ABSTRACT
My objectives in this chapter are to introduce historicist interpretivism through an examination of its key theoreticians, the features that make it philosophically and methodologically distinct, and the issues that might define its future directions. The first thing to do is to be clear about terminology. The term ‘historicism’ can be used to capture a number of philosophical understandings of, and methodological approaches to, the human sciences. It is most commonly invoked to capture and characterize the intellectual identity of a number of theoreticians writing since the Scottish Enlightenment, for whom the nature of social explanation is ineluctably historical (Iggers 1995). In the plainest terms, the viewpoint that historicist approaches to the social world share is a rejection of any purportedly universal or immutable explanatory laws pertaining to human behaviour, of any claims about understanding that appeal beyond a historically bounded notion of reality. In this respect, historicism can be seen– in one form or another– in the writings of all those philosophers committed to Wilhelm Dilthey’s influential distinction between the human and natural sciences. According to this distinction, while the latter domain invokes generalized laws of cause and effect, the former draws necessarily instead on a historically located conception of the human mind (Dilthey 1991). In place of claims about the universal or immutable, historicists insist upon the local, contextual, and intentional when seeking to understand and therefore explain human action.
