Morphological Transformation of Historicism

The article analyzes the social changes associated with the characteristics of advanced modernity and postmodern transition. Modern trends inevitably affect the state and metamorphoses of socio-humanitarian knowledge in general and history in particular. The object of the research is the general systematization of the forms and trajectories of the development of historical knowledge. Various conceptual and categorical apparatus determined by the transformation of the basic concept of “historicism” is analyzed. The essential features and peculiarities of such categories as: “radical historicism”, “anti-historicism”, “new historicism”, “oral history”, “symbolic politics”, “historical politics”, “posthistory” are revealed, some of which are dialectically dependent on each other. It is emphasized that historicism is to a large extent a “traveling concept”, which is expressed in dynamism and variability, from the standpoint of social interests, temporal factors, scientific schools and traditions. The main trend in the development of historicism leads to its modern pluralistic forms, which causes a crisis of objectivism, unification and paradigmality, as well as a significant increase in the axiological component in epistemology and subjectivization. As a result, the constructivist principles of posthistory begin to dominate in public discourse, expressed in certain narratives that do not overcome the interdisciplinary nature of historical knowledge.