Historicism

Historicism is a term Karl R. Popper's approaches to the philosophy of history especially in Hegel and the historical materialism of Karl Marx.

For Popper, historicism is a misconception, which is based on the idea of ​​historical necessity of laws of the historical process and therefore making historical predictions goal of scientific knowledge.

In post-structuralism, the concept of New Historicism occurs.

Variants

Popper's critique of historicism

The historicist wants to understand the meaning of the game, which is listed on the historical stage by trying to find the laws of historical development. And if this is successful, he can thus predict future developments. He can then establish the policy on a sound basis and to provide practical guidance as to what policy actions are likely to be successful and which are not.

What Popper calls a " prophecy " is an unconditional forecast with technologically uncontrollable boundary conditions. A "technological forecasting ", however, is a conditional forecast with technologically influenced boundary conditions. A " prophecy 'arises when a prediction" absolutely " will that is independent of boundary conditions made ​​. So a prophecy among propose a logically necessary element to a scientific prediction.

The historicist is, however, forced to make Unconditional predictions because he strives for long-term forecasts for companies, namely for a " historical forecast on a grand scale ". However, this was not possible for companies, because companies do not constitute isolated, stationary and cyclic systems.

Finally, Popper asserts, he has succeeded to provide a rigorous refutation of historicism: he has shown that it is impossible for strictly logical reasons to predict the future course of history with rational methods.

His train of thought summarizes Popper himself in the following five steps together:

Popper himself claimed to have done with his historicism criticism the essential core of Hegel's philosophy of history or historical materialism. Whether Popper make sure that scientifically adequate reconstruction of the relevant theories really succeeded is debatable. Walter Kaufmann criticized Popper violations against even simple scientific citations. Moreover, in principle, to ask whether Poppers approach here is consistent with the rules of his own methodology.

Anthropological historicism

Franz Boas developed the variant of the historical particularism for anthropology. Boas championed a vision of culture circles including the religious, historical, linguistic and artistic aspects. Particularly special cultural histories smaller regions are emphasized, to be joined by linguistic and ethnological studies. Boas thus rejected the theory of evolution, because there is no generally - normative development spectrum, but each region and each culture requires different adjustments. Boas and Malinowski is considered next Luschan as a pioneer of modern anthropology.

New Historicism

Since 1950, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault argued that each era possesses a more or less completely its own system of knowledge. Many post - structuralists share the view that any question can be answered only in their own cultural and social context. Answers can not be found in terms of eternal truths. Only those still existing texts, objects, or other traditions are recognized as meaningful rather. This school of thought is often referred to as New Historicism.