Maurice Mandelbaum on history, historicism, and critical reason: Answering the destructive gestalt of twentieth-century intellectual crisis with the constructive gestalt of critical-realist reason

Although he maintained a consistent stance of clear-eyed analytical rigor and sober philosophical distance, Maurice Mandelbaum’s thinking was deeply marked by the multiple, convergent crises of the first half of the twentieth century. This impact was most evident in his response to the cumulative pattern of intellectual and socio-political shock-waves lumped under the expansive label “the crisis of historicism.” Many commentators at the time distilled the spiraling crises and amplifying aftershocks of the first four decades of the twentieth century under this resonant rubric. As an ensemble epochal concept, it persisted over decades as a constellational – or gestalt-like – term for an ominous gestalt-like crisis: it was a relational configuration of multiple crises happening in history but also a crisis about the status of history itself as a form of meaning and intelligibility.