Heteronomic Historicism

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Linguistics, Historicism and the Humanities

Historicism, Entrenchment, and Conventionalism

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its histor...

Entrepreneurship theory and the poverty of historicism

Purpose – The author applies methodological concepts from The Poverty of Historicism to contemporary research in the area of entrepreneurship. This paper aims to explain why current theoretic models do not adequately explain entrepreneurial phenomena and to present outlines of a distinct entrepreneurship research paradigm. Design/methodology/approach – The author examines the essay from the per...

Queer Theory, Historicism, and Early Modern Sexualities