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Thinking about "historism" or "historicism" today offers an unusual challenge.¹ On the one hand, in the aftermath of discussions reaching across two centuries, intelligible use of the term is impeded by a daunting array of contradictory and multivalent connotations. Historism is associated with belief in the rational necessity of "progress, " the search for ,,scientifica laws of development, emphasis upon the particular and nonrepeatable in human affairs, or normative affmation of the value of historical knowledge. For some writers historism is associared with virtually any notion expressing what has been called "the twilight of all absolutes and the vanishing horizons of meaning" (Meyerhoff, p. 22). For others, such as Karl Popper, the ,,historicism⁶" referred to is quite specifically "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 ,lawsL or the ,trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (1964, p. 3). Such views resonate with earlier commentaries on history and historism, as in Dilthey's remark: "As in the natural sciences, so also in history, a regularity in the pattern of interactions makes prediction and intervention based on knowledge possible" (1962, p. 143). The possibility of predictive knowledge is quite at odds, of course, with the commonplace notion that the "historian"ls business is to know the past, not to know the future" (Collingwood, p. 54). or with the postulate, as Max Weber put it, that "we seek knowledge of an historical phenomenon, meaning by historical: significant in its individuality (Eigenart) " (1949, p. 78). It is the presence of such contrasting notions and outright contraditions that have called the meaning of ,historismu into question and in some respects have challenged its reputation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-57801-4_15

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