historical knowledge

historicism

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

philosopher

university professor

Johns Hopkins University

innovator in the field of

philosophy

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is an approach to history which rejects the view that historical events can be grasped apart from their broader context.

Maurice Mandelbaum, in what must now be regarded as the most comprehensive philosophical analysis of the term, defines 'historicism' as a demand that 'we reject the view that historical events have an individual character which can be grasped apart from viewing them as embedded within a pattern of development': History, Man, and Reason: Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, 1971), 42-43. Mandelbaum denies, however, that historicism is either a Weltanschauung or an ideology, much less a philosophical position. Historicism is rather, he argues, a 'methodological belief concerning explanation and evaluation,' which holds that 'an adequate under-standing of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained by considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development' {ibid.). Historicism is thus, by Mandelbaum's lights, a theory of value linked with some version of geneticism. Nonetheless, his objections to it are substantially the same as Popper's. Historicist err by conceptualizing history as a 'stream' of development, rather than as 'a very complex web whose individual strands have separate though interlacing histories' (ibid.). (H whyte)

Maurice MandelbaumThinkers

Maurice Mandelbaum