Ruminations on the dark side: history of art as rage and denials

Abstract

The holist view is that the creativity of an author is the manifestation of the creativity of the group he or she belongs to; the individualist view is that the creativity of the group is merely the sum of the creativities of the individuals who constitute that group. The holist understanding of human creativity was particularly widespread among Weimar-era historians and their almost unanimous tendency to adopt holist historical explanations constitutes a collective phenomenon in its own right. The paper explores the problems of providing an individualist explanation of this phenomenon.