Historicism

Herman Paul is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is the author of Key Issues in Historical Theory (2015) and Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (2011). Adriaan van Veldhuizen is Assistant Professor in Historical Theory at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he coordinates the PhD program in history and plays a leading role in the research project, “The Demands of our Time: Epochal Thinking from 1800 to the Present.” He published a Dutch-language book on the history of socialism and several articles on historical theory, most recently in History and Theory.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsBiographical NotesIntroduction: Historicism as a Travelling ConceptHerman Paul and Adriaan van VeldhuizenI: Travels through Time1 Historicism through the Lens of Anti-Historicism: The Case of Modern Jewish HistoryDavid N. Myers2 Historicism as a Modern Theological ProblemGary DorrienII Travels Through Space3 Historicism and Positivism in Sociology: Weimar Germany to the Contemporary United StatesGeorge Steinmetz4 Historicism’s Arrival in the United States: Two Routes from GermanyAdriaan van VeldhuizenIII Travel Companions5 The Specter of Historicism: A Discourse of FearHerman Paul6 Thinking in Uncertain Times: Raymond Aron and the Politics of HistoricismSophie Marcotte-ChenardIV Travels Beyond Historicism7 Friedrich Meinecke’s Historism or the Defeat of German HistoricismAudrey Borowski 8 Karl Löwith’s Historicization of HistoricismBruno Godefroy

In perpetual crisis, the polysemic concept of “historicism” has relentlessly moved from discipline to discipline, culture to culture, unsettling all efforts to wrest absolute values from the flux of relativism. The remarkable essays collected by Paul and van Veldhuizen follow its fortunes in historical, social scientific, philosophical and theological—both Christian and Jewish—contexts, as well as across national boundaries in Germany, America, France and Holland.