Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2016)
A Panofskyian meditation on free will and the forces of history: is humanist historiography still credible?
Abstract
In his paper ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ Erwin Panofsky postulated the free will and rationality of historical subjects as the basis of the rejection of collectivist (holist) approaches to history writing. The rejection of ‘insectolatrism’ as Panofsky put it—the idea that collectives such as cultures, ethnicities or linguistic groups determine an individual’s intellectual capacities and drive his or her creativity—is the core thesis of what he defined as humanistic historiography. This paper examines the credibility of this approach to historiography in the context of modern research about social structures in the social sciences and free will in analytic philosophy.
