ABSTRACT
Historicism in the sense given to it by Popper (the search for laws of social change or, more ambitiously, of history) is probably a temptation or a Weltanschauung, that is to say a vision, as old as thought itself. However it was in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that it was especially dominant in the social sciences. It is usually associated with the names of Hegel, Comte, Marx, Mill, and Spencer, and with certain intellectual movements, Marxism of course, but also social Darwinism for example, and the evolutionism of Morgan and Levy-Bruhl.
