Talk:Historicism

message: What is that? There is no link and no google search thing for it. 89.150.118.208 (talk) 13:20, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: idealistic fallacy

message: The page is currently devoted entirely the notion of "historicism" as used by Karl Popper. There is another sense of "historicism" which is completely different, advocated by German theorists and thought to have started with Meineke and Ranke and the like (it is in fact almost completely anti-Hegelian). My question is whether or not this distinction should be attempted to be made into this article, or whether a separate article should be held for each? They are completely unrelated as far as I can tell, but are both very interesting and important in histiographical studies. --Fastfission 16:51, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ranke's aim was to reconstruct the unique periods of the past as they actually were and to avoid injecting the history of former times with the spirit of the present; this approach to historiography is known as historicism.
Is that a good statement of the other sense of "historicism" to which you are referring?  If so, it doesn't seem completely different from the need for historical context mentioned in the New historicism and Modern historicism sections of the article.
So perhaps there is after all a connection which can be exploited to link the use of the term in Ranke's sense into the existing article.  -- JimR 02:39, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes.  Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the  link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to).  The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. -- JimR 06:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anglo-Saxon v. German "historicism"

message: This section of the article tells us what Popper think Historicism is, and that the writer of the article tends to think his definition should not be applied to Hegel, but we never got to actually learn what Popper's "attack on historicism" actually was. Put differently, there's no connection between the title of the section and its content. 192.115.133.141 12:35, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point!  I've attempted a description of Popper's attack, but it's many years since I read The Open Society, so if anyone has a copy handy, please quote from it (sparingly under fair use), and/or correct or neutralise my point of view.  -- JimR 17:14, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popper's attack on historicism 

message: Could a direct citation or better yet, the german of the given Hegel quotation be provided?  The very article seems to be all over the internet yet this quotation is cited nowhere and my searches for the German have resulted in rather different but similar lines.
(129.206.196.162, 9 November 2005)
: Put on a citation needed sign so that mirrors will be able to recognise the problem, and hopefully someone who knows where to find the quote. Ansell 04:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation for Hegel quotation? 

message: Who is the Burke referred to alongside Tocqueville, Augustine, and Mill? Can someone else disambiguate as necessary, as I'm not familiar with the subject so may well choose the wrong one.--94.197.161.111 (talk) 20:06, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It can be none other than Edmund Burke. The "mill" in question is undoubtedly John Stuart Mill. The article could really use some citations, but that is another matter. --Saddhiyama (talk) 20:13, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: "Burke" - who?

message: I would add Vico as the initiator of the concept.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by FixMacs (talk • contribs) 23:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add Vico 

message: "Historicism is a mode of thinking in which the basic significance of specific social context--e.g., time, place, local conditions--is central; whereas the notion of fundamental generalizable immutable 'laws' in the realm of sociology/social behaviour tends to be rejected."
This is a wonderfully academic sentence. It separates a fragment by using two dashes. It parenthesizes the word "laws" so you are not sure of the meaning of the word. It uses a slash to confuse "sociology" and "social." In general, it is a marvellously obscure sentence worthy of the great Hegel himself. If the purpose of a Wikipedia article is to astound , amaze, and impress its readers, then this sentence is first–rate. If, however, the reader is looking for information, then this is not the article to read.Lestrade (talk) 13:40, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia Principle of Relativity: Bad is Good when it is compared with Very Bad.Lestrade (talk) 19:09, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: First sentence

message: I didn't think Steward was completely relativist. He did see culture as shaped by local environmental adaptations (especially subsistence, technology, and economy-- his 'culture core'), but he famously broke ties with his intellectual father (Alfred L. Kroeber) and intellectual grandfather (Franz Boas) in both his supposed ″environmental determinism″ and his embrace of White's Multilineal evolution. I'll have to look this up and update later, but I am fairly certain he was in favor of cross-cultural comparisons, as long as comprehensive work had been done on the cultures being compared. Tiredmeliorist (talk) 07:43, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Julian Steward

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: From the Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography:
1. An approach to understanding human affairs that focuses on the prior circumstances leading up to an event.
2. An approach to understanding human affairs that regards the present as the predictable outcome of past processes.
Historicism in the first sense is a deeply contextual approach to description and explanation—the opposite of reductionism and essentialism. In the second sense, historicism has been seen by some critics as a signal failing of orthodox versions of Marxism.
From the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory:
The view that past events must be understood and judged within the context of their own times. This is because, as G. W. F. Hegel argued, all societies are the product of their history. So, for example, New Historicism argues that to read Shakespeare properly one has to read it from the perspective of his peers, and see it as his original audiences did. Historicism also refers to the view that history unfolds according to certain inexorable laws, such as the economic laws of supply and demand. For this reason Marxism is often regarded as a form of historicism, though not all Marxist scholars accept this label (Louis Althusser, for one, rejects it completely). Karl Popper wrote derisive critiques of historicism, which was a codeword for Marxism for him in any case, arguing (quite mistakenly) that it is totalitarian in that it tries to describe everything that happens and in that it imposes a single narrative on the unfolding of events.
From the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology:
According to Karl Popper, historicism is ‘an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal 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’ (The Poverty of Historicism, 1957). Historicism is therefore the belief in laws of history, of social development, or of progress. Political ideologies such as fascism and communism are often said to be erected upon historicist foundations.
From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics:
Doctrine that historical events are governed by natural laws, which in turn determine social and cultural developments, beliefs, and values specific to each period of history.
From the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences:
A term with two conflicting but not strictly incompatible meanings: according to the first, historicism is a strong version of historical relativism and holds that historical eras can be understood only on their own terms. At its limit, this view challenges the validity of historical comparisons (see historical particularism). The second meaning is Karl Raimund Popper's well-known characterization of historicism as the search for social and historical laws that enable predictions about the future. Popper was critical of such ambitions and targeted in particular the scientific claims of Marxism, which he argued had been shown to be false. He also extended his critique toward a wide range of teleological theories of modernity and modernization.
From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology:
A general and increasingly ambiguous term meaning a number of different things to different people. At its heart, however, is the idea that a society and its culture exist mainly in their dynamic and developmental character. In this it gives emphasis to non‐rational behaviour, all‐round creativity, and doubts many of the beliefs inherent to a progressive view of change.
From The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:
A label which has been confusingly applied to distinguishable positions in social philosophy. It was originally used to refer to a particular conception of the aims of history which emphasized the need to recognize the essential individuality of historical phenomena; these phenomena, being expressive of human thought and feeling, required for their proper understanding an empathetic grasp of the conditions that gave them life and meaning in a social context. A wider interpretation of the term, often held to have relativist implications, involves the claim that the nature of any phenomenon can only be adequately comprehended by considering its place within a process of historical development. Thirdly, it has been employed to designate doctrines which attribute to the social sciences the role of predicting future developments on the basis of discoverable laws of historical change.
From the Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication:
1. A pejorative synonym for historical determinism or historical relativism.
2. (historism) The stance that events and/or ideas need to be interpreted within their historical context (historical contingency), or that human phenomena should be seen in terms of their historical development. Such standpoints are often framed in opposition to universalism, essentialism, and formalism. However, over-emphasis on historical variability and the uniqueness of circumstances is criticized as relativistic.
3. The hermeneutic approach in which it is argued that historical interpretation requires us to adopt the values and assumptions of the time, seeing the phenomenon in its own terms and not ours. ‘Always historicize,’ declared Fredric Jameson in 1981. Critics have either branded this approach as cultural relativism or have emphasized that interpreters cannot escape their own historical situatedness.
[4. New Historicism.]
5. In architecture and design, styles drawing inspiration from the past. The term is often used pejoratively, particularly within modernist discourse.
I can provide full citations if anybody wants to use this material. The first paragraph of the article as it stands strikes me as particularly bad. I doubt the average reader comes away from that first sentence with any idea of what "historicism" is. I think the first sentence should mimic the first from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy's entry, i.e., make it clear that there are several different definitions of "historicism". Srnec (talk) 02:00, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some definitions from OUP 

message: Historicism – Anthropology (ua.edu) may help . I am not the first to suggest that, due to differences in "historiography" hisoricism and 'anthropology' historicism, the latter deserves a page to itself FatalSubjectivities (talk) 16:44, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Anthropological historicism]] page