Finding Value in the Historicist Tradition

Historicism was a popular intellectual movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It made its mark in multiple academic disciplines, including economics in the guise of the Historical School. It was especially prominent in German and other continental European intellectual environments. In the present day, as this essay shall discuss, numerous insights from the old historicist literature possess continued utility.

Historicist writings about society were heavily based on historiography. The interpretation of history was their main foundation. Their approach, therefore, was heavily empirical and not much informed by elaborate preconceived theories. To the historicists, various periods and societies were governed by distinct, cohesive “spirits” – the spirit of capitalism, for instance. They were, moreover, deeply interested in discerning historical patterns, and conceived of social realities as organically evolving.

The historicist mind frame is, perhaps, best exemplified by twentieth-century economist Werner Sombart. However, Max Weber deserves to be numbered among the great historicist thinkers as well, and is more widely remembered today. The works of these two intellectuals are perhaps the best starting point for understanding the historicist conception of society. In one scholar’s opinion, Sombart and Weber were two of the three “most eminent exponents of the ‘Youngest’ Historical School” of economics, by which Joseph Schumpeter was heavily influenced. Yet their historical approach to understanding social dynamics is applicable far beyond economics. The intellectual tradition of people like Sombart and Weber can both enhance our understanding of social processes and provide helpful normative prescriptions.

Good and Bad Philosophy of History

Karl Popper famously attacked what he called “historicism” in his treatise The Poverty of Historicism. However, what Popper was criticizing in the book was historical analysis of the kind that sought to make assured predictions about future events and saw history as progressing towards definite goals of some kind. This kind of thinking may perhaps be exemplified by Hegelian philosophy of history, which was later developed into Marxism; it tends to believe that history has something like a will of its own.

Popper was surely right to reject this way of evaluating history. The sheer uncertainty in human affairs should make one deeply skeptical of grand narratives of history which extend into the future. Experts’ inability to make reliable prognoses is by now a well-known finding. The randomness at play in history has even prompted attempts at “quantum social science,” the use of probabilistic models akin to those of quantum physics to capture the unpredictability of human behavior.

Historicism in the Weber-Sombart tradition offers a fundamentally different approach to analyzing history. This is reflected in Weber’s famous notion of the “Protestant work ethic,” which is held to have played a major role in the rise of “the spirit of capitalism.” In his book The Bourgeois, Sombart offers a lengthy rebuttal of this analysis, which Weber in turn rebuts through footnotes in later editions of his Assorted Essays on the Sociology of Religion. Yet whether Weber got the spirit of Protestantism exactly right is beside the point, all the more so since Sombart also sees a Protestant spirit at play in history; he simply disagrees that it furthered the emergence of capitalism. For him, it is more an earlier, Catholic spirit, as seen in the Italian city states, which paved the way for capitalism.

Tellingly, Weber describes the “spirit of capitalism” as a “historical individual.” He explains this term as meaning “a complex of relations in historical reality which we terminologically combine into a whole from the perspective of their cultural significance.” That phrase, “historical individual,” is deeply revealing as to the nature of Weber’s and Sombart’s historicism. These thinkers seem to view history as an ecosystem of sorts, full of highly varied “individuals,” each of which is, for instance, a certain society during a certain period of time. Now, each of these has its own internal logic, like Protestantism does, but there is not much of an overarching logic to the whole picture – definitely not enough to make confident predictions about the future.

Various commentators have placed Sombart and other historicists, particularly members of the Historical School of Economics, in some relation to Karl Marx. The two certainly had much common heritage, and Marx influenced the Historical School in various respects. A focus on historical evolution is common to both. However, Marxism’s flaws should not be attributed to the whole historicist tradition. The Marxian worldview fails for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is not historicist enough, at least in the Sombart-Weber sense. Thus, Mortin Plotnick provides the following partial summary of Sombart’s criticism of Marx:

Sombart accepts the Marxian economic interpretation of history not as an absolute universal postulate for all human history, but only as the destiny of a given epoch, as the predominant mode of behavior within the economic system of Capitalism only.

The criticism, then, is that Marx was not attentive enough to historical evolution from age to age.

(Sombart’s critique of Marxism is elaborated in A New Social Philosophy. In Weltanschauung, Science and Economy, he again takes aim at the foundation of the Marxian worldview, stressing that spirit, not material circumstances, is the primary driver of history. During successive periods of human history, prevailing attitudes towards work and the winning of sustenance were at first akin to “magic” before becoming increasingly rational; religious and political factors conditioned people’s mindset, which then governed their economic behaviors. In various works, Sombart has cited extensive historical documentation to show that the general approach to economic activity in days of yore was far less rational and far more reliant on magical thinking than it is nowadays.)

In the end, Marxism was perhaps chiefly discredited when its prophecy of deepening economic stratification was seen to have failed, with the layers of society evolving into more of a continuum than a stack of strictly delimited classes. So perhaps Sombart’s criticisms of Marxism did not sufficiently emphasise its main specific flaw. Still, he captured what is probably the main general flaw in Marxian historical analysis, namely its reductiveness. Marx selectively described the conditions which he saw in his time and erroneously extrapolated them backward and, more importantly, forward, reducing all social phenomena to economics – as seen through a flawed paradigm, no less.

A historicist in the vein of Sombart, acutely focused on the deep differences between places, peoples, and periods, would never commit this error. If social processes are so varied and mercurial, how could one presume to foresee how they will unfold decades in the future? This gets at the heart of what makes the historicist tradition, as we understand it here, so great – namely its sensitivity to the vast diversity of human social experience. More on that below.

What Shapes a Society’s Destiny?

Elsewhere, I have scathingly criticized the geopolitical theories of Alexander Dugin, that indefatigable ideologue of Russian imperialism. Dugin’s “geopolitics” and his “Eurasianist” project are in large part based on the belief that world history is determined by geography. Geography, of course, is interpreted to require the expansion of Russia’s borders inter alia. On the surface, this elevation of geography resembles the historicist mind frame. It, too, claims to discern patterns in history. It, too, compares societies to one another and views their development as steered by cohesive logics. Yet in truth, the two are fundamentally different.

The fetishization of geography runs counter to the historicist emphasis on “spirit.” A society’s spirit, its culture and institutions, tends to override geography when the two conflict. As Will and Ariel Durant reasoned, technological improvements lessen geography’s impact on human life. Preconditions for certain economic endeavors may be set by the givens of the natural environment, but it falls to inventive “leaders” and hardworking “followers” to make use of them, “and only a similar combination (as in Israel today) can make a culture take form over a thousand natural obstacles. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.”

Likewise, Sombart writes that two of the especially commercial societies which contributed to the early development of capitalism were the Lowland Scots and the Florentines – two of the “three peoples in which the ‘mercantile’ spirit blossomed first and most purely.” It does not seem to be geography which put them in this position; in fact, Sombart notes that they did not take advantage of their geographic situation: “Just like the Florentines, they [the Scots] stayed away from the sea despite being surrounded by it: they were never a seafaring nation in grand style.” This stands in stark contrast to standard geographic reductionism in the vein of Dugin, which understands mercantile culture as stemming from proximity to the sea and a resulting history of commerce.

More recently, Nathan Klarer has spotlighted Venice as “a marvel of man’s intellect” not explicable by “materialist” theories of history: “from a purely geographical perspective, Venice should not exist.”

The primacy of the spirit is reflected in historicist works, as reflected in Sombart’s criticism of Marx as excessively materialistic and insufficiently sensitive to mental factors.

The Sociological Tradition

Historicism can easily be related to a dichotomy advanced by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, though he himself does not draw the connection. Citing philosopher Roger Masters, Pinker distinguishes between “the economic tradition” and “the sociological tradition,” two rival ways of understanding society. The former, represented by thinkers from Machiavelli to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham, conceptualizes human collectives as designed through bargaining between “rational, self-interested individuals.” On the other hand, the sociological tradition views the social body as “a cohesive organic entity.” Among its promoters are “Plato, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, [and] Weber.” The author notes that the economic tradition tends to coincide with right-wing and the sociological tradition with left-wing politics, “but only roughly.” Some figures, such as Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, have married conservatism with the sociological tradition, and it is apparent “how conservative beliefs can favor the preservation of society as an entity.” One might add that this objective seems integral to Edmund Burke’s brand of conservatism.

The above distinction – between the sociological and the economic tradition – is easily related to historicist thought. Plotnick writes that Sombart’s scholarship was conditioned by the “mind” of the nineteenth century, a worldview exemplified by the Communist Manifesto. Plotnick juxtaposes the Declaration of the Rights of Man with the Manifesto, noting: “In one case, human institutions are conceived as products of deliberation, of the ‘social contract’; in the other, as products of growth and change.” Obviously, this is the same essential difference as that between “the economic tradition” and “the sociological tradition.”

Applying Historicism in One’s Personal Life

A recurring theme in historicist thought, whether stated explicitly or not, is the correspondence between individuals and societies. This is captured by Weber’s aforementioned reference to “historical individuals.” Perhaps it was partly for this reason that Sombart drew so much inspiration from Nietzsche, who was notably prone to deriving recommendations for individual behavior from his analyses of whole societies – notably, the ancient Greeks.

Thus, it only makes sense that historicist analyses of society also tend to work as self-help books. Weber’s construct of the Protestant work ethic may be designed to explain sweeping world-historical trends, but it offers helpful guidance as to what an individual should do to get ahead in a capitalistic economy. Indeed, a major source for Weber’s explanation of the concept is Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Tradesman.”

Some historicist literature even has an explicit normative slant. Several intellectual currents seem to define historicist cultural criticism, of which Sombart, for an economist, did a lot. There is the romantic tendency to value the simple and natural. There is the holistic vision of society which asks what implications actions in one area of life have for another area. There is a preference for the concrete over the abstract. There is the inclination to ask what behaviors history recommends.

In Traders and Heroes, Sombart laments the trend of “sportism,” the enthusiasm for artificial and formalized sports. His gripe is not with physical exercise as such, but with what he idiosyncratically calls “sport”: a kind of mathematized exercise wherein “it is no longer the how, the form of the accomplishment, that is decisive, but its external, measurable success.” He also takes issue with excessive dedication to sports which train only certain parts of the body, or which bear little relation to useful, practical physical activity, especially activity of a military kind. Instead, he urges his readers to practice, for instance, “hiking, competitive running, snowshoeing, shooting, hunting, mountaineering, rowing, swimming, fencing, discus throwing, gymnastics, riding,” and so on.

Nowadays, fencing might perhaps be replaced in that list by what is known as Historical European martial arts (HEMA). As one resource clarifies, fencing as practiced today “evolved from classical fencing, whereas HEMA is focused on the authentic recreation of martial arts originating from Europe.” It is no stretch to suppose that Sombart would have preferred the latter to the former.

Further, the historicist mind frame might recommend American football over its counterpart in the rest of the world, which Americans call “soccer.” Running while carrying an object in one’s arms is certainly a skill with more real-world applicability than running while kicking an object along in front of oneself. At least in this regard, then, American football is superior.

We can extend the logic of Sombart’s opinions on sports to other recreational activities. Board games are one example. A game like Monopoly, which is based (however loosely, in this specific case) on real aspects of the modern life, may be preferred to more abstract alternatives. The genre of Euro-style or German-style board games may also be appealing. As games expert Daniel R. Nelon has explained, many of these “tend to be historical and based around worker placements, politics, […] and resource management.”

The emphasis on “spirit” can also be laden with normative implications. It seems to imbue Sombart’s work with a certain high-flying idealism. Traders and Heroes – stunningly insightful in parts, comically absurd in others – is a work of propaganda from the Great War. It disparages Britain’s commercialist culture while extolling the heroism of the German mind. The British are the titular “Traders,” the Germans the “Heroes.” The Brits are portrayed somewhat like “last men”: dry, philosophically superficial, driven only, or almost only, by material self-interest. The Germans are the ones with a long history of self-sacrifice for higher values. Sombart refers extensively to literature from and about both nations, spanning many centuries. That includes this quote from Goethe’s poem “Soulful Longing,” which he describes as “words which everyone knows”:

And as long as you have it not,
This “die and become,”
You are but a dim guest
On the dark earth.

Sombart’s attitude in such moments (whether it accurately reflects Goethe’s is hard to tell) certainly has ample potential for abuse. Yet it is easy to see utility in it as well. Just imagine a world in which everyone only followed his quotidian self-interest, or even the common good calculated in a shallow utilitarian way. Sacrifice for lofty ideals may also be best for the individual doing it – but let us leave that point to Nietzsche.

Contemporary Relevance

Parts of the historicist mind frame are especially relevant today. In particular, the idea that groups of people are animated by different “spirits” has fallen out of fashion. In his preface to the Bantam edition of one of folklorist Nathan Ausubel’s books, literature professor Alan Mintz notes Ausubel’s “conviction – one not very widely shared these days – that it is possible to draw a collective portrait of a people.” Mintz leaves little doubt that the intelligentsia has left this belief behind: for him, it resembles “an older Romantic conception of the existence of a ‘folk mind’.” The similarity to the historicist “spirit” is hard to miss, the more so given historicism’s grounding in Romantic thought.

That preface was published in 1980. The years since have shown beyond doubt that there is a great deal to the idea of the “folk mind.”

One Israeli intellectual has commented that, with the pogrom on October 7, the Israeli public came to “the sudden realization that the ‘Arab’ actually exists, that the Left’s peace dream is well and truly dead.” This quote captures the fundamental flaw in much of our modern era’s foreign policy. Policymakers and the public lack, or fail to apply, the concept that different societies with dissimilar “minds” exist in any meaningful sense. Surely everyone else shares our values, at least to the extent of operating on some baseline decency, self-interest and pragmatism; therefore, the concessions that would appease us will appease them. Well, no such luck. “Mankind does not strive for happiness,” as Nietzsche wrote, “only the Englishman does.”

To a lesser extent, the same error of thought has been applied to Russia. Recently, Konstantin Kisin voiced his befuddlement at the way some Westerners talked about “democracy in Russia.” Kisin noted that “Russia [had] never had a democracy – ever, in twelve centuries” and expressed uncertainty as to whether the country’s population would even accept democracy if given the option. In 2020, Russia’s Far Eastern province of Khabarovsk Krai was rocked by protests over the removal of its governor. This was a rare glimmer of resistance to the Kremlin’s despotism, though the demonstrators had no ambitions beyond their own province. Commenting on the protests, some experts found it relevant that Khabarovsk Krai was home to “vast numbers of Ukrainians.” That certainly goes some way towards explaining why this area of the country is so atypically rebellious.

Another historicist idea worth retrieving is that of the organic interconnectedness of society. Schumpeter stressed this as a central feature of the German Historical School in economics, calling it “a belief in the unity of social life.”

The need for returning this perspective to our current intellectual climate is apparent from the endless debate over transgenderism and related matters of gender expression and identity. Strikingly absent have been arguments along the lines that traditional gender roles are good, and that the various fashionable forms of gender-bending are bad because they undermine them. It seems gender issues are discussed almost exclusively in terms of their effects on gender-confused individuals themselves and their immediate families; any implications they may have for wider society are left out of the picture. Even conservatives and other commentators critical of today’s gender madness largely conform to this pattern.

A historicist conservative – and as we can see from Pinker’s commentary, historicism does lend itself to conservative interpretation – might note the United States’ military recruitment crisis, and how the slackening of gender norms can only undermine those traditional notions of manliness which have always brought men into the armed forces. He might note that the erosion of masculinity had disastrous consequences when it occurred in another “historical individual,” the Roman Empire, where it went hand in hand with rising authoritarianism and precipitated the collapse of the whole commonwealth. He might also remark that basing gender categories solely on self-identification is yet another manifestation of the “spirit” which Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism” and which generates so many problems across countless areas of American life.

Lastly, there is historicism’s emphasis on the concrete. This is heavily stressed by Erik Reinert in The Visionary Realism of German Economics, which finds fault with classical economics for being too abstract and theoretical, and for placing insufficient focus on production. “The English emphasis on trade and barter, rather than on production, still today continues to be a key characteristic of mainstream economics,” Reinert acidly observes. German economics, from which the German Historical School would emerge, took the opposite approach.

Recently, investor Roy Sebag has harkened back to this latter perspective in his booklet The Natural Order of Money. This monograph lays out a view of economic activity which revolves around production, especially of the agricultural variety. In Sebag’s vision, economic activity is understood as ultimately based on “the repeated production and consumption of foods, fuels, and primary materials.”

At first blush, historical economics’ concrete, material bent may seem odd, given that it stands in some contrast to the centrality of “spirit.” However, it is part and parcel of the holistic approach which emphasizes the interconnectedness of social phenomena. “Cooperation between persons,” writes Sebag, “cannot be analyzed or abstractly promoted in a mathematical vacuum, removed from the wider ecological environment.” Sebag even deploys the old image of the social collective as a living body: “Much like the biologist, we must begin with the organism itself.”

One could expound further on specific areas in which historicist ideas are applicable to current problems, but the main point has been made. Historicism’s chief strength, in a nutshell, is that it strikes something like the right balance between specificity and generality. Patterns in history can be usefully discerned, but applications of the same ideas to multiple situations must be carefully qualified by attention to the specifics of each case. Andrew Moravcsik has made a similar and persuasive argument regarding International Relations theory. He contends that the abstract and general principles of realism, centered on the anarchic state of the international system, should receive less consideration than the specifics of each country’s politics.

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