Walter Benjamin's historicism and the critical historian

Abstract

This article explores the notion of Progress as a fundamental myth of Modernity, as well as the main characteristics of the type of rationality generated in this stage of human history. It presents how, thanks to this cultural humus, from the first decades of the nineteenth century, a broad and diffuse current of thought called Historicism emerged, which gave history or historicity a central value, since it was considered the fundamental science for the interpretation of social reality. For his part, at the end of the 1930s, Walter Benjamin, founding member of the Frankfurt School, in his essay entitled Theses on the Philosophy of History, presented his disagreement with the historicist approach. This is the history of the winners and gives rise to serve as a foundation for totalitarian political positions. In this sense, he proposes that the task of the critical historian is to give voice to the losers, to the marginalized of history, so that they may find redemption and justice is done with the historical fact