historicism

In architecture and the visual arts, the copying of styles from the past, for example the Gothic and classical revivals of the 19th century. It implies a detailed imitation, rather than the ironic reference that is common in postmodernism or the selection of existing styles to combine with an artist's own work as in eclecticism.

historicism

Term referring to two contrasting views on the nature of historical and social research. The first claims that historians must interpret each age in terms of its values, assumptions, and concerns, and that a modern perspective uncritically distorts historical phenomena. The second argues for the need to understand historical change in terms of broad, all-embracing laws of historical growth and development. Karl Popper used the term in this second sense (in the Poverty of Historicism 1957) to attack the theories of Hegel and Marx, both of whom saw the course of history as working towards a goal.