 Popper’s title alludes to Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), which, in turn, responded to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty (1847). Popper thereby signaled his intention to formulate a philosophico-methodological criticism of Marxist and, by extension, Hegelian philosophy of history. The term “historicism”signifies here both “historism” (in the German sense of Historismus in connection with Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, Meinecke—by way of Herder and Goethe—Mannheim and Troeltsch), and “historicism” (in the Italian sense of Storicismo as formulated by Benedetto Croce). In tracing the term to both Herder and Goethe, Meinecke perceived their emphasis on the “concrete”, the “unique” and the “individual” as constituting the core of historicism. Through this emphasis, historicism, understood as an outlook on the world (Weltanschauung), emphasizes the historical quality of human existence; as an interpretation of history and life, it concerns itself with concepts of individuality and with individual development. Historicism seeks to describe and interpret the unsystematic variety of the reality of society and history, for the concept of individuality not only embraces individual persons but also includes the variety of historical forms, such as different peoples, customs, cultures, institutions, nation-states and the like; and the concept of development includes the historical process—at a particular time and place—within which individuality manifests itself not by abstract, general laws or principles but by the living expressions of the multiplicity of these unique historical forms. Individuality, the “fact of change”, and the historical process, the Weltanschauung of historicism, combine to formulate a sort of historical relativism. This signification of historical phenomena entails the sense in which historical knowledge and reality are explained by Dilthey: