Historicism held that each culture forms a coherent whole penetrable only by sympathy

Evidence

But there was a tendency among some thinkers to exceed comparative study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from “China to Peru,” by sympathetic identification. This is a third eighteenth-century element preparing the way for modern Orientalism. What today we call historicism is an eighteenth-century idea; Vico, Herder, and Hamann, among others, believed that all cultures were organically and internally coherent, bound together by a spirit, genius, Klima, or national idea which an outsider could penetrate only by an act of historical sympathy. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 325

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines historicism as an 18th-century doctrine of organically coherent cultures requiring Einfühlung — a key term for the toolkit.
• XREF: This definition of historicism as sympathetic penetration scaffolds later critiques that sympathetic identification was itself a selective, Eurocentric gesture — relevant to how Islamophobia scholarship reads liberal good-faith engagements with Islam.

Related

• No foundational critique links historicism’s growth to imperialist practice. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Immanentism is progressive only when historicised and materialist #complicates (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2541