Philosophy of History before Historicism

Abstract

The dominant philosophy of history of the nineteenth century is so familiar to scholars nowadays that a few summary remarks will suffice to say what it was. Basic to it was the recognition that historical events should be studied not, as heretofore, as data for a moral or political science, but as historical phenomena. In practice, this was manifested by the emergence of history as an independent academic discipline, in fact as well as name. In theory, it found expression in two propositions: that what happened must be explained in terms of when it happened, and that there exists a science with logical procedures peculiar to itself, the science of history. Neither proposition was new except in the insistence that was placed on it, and this insistence is seen in the doctrinal exaggeration of both. The converse of the first was held to be that the history of anything constitutes a sufficient explanation of it; and those who imputed a logical order to the chronological order of events saw the science of history as a science capable of predicting the future of society. That the term for the first of these doctrines, historism, has tended to become absorbed, in English usage, by the term properly applicable to the second alone, historicism, may merely illustrate the difficulty of assimilating to other languages what were German terms for predominantly German schools of thought.' Or it may attest to a realization that these two doctrines are related, as indeed they were in Hegel's thought. In any case, it shows, as simplification often does, how widespread interest in historicism in all its aspects has become. By contrast, we know very little about philosophy of history in the cen-