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Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture.Louis Dupré

Paul Hamilton. Historicism. (The New Critical Idiom Series, ed. John Drakakis.) New York and London: Routledge, 1996. 226 pp. $6.99. Paul Hamilton's Historicism is part of Routledge's The New Critical Idiom, a series designed as an explanatory guide for critical terminology. More than just an elaborate dictionary, the series is designed to relate selected critical terms to the larger field of cultural representation. Hamilton's book provides useful background and is compact and surprisingly comprehensive. Explaining and amplifying historicism and its uses from ancient Greece to modern Greenblatt, Hamilton considers the term in relation to other modes of criticism and also provides a very useful and extensive bibliography of further reading. Hamilton subdivides historicism into two camps: (1) hermeneutical historicism, which insists on the primacy of historical contexts to the interpretation of all texts. This hermeneutical historicism reflects the belief that a text can only be understood within "an economy of other texts, which both limits their possibilities and facilitates the distinctiveness of their utterances." Any work or idea is relative to or adjacent to discourses of science, politics, history and so on; (2) the extent to which subsequent readers reinterpret a work according to their own cultural interests and biases. This problem of historical relativism provides Hamilton with a discursive bridge to both modernism, with its insistence that we can break from the past, and postmodernism, with its insistence that the "past" is unfixed and unknowable. Hamilton's book, while in many ways a historical survey wrestling with the problems of postmodernism, does argue toward certain conclusions: (1) that postmodernists searching for a way to "think differently" from their past and present may well find solutions in postcolonial and feminist writings; (2) that while Enlightenment concepts such as progress have been critically undermined, many historicists still long for a concept that offers "redemption" from historical relativism. Hamilton's religiously infused language may be due to historicism's relation to hermeneutics, originally a science for interpreting Scripture. That being said, Hamilton clearly points out the intelleaual pitfalls of such thinking: "Historicism remains the secular record of changes in historiography, not the rainbow promising a new heaven and a new earth."