Opponents exploit historicist self-reference to accuse it of moral scepticism

Evidence

This is, moreover, a difficulty that recurs for every historicist philosophy; it is taken advantage of by cheap polemicists (particularly Catholics) in order to contrast within the same individual the “scientist” and the “demagogue”, the philosopher and the man of action, and to deduce that historicism leads necessarily to moral scepticism and depravity. From this difficulty arise many dramas of conscience in little men, and in great men the “Olympian” attitude a la Goethe. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1442