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1. The term “historicism,” now used mostly in a critical sense, still had positive significance in the mid-19th century. Thus it could denote a philosophy that, following G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831; Hegelianism), viewed world history as a realization of the absolute (C. J. Braniss). It then soon became a polemical title for Hegel’s own philosophy of history (R. Haym), for the historical school of law (I. H. Fichte), and finally for a concept of human life oriented primarily to historical facts and contexts. Critics of historicism did not dispute the historicity of this life but stressed that human nature cannot be viewed as merely the object of academic study. Thus F. Nietzsche (1844–1900), in part 2 of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873–76; ET Thoughts out of Season [1909]), criticized the dominion of history as that of an objectifying and relativizing outlook that threatens the survival and enhancement of li…