Mai Nieke And Historicism

Although Friedrich Meinecke is a very important man both in the history of historical writing and the intellectual history, yet the research about him is not very much enough especially in China.Through this article, we will discover that Meinecke did play a very important role in the development of Historicism, because he not only inherited the tradition of historiography since Ranke but also attended the discussion about the method and the value of history which was initiated by the thinkers in the southwest of Germany. Therefore, we can not research Historicism without making mention of Meinecke.In order to know about Meinecke's Historicism, we must attach a great importance to his great book named Die Entstehung des Hi stori smus (Historism : The Rise of a New Historical Outlook ). Meinecke described the rise of Historism in this book and at the same time expressed his own outlook. We will introduce his outlook through these two key words called Individuality and Development. The reason why he insisted on such a kind of outlook can also be discovered so long as we take the Europe's political situation into account.At the end of this article, we also refer to Croce and Popper in order to differentiate the difference between them and Meinecke.