Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination

Discussions of historicism sometimes proceed on the assumption that it consists of a discernible and unjustifiable distortion of a properly historical way of representing reality. Thus, example, there are those who speak of the particularizing interest of the historian as against the generalizing interests of the historicist. Again, the historian is supposed to be interested in elaborating points of view rather than in constructing theories, as the historicist wishes to do. Next, the historian is supposed to favor a narrativist, the historicist an analytical mode of representation. And finally, while the historian studies the past its own sake or, as the phrase has it, for itself alone, the historicist wants to use his knowledge of the past to illuminate the problems of his present or, worse, to predict the path of history's future development.'