The Inheritance of Historicism

Abstract

Historicism is a term, used today in two main senses: a feature or principle of historical consciousness and an intellectual movement of the 19th century, depending mainly on German romanticism and developing an Historik with the clear differentiation of methods of natural sciences and historical (or cultural) sciences. This opposition was negated by the development of historical science. Social history uses a lot of methods of other social sciences. The idea of “total history represents the epistemological aim of historians. But history is a descriptive and interpretative discipline, which uses all this methods without loosing the specific outlook or way of thinking, which was created by the historicism.