ABSTRACT
To compare George Orwell and Louis Althusser may, at first glance, appear surprising. The former is an outstanding novelist and a genuine politicai theorist, whose work in 1984, the year of the predicted realization of his politicai nightmare, was once more in the limelight. The latter was, before his last decade of life, an influential philosopher, who has led for decades an important but waning current of contemporary French Marxism. Historicism was in dire need of an advocate to combat the dominance of antihistoricism represented by the well-known polemical work of Karl Popper: The Poverty of Historicism. According to Alfred Stern, and several other authors, the essence of historicism resides in its questioning of “the external and supra-historical validity of scientific statements as well as of moral values.” Popper underscores the importance of social change and that of a “holistic” perception of social reality as the two theoretical pillars of historicism.
