Historicism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Historicism maintains that all human thought rests on indemonstrable presuppositions that are unknown to the thinker—presuppositions that vary from one historical epoch to another. It is a powerful paradigm that underlies much of social and political inquiry since the beginning of the twentieth century. In political theory, historicism is evident in the rejection of natural right or rational norms in favor of a relativist theory of values. In the history of political philosophy, it is via the belief that all previous universal statements about the nature of politics and of the good society should be traced back to particular social situations in which these statements were made. In political science, critique of behavioral political science for ignoring value judgments in favor of allegedly objective study of facts is another example of expressions of, or developments influenced by, historicism.

The first philosopher who insisted on the dependence of philosophy on history was Georg Hegel, but he was not a historicist. In contrast with historicism, Hegel believed that at one moment in time, history had revealed the absolute truth. The origin of historicism can be better traced to the German historical school of law, which developed as a reaction to the attempt to impose the Napoleonic code on German territories in the early nineteenth century. According to the proponents of this school, modern natural right teaching is too abstract and therefore not applicable to every place; the true norms are those discovered through studying the history of a people. The hope that one can discover valid but historically relative norms, however, was eventually abandoned because it rested on assumptions—the belief that historical peoples are natural wholes or the belief in laws of historical evolution; these assumptions were not supported by an unbiased study of history.

Further, the study of history made it clear that the particular norms from the past always had a reference to universal principles and no universal principle can oblige one to accept the norms of every historical community. Although scholars continued to believe that history, and not unhistorical philosophy, was the door that gave access to humankind’s true situation, it became evident in the course of the nineteenth century that history cannot provide a substitute for universal principles. The thinker who first saw clearly that the modern turn to history leads to nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche, who described the fluidity of all concepts as a deadly truth in his Use and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874).

Since historicism denies both the notion of progress and the possibility of discovering a permanent truth in the past, the basis of historicism is a historical critique of human thought showing, first, that all “advances” in human thought occurred at the expense of forgetting important insights and, second, that earlier human thought could not, in principle, anticipate possibilities that were developed later. The first such philosophical-historical critique was Nietzsche’s teaching of the human mind as not a mirror of reality, but a complicated expression of a basic instinct of life, which he called the will to power. Nietzsche, however, wavered between presenting his doctrine merely as his interpretation of reality and as a trans historical insight into the nature of reality.

The most thoroughgoing historicism emerged in the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, by rejecting the naturalistic interpretation of Nietzsche’s teaching, broke with the metaphysical tradition going back to Plato. Instead of giving another answer to the question of what is being, Heidegger’s confrontation with the tradition of Western philosophy led to the conclusion that being is fundamentally elusive. According to Heidegger, the history of Western thought has proved to be a series of attempts to understand various different beings while becoming increasingly forgetful of the problem of being. Technological progress, then, has been made at the expense of forgetfulness of a fundamental problem. Since philosophy or science as the pursuit of knowledge assumes the world is fundamentally intelligible—an assumption that historicism maintains erroneous—philosophy or science tends to identify the world with what is intelligible and, therefore, it tends to dogmatically disregard everything that resists being made into an object. From the historicist viewpoint, philosophy or science impoverishes the world instead of truly clarifying it.

Although not all forms of historicism are indebted to Heidegger, doubts about the modern science’s capacity for understanding and guiding human life seems to be the common motive that animates historicism in general. On the other hand, resistance to historicism in various quarters has resulted from the persistent power of natural science, or the connection between human life and the natural mechanism supporting it; the evidence that there is a permanent structure underlying the variety of human languages; and renewed arguments in favor of the necessity and meaningfulness of the question of the good society. Nonetheless, by insisting on the perspectival character of all human thought, and denying that there can ever be a view from nowhere, historicism remains one of the powerful intellectual orientations of late modernity.

Bibliography:

Collingwood, Robin George. The Idea of History. Edited by Jan Van der Dussen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962.
Miller, Eugene. “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry.” American Political Science Review, 66 (1972): 796–817.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.
Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

This example Historicism Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.