The historist approach takes to its extreme limits the common observation that human institutions (language, Art, religion, law, State) are subject to perpetual change.
(The term historism is sometimes reserved to identify the specific current called Historismus in the tradition of German philosophy and historiography.
The Italian philosopher, anti-fascist[9] and historian Benedetto Croce[10] and his British colleague Robin George Collingwood[11] were important European exponents of historism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
[1]: 127 The essence of this principle, in brief, is: not to forget the underlying historical connection, to examine every question from the standpoint of how the given phenomenon arose in history and what principal stages this phenomenon passed through in its development, and, from the standpoint of its development, to examine what the given thing has become today.20th-century German historians promoting some aspects of historism are Ulrich Muhlack, Thomas Nipperdey and Jörn Rüsen.
Nietzsche contends that the historians of his times, the historists, damaged the powers of human life by relegating it to the past instead of opening it to the future.
On the basis of Popper's definitions, the historian Stefan Berger proposes as a proper word usage: I deliberately use the term ‘historism’ (and ‘historist’) rather than ‘historicism’ (and ‘historicist’).