Historicism
The New Historicism
The so-called new historicism, popularized since 1980, goes back at least to 1942, when Croce wrote that "The New Historicism accepts, extends, and applies Vico's principle that men know only what they do." The newer New Historicism, though avoiding philosophical claims, likewise turns, as Vico had done, to cultural forms, especially literature and art, to reveal underlying interests and power structures and to penetrate to inarticulate levels and marginal groups of society. In general, this New Historicism was part of the linguistic and textualist turn taken by history and the human sciences, including philosophy, in the past generation; and so were the closely allied innovationist movements that call themselves "the new cultural history" and "a new philosophy of history." Despite attempts to deprecate the Old Historicism on ideological as well as methodological and terminological grounds, the New Historicism shared or inherited some of the same assumptions and goals and in a long perspective forms part of the same story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bambach, Charles R. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Croce, Benedetto. History as the Story of Liberty. Translated by Sylvia Sprigge. New York: W. W. Norton, 1941.
——. History, Its Theory and Practice. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. New York, 1960.
Heussi, Karl. Die Krisis des Historismus. Tübingen: Mohr, 1932.
Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.
Mannheim, Karl. "Historicism." In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Paul Kecskemeti. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
Meinecke, Friedrich. Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. Translated by J. E. Anderson. London: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
Roberts, David. Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Thaden, Edward C. The Rise of Historicism in Russia. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Historismus und seine Probleme. Tübingen, 1922.
——. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Translated by Olive Wyon. New York: Harper, 1960.
Donald R. Kelley
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Heterodyne to Hydrazoic acidHistoricism - The Errors Of Historicism, The New Historicism, Bibliography