A Collapse of Trust

Reconceptualizing the Crisis of Historicism

Bibliographic Data

ID4946013
AuthorsHugh Paul (0000-0002-9365-6329, Leiden University, corresponding author), Sherman Paul, Herman Paul (1Department of History, Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Year2008
Volume2
Issue1
Pages63-82
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Philosophy of History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1872-261X • E-ISSN: 1872-2636
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/187226308x268863
OpenAlexW2103547182
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This essay redefines the crisis of historicism as a collapse of trust. Following Friedrich Jaeger, it suggests that this crisis should be understood, not as a crisis caused by historicist methods, but as a crisis faced by the classical historicist tradition of Ranke. The "nihilism" and "moral relativism" feared by Troeltsch's generation did not primarily refer to the view that moral universals did not exist; rather, they expressed that the historical justification of bildungsbürgerliche values offered by classical historicism did no longer work. In Niklas Luhmann's vocabulary, this is to say that moral values could no longer be trusted on historical grounds. But when the "reduction of complexity" offered by classical historicism collapsed, Troeltsch's generation faced a justification problem: what other modes of justification, if any at all, were available in a time of increasing secularization and growing feelings of discontinuity with the past? In identifying the crisis of historicism with this moral justification problem, this essay helps explain why such debts of despair could be reached in the early-twentieth-century disputes over historicism

Epistemology · Historicism · Pluralism (philosophy · Relativism · Central European national history · Chinese history and philosophy · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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