This present thesis criticizes the ideology of historicism which contains Ranke's historical discourse in the context of forming modern history. Here, empirical epistemology, nationalism and linear temporality are treated as primary elements of historicism. Opposing to Hegel's idealistic philosophy of history, Ranke established the empirical historiography which used critical research of materials as its methodology. There were hegelian historicist principles, however, in his historical discourse. And he had empirical epistemology in common with Hegel, which by confusing real-object with thought-object, insists that historiography represents the actual process of reality. But rather it is a form of representation that informs a certain knowledge through language. For Ranke, nation-state exclusively has historicity and political legitimacy. In his view, hindering its politics is antinational, simultaneously antihistorical, and it is regarded as nothing but a accidental episode in a nation-state's narrative. This way of thinking reveals the relationship of complicity between historicist historiography and nationalism. The ideology of nation-state interpellates individual as the subject of nation. In this process, their different social conditions are eliminated. The historiography, which has had historicist ideology in it, has been a source of ideology of the nation-state. Historicism postulates a linear and homogeneous time. This concept of time is one of the fundamental elements in arranging and colonizing nations or groups of society according to their extent of historical development. Thus rupturing the historicist concept of time is called for the overthrowing of that master discourse. Althusser, in his project of the reestablishment of Marxism, suggested the Marxist historical time on the Marxist totality. The decentered Marxist whole in which each instance has its own relatively autonomous time, simultaneously exists as a specific history determined by relations of relative effectivity within the whole, and yet they also encounter into each other. This Althusser's concept of time is to be a necessary element in overcoming historicism, thus in re-constructing the theoretical system of history.

This present thesis criticizes the ideology of historicism which contains Ranke's historical discourse in the context of forming modern history. Here, empirical epistemology, nationalism and linear temporality are treated as primary elements of historicism. Opposing to Hegel's idealistic philosophy of history, Ranke established the empirical historiography which used critical research of materials as its methodology. There were hegelian historicist principles, however, in his historical discourse. And he had empirical epistemology in common with Hegel, which by confusing real-object with thought-object, insists that historiography represents the actual process of reality. But rather it is a form of representation that informs a certain knowledge through language. For Ranke, nation-state exclusively has historicity and political legitimacy. In his view, hindering its politics is antinational, simultaneously antihistorical, and it is regarded as nothing but a accidental episode in a nation-state's narrative. This way of thinking reveals the relationship of complicity between historicist historiography and nationalism. The ideology of nation-state interpellates individual as the subject of nation. In this process, their different social conditions are eliminated. The historiography, which has had historicist ideology in it, has been a source of ideology of the nation-state. Historicism postulates a linear and homogeneous time. This concept of time is one of the fundamental elements in arranging and colonizing nations or groups of society according to their extent of historical development. Thus rupturing the historicist concept of time is called for the overthrowing of that master discourse. Althusser, in his project of the reestablishment of Marxism, suggested the Marxist historical time on the Marxist totality. The decentered Marxist whole in which each instance has its own relatively autonomous time, simultaneously exists as a specific history determined by relations of relative effectivity within the whole, and yet they also encounter into each other. This Althusser's concept of time is to be a necessary element in overcoming historicism, thus in re-constructing the theoretical system of history.

Ranke, historicism, empiricism, statism, temporality