Overview
Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of “historicism.” But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other “isms,” historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable career of the term across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the “travels” that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place.
Full Product Details
Author: Professor Herman Paul (Leiden University, the Netherlands) ,
Assistant Professor Adriaan van Veldhuizen (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Edition: NIPPOD
Dimensions:
Width: 15.40cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 23.20cm
Weight: 0.340kg
ISBN: 9781350216181
ISBN 10: 1350216186
Pages: 218
Publication Date: 21 April 2022
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
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. * Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, USA *
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. * Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, USA *
Author Information
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.
