Schleiermacher gave the circle its classical form: grasp the whole from the parts, correct it as the parts accumulate, grammatical and psychological loops at once. Dilthey made it the method of the human sciences. Heidegger radicalized it in 1927: interpretation is never presuppositionless, every reading starts from fore-having, fore-sight, fore-conception, what stands there is first of all the interpreter's un-discussed assumption. Gadamer's Truth and Method, 1960, completed the move: understanding is a fusion of horizons, prejudice, fore-judgment, is not the enemy but the condition of understanding, and the circle is an ever-expanding spiral, not a closed loop.
Everyone runs the circle daily: the headline sketches a whole, the article revises it, the comments revise it again, and the reader who notices the loop reads better than the one who believes they read the facts cold. The Indian tradition ran the same engine independently: Mimamsa and Vedanta commentators read passages through the corpus's vision and the vision through the passages, two thousand years before anyone told them circles were fashionable. Shankara and Gadamer, same spiral, different monasteries.
The claim: the hermeneutic circle is the philosophical version of this archive's predictive-processing file, you perceive the model, never the territory, so the only escape from a bad interpretation is a bigger, better-informed circle, and propaganda works by supplying your fore-having before you ever open the text. Verdict: Gadamer said as much without the paranoia: you cannot exit tradition, you can only widen it deliberately. The archive's method is the widened circle by design: three competing wholes per entry, forcing the loop to run against itself. The circle cannot be broken. It can be made too big to fit one story.
If you cannot read a part without a whole, where did your whole come from?