HISTORIOGRAPHY, HISTORICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

• What is the relation between these bodies of thought about the writing of history? We should begin by asking the basic question; what is historiography?
  THE CONCEPT OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
  When historians discuss methodological issues in their research, they more commonly refer to “historiography” and not even “philosophy of history”. In its most general sense, the term historiography, refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. Every intellectual practice is guided by a set of standards about how to proceed. Also, experts evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets these standards. So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. As this is true for theatre and literature, it is also true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part, the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing.
  Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. So, a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry.
  Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So, discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school.
  A full historiographical “scan” of a given historian might include questions like these; what methods of discovery does he/she use? What rhetorical and persuasive goals does he/she pursue? What models of explanation? What paradigm of presentation? What standards of style and rhetoric? What interpretive assumptions?
  
  
  THE CONCEPT OF HISTORICISM
              Historicism (also known as Historism) is the idea that there is an organic (a living) succession of developments and that some local conditions influence these results in a decisive way. Historicism recognizes the historical character of all human existence, but views history not as an integrated system but as a scene in which a diversity of human wills express themselves. Historicism holds that all historical knowledge is relative to the standpoint of the historian. The philosopher Karl Popper has objected to Historicism on the grounds that it leads to an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history, and therefore destroys the democratic responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society, and hence leads to Totalitarianism. 
  •  Types of Historicism
  The term "historicism" is used in several different fields of study (including philosophy, anthropology, and theology) to indicate some widely differing lines of thought:
         i.          Hegelian Historicism
  Is the position, adopted by G. W. F. Hegel, that all human societies and all human activities (such as science, art or philosophy) are defined by their history, and that their essence can be sought only through understanding it. Hegel further argued that the history of any such human endeavour not only builds upon, but also reacts against, what has gone before (a position he developed from his famous dialectic teachings of thesis, antithesis and synthesis). According to Hegel, to understand why a person is the way he is, you must put that person in a society; and to understand that society, you must understand its history, and the forces that shaped it. He is famously quoted as claiming that "Philosophy is the history of philosophy" i.e. philosophy is a by-product of its history.
        ii.          Biblical Historicism
  Is a Protestant theological belief that the fulfilment of biblical prophecy has taken place throughout history and continues to take place today (as opposed to other beliefs which limit the time-frame of prophecy fulfilment to the past, or to the future). In essence, prophecy spontaneously repeats itself.
      iii.          Anthropological Historicism
  This is associated with the empirical social sciences and particularly with the work of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858 - 1942). It combines diffusionism with historical particularism. Diffusionism is the idea that all of culture and civilization was developed only once in ancient Egypt and then diffused (spread) throughout the rest of the world through migration and colonization. Historical particularism is the idea that one has to carry out detailed regional studies of individual cultures to discover the distribution of culture traits, and to understand the individual processes of culture change at work.
      iv.          New Historicism
  This is the name given to a movement which holds that each epoch of mankind has its own knowledge system, with which individuals are unavoidably entangled. Accordingly, the argument is that all questions asked must be settled within the cultural and social context of the epoch in which they are raised, and that answers cannot be found by appeal to some external truth.
  
  
  THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
  The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the past forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is therefore not surprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts to examine history itself and the nature of historical knowledge.
  These reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called “philosophy of history”. This work is heterogeneous and complex, comprising analyses and arguments of idealists, positivists, logicians, theologians, and others on individual issues. Given the plurality of voices within the “philosophy of history,” it is impossible to give one definition of the field that suits all these approaches.
  Still, we can usefully think of philosophers' writings about history as clustering around several large questions, involving metaphysics, hermeneutics, epistemology, and historicism: (1) What does history consist of; individual actions, social structures, periods and regions, civilizations, large causal processes, divine intervention? (2) Does history as a whole have meaning, structure, or direction, beyond the individual events and actions that make it up? (3) What is involved in our knowing, representing, and explaining history? (4) To what extent is human history constitutive of the human present? And so on.
  Since history is the study of the past in all its forms, Philosophy of history examines the theoretical foundations of the practice, application, and social consequences of history and historiography. It is similar to other infrastructure of disciplines – such as philosophy of science or philosophy of religion, in two respects. Firstly, philosophy of history utilizes the best theories in the core areas of philosophy like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to address questions:
  •   About the nature of the past and how we come to know it?
  •   Whether the past proceeds in a random way or is guided by some order principle?
  •   How best to explain or describe the events and objects of the past?
  •   How historical events can be considered causally efficacious on one another?
  •   How to judge testimony and evidence?
  Secondly, as is the case with the other infrastructure of disciplines, philosophy of history investigates problems that are unique to its subject matter. History examines not what things are so much as how they came to be. History focuses on the particular rather than the general. Its movers are most often people who act for a variety of personal inner motives rather than external physical forces. The facts of history are no longer observable directly, but must be mediated by evidence. These problems and many more that are specific to the past have been studied and debated by philosophers for as long as philosophy itself has existed.
  
  
  
  
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