Historicism And New Historiography Of Modern China, 1902-1949

Historicism is one kind of life view,world view,and historical thinking which bases on three layers of presupposition.The first presupposition is that there is a fundamental difference between the historical phenomena of human life and natural phenomena.The essence of historical phenomena exists in the entire past time process.The second presupposition is that the individuals' value depends on its own existence in this process and has its irreplaceable specificity.There are both differences and internal links between individuals.Each era or stage is a special embodiment of the human spirit.The third presupposition is that tracing to the history source is the only way to proper understand it.That means that we have to judge the individuals and era according to their environment or context and grasp a specific development trend.As an important component of modern humanism,historicism rose in the period of late 18 century through 19 century in the West.It was mainly marked by the specialization of historical concept and historiography practice in Germany,and a series of thinking about the spirit,culture,and history autonomy which resulted from the specialization.This process is not only driven by the evolution of the inner logic of the West thoughts and culture,but is also closely related to the many influences of its external social and political factors.At the same time,the concept elements and humanistic spirit of historicism are not separately existed in the Western cultural soil.They are originally bred from the universal human life experience and historical consciousness.They embody self-awareness of humanistic consciousness and the maturity of historical thinking.We can also find these in the historical concept of pre-modern China.By the late 19 th century,although historicism was gradually falling into a crisis in the West,it converged with the historical spirit of the Chinese cultural tradition and the remains of the historiography movement of the Qian-Jia Period,when it spread to the Eastern countries accompanied the strong expansion of imperialism and Western culture.The convergence provided thought resources and practical references for Chinese new historiography movement.This article begins with a re-acquainting of the concept of "historicism" and then tries to comb and compare the two cultural origins of Chinese and Western historical ideas and their "confluence" in modern times.Through systematic analyzing and describing the ideological spectrum which historicism is thereof,the paper reveals the role that historicism played in the specializing of history and defending the autonomy of history;the paper also tries to point out how the connotation of historicism was cut apart by empiricism and positivism,and how it was interpreted and demonstrated in the view of China's standard cultural history.Then I explore the theoretical dilemma of the modern transformation of Chinese historiography and the Chinese and Western cultures problems which it faced.The paper consists of five chapters.The first chapter,"Introduction",expounds the research origin and writing theme of this article,and strives to systematically review and evaluate the research results of the predecessors related to the theme,and makes necessary explanations on the research ideas and methods.The second,third,and fourth chapters are the main text and constitute a complete discourse system.Among them,the second chapter mainly discusses the connotation of historicism and its western origin and development.Then through the comparison between China and the West,it elaborates the characteristics and performance of "Oriental Historicism".The third chapter discusses the ideological operation of historicism in the formation of China's modern new history theory in the first half of the 20 th century.It separately sudies the origin of the problems of the nature of history,the scientificization of history,the historiography concept of rationality and humanism,and the irrational historical ideology.And then it points out that historicism is more often seen in the form of "artistic theory" of history when it argues the humanity of history and its independence from natural science.It provided the most fundamental intellectual resources and methodologies when new history seeks its own orientation and specialization.It also played a significant role in suppressing universalism and scientism in the field of history at that time in the same process.Chapter 4 discusses the specific conditions of historicism in the praxis of Chinese modern new history in the first half of the 20 th century.It points out that the most successful praxis of historicism are mainly reflected in two aspects: first,Chinese history that satisfies with small narratives,valuing textual criticism,and opposition to universal laws inherited the tradition of Qianjia's textual criticism,drew on the methods of modern Western empirical history,and aimed to reconstructing historical facts.The second is the rise of Chinese cultural history.It considers that Chinese historical culture is different from the West.The former has its own uniqueness.By taking the concepts,which are contained in their history studies praxis of Wang Guowei,Fu Sinian,Chen Yinque,and Qian Mu et al.new historians,as examples,the paper further analyzes and discusses the cultural destiny of the historical era which are pointed out by their historicist ideas.Finally,in Chapter 5,“Concluding Remarks”,I summarize the historicism thought that is discussed in the paper and its manifestations and existing problems in theory and practice of modern Chinese new historiography.It argues that historicism is one dominant thought that history can hardly get rid of.The key to overcome relativism and avoid the separation of facts and values lies in how to recognize and handle the eternal proposition of universality and specialization.