This thesis treats the intellectual history of historicism over the last two centuries and distinguishes critical historicism from conventional Western historicity. Despite the religious premises of historicism, religious historicism had been largely dismissed in serious historiography by the end of the nineteenth century. / Internal tensions haunted this development, for unlike the programmatic secularist, the secular historicist tended to value the religious perspective of earlier historicists, from Hamann and Herder to Ranke. With Dilthey the 'crisis of historicism' was meliorated by a more positive view of secularity; but such palliatives had no place in the thought of Ernst Troeltsch. / By locating Troeltsch in the history of historicism, the thesis invites a reinterpretation of his development. It roughly divides his thought into three periods: the religious historicist, where his ideas were grounded by the influence of Ritschl; the intermediate, where, like Harnack, he began to challenge the most blatant errors of religious historicism, but stopped short of a full divestment; and finally his secular historicism. / Troeltsch's mature position was not patterned upon Weber, as is often alleged. Rather it was the progeny of the entire historicist tradition. His continuing theological influence stems from his early and intermediate periods; yet the roots of his personal secularization are located in even his earliest work. In that sense his development tends to replicate the secularization of historicism as a whole. Both had the germ of secularity in their methodologies. At some point a choice had to be made between loyalty to a methodology or to a religious proposition. Ritschl and Hermann chose the latter, Troeltsch the former. / The final three chapters bring these conclusions to bear upon contemporary secular theory. Three religious/secular paradigms are defined: the dialectical, as typified by Durkheim, which treats religion in terms of functional inevitability; the Weberian, which construes secularization as inevitable and irretrievable; and the secular historicist, or Troeltschian, which treats the atrophy of religious values as indeterminant phenomena. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-12, Section: A, page: 3754. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75704 |
| Contributors | THORNTON, WILLIAM HENRY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 595 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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