Historicism

Historicism is a school of thought that considers all reality as the product of a historical evolution. From the XIX century, among the authors of different tendencies that can be considered historicists are Leopold von Ranke (History of the Latin and Germanic peoples, 1824), Karl Marx (historical materialism), Benedetto Croce (absolute historicism) or Antonio Gramsci. He conceives of being essentially as a becoming, a temporary process, which cannot be captured by the reason. He conceives of becoming as history and uses more the science of the spirit. According to historicism, philosophy is a complement to history. His task is to carry out a theory of history. This is intended to carry out a systematic exploration of historical facts.^{[citation required]}

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the most important thinker of German historicism, summed up the concept by stating: "What man is, he experiences only through his history."

Background

The so-called Historical School of Law recognizes as antecedents the legal ideas of the Greek sophists in antiquity, and those of Giambattista Vico in the modern age. The aforementioned school reached its highest development in Germany with the works of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Georg Friedrich Puchta and Gustav von Hugo. Before, in England, Edmund Burke in his essay Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) had harshly criticized this political movement, pointing out the need to inspire all social action in history, habit and religion. The methodology of historicism indicates that philosophy is a complement to history. In turn, historicism advocates an active vision of history, based on the centrality of the individual and his cultural ecumene in the understanding of past events.

Objectives

Your task is to carry out a theory of history. This is intended to carry out a systematic exploration of historical facts. Scientific, artistic, technical, political or religious facts can be considered historical facts because they have importance for the life of man. Historicism maintains that there should not be a historical theory with previous schemes that imposes on the past. Ranke postulates that it must be the past that speaks; the historian has no mouth. He reveals a method, the philological one, which consists in the recourse to official written documents.

In 1824 Ranke published "History of the Roman and Germanic Peoples (1494-1514)". This is the first book of the historicist type of history, and it will include the ideological program of that new history. The content analyzes a conflict between the French and Spanish monarchy over the territories of Italy, Ranke's thesis is that Europe arises as the conflict between the Romanesque and Germanic peoples. The important thing about the book is the method, the approach that he gives to the matter. That is why he publishes an appendix where he exposes his methods, while criticizing previous authors who had written about that history, for example Guicciardini, who in his History of Florence does something that is untenable, which is to resort to the novel, since Ranke believes that you have to go to the documents to know for sure what had happened (the story's main source is having an ideological idea)

Principal exponents

Among the main exponents we highlight writers such as Benedetto Croce, who also stood out as a historian and politician. Croce's theory is strongly historicist and influenced authors such as Antonio Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile. According to his theory, history also has a precise epistemological horizon, because in the first place it is knowledge, and contemporary knowledge, for which reason History is not the past, but is alive as soon as its study is motivated by an interest that arises in the present. Historiography is also useful to understand the deeper rationality of the process of the spirit, not being an abstract knowledge, but rather precise facts and experiences. Historical knowledge illuminates us about the genesis of the facts. Another author who stands out is Giambattista Vico, Neapolitan lawyer and philosopher of history. He is notable for his concept of truth as a result of doing (verum ipsum factum). All his doctrine, all his points of view regarding knowledge and history, are elaborated in opposition to Cartesianism —as has been said—, and to the conception of his time that made physics the paradigmatic science. His approach according to which man can know, properly, what is the product of his doing, leads him to maintain that Nature, a divine work, can be thought, but not "understood." Only God, who has made everything, can have a full understanding of everything.