Editing Historicism (section)

===Modern Historicism===
Within the context of 20th-century philosophy, debates continue as to whether ahistorical and immanent methods were sufficient to understand the meaning (that is to say, "what you see is what you get" positivism) or whether context, background and culture are important beyond the mere need to decode words, phrases and references. While post-structural historicism is relativist in its orientation—that is, it sees each culture as its own frame of reference—a large number of thinkers have embraced the need for historical context, not because culture is self-referential, but because there is no more compressed means of conveying all of the relevant information except through history. This opinion is often seen as deriving from the work of [[Benedetto Croce]]. Recent historians using this tradition include [[Thomas Kuhn]].

[[Talcott Parsons]] criticized historicism as a case of idealistic fallacy in ''[[The Structure of Social Action]]'' (1937). [[Post-structuralism]] uses the term ''[[new historicism]]'', which has some associations with both anthropology and Hegelianism.