Historicism Quotes

“Periodization”

“historicism”

“Wikipedia: Historicism”

“How can historicism consistently exempt itself from its own verdict that all human thought is historical?”

“History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures.”

“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.”

“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”

“Historicism runs counter to the specific capacity of the literary work to escape the limits of historical time, to allow for the cross-generational flourishing of tradition, and open the present to a multidimensional temporality.”

“At every turn, the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by the standards of a later time, yet in every time there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by name.”

“It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.”

“Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. [...] The unending quest of historians for understanding the past — that is, "revisionism" — is what makes history vital and meaningful.”

“Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.”

“The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense.”

“If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.”

“Die Natur dieser Traurigkeit wird deutlicher, wenn man die Frage aufwirft, in wen sich denn der Geschichtsschreiber des Historismus eigentlich einfühlt. Die Antwort lautet unweigerlich in den Sieger. Die jeweils Herrschenden sind aber die Erben aller, die je gesiegt haben. Die Einfühlung in den Sieger kommt demnach den jeweils Herrschenden allemal zugut.”

“Hayek ripped G. W. F. Hegel in The Counter-Revolution of Science’s third part for his “historicism”—the idea, in Hayek’s terminology, that history moves in set and predictable stages. He considered this idea fatally flawed and societies that were based on it to be unsuccessful, unproductive, and unfree.
Historicism denies free will. The future is what we make of it.”

“Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

“The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

“The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. ... I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time.”

“History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned—could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change.”