphasizes that ideas, institutions, and values are best understood by examining the historical processes through which they appeared and developed. Historicism is applied in disciplines including philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, and literary studies. It is often contrasted with, but may also complement, different approaches, such as functionalism, which explain phenomena in terms of the functions they perform rather than their historical development. The term was introduced in the late eighteenth century and has acquired several distinct meanings over time. Nowadays, historicism encompasses a variety of philosophical and scholarly traditions, including Hegelian historicism, anthropological historicism, New Historicism, and Protestant historicist interpretation of biblical prophecy, and has been particularly associated with thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Franz Boas. Historicism has been the subject of extensive philosophical debate. Karl Popper used the term to describe theories that seek laws of historical development capable of predicting the course of history, arguing that such approaches encourage historical determinism and threaten the open society. Other critics, including Leo Strauss, have challenged historicism for its implications for historical explanation, political philosophy, and objectivity. Art historian David Summers, building on the work of E. H. Gombrich, defines historicism negatively, writing that it posits "that laws of history are formulatable and that in general the outcome of history is predictable," adding that historicism poses "the idea that history is a universal matrix prior to events, which are simply placed in order within that matrix by the historian." This approach, he writes, "seems to make the ends of history visible, thus to justify the liquidation of groups seen not to have a place in the scheme of history" and has led to the "fabrication of some...