Just why is it that there are still any historicists running around? Now clearly the heyday of the old, Hegelian historicism has come and gone. The World Wars ruined the optimism that was psychologically requisite to carry out such a project. And Hegel's work in the Philosophy of History was, prior to that, subjected to the withering sarcasm of Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or--which sought to repudiate Hegel's callous disregard for the Law of the Excluded Middle. To be clear, on the one hand, I think that the old historicism of Hegel was fatally flawed--for precisely the sorts of reasons contained in Kierkegaard's monumental jest. C. S. Lewis also treats the flaws of the old historicism in an essay that I find quite to the point. But, on the other hand, the pretensions of the old historicism aside, one can see that there was something grand about it. Or, perhaps, that there would be something grand about such an idea had that idea any deep correspondence to reality.
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