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Presentism
(redirected from presentist)

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Presentism 

a term used in scholarly literature to designate a subjective, idealist school in 20th-century bourgeois historical methodology. Presentism viewed historiography not as a reflection of objective phenomena taking place in the past, but merely as the reflection of contemporary ideological attitudes. In absolutizing the obvious fact that any portrayal of the past presupposes a certain contemporary perspective, presentism in principle rejects the possibility of objective truth in understanding history. The concepts of presentism were most widespread in the USA from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, since the trend was closely connected with the philosophical school of pragmatism.



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Does a presentist bias skew ratings in a way that gives greater weight to more recent decisions and jurists?
The result of this "mode of interpretation" would be, Belsey insists, "more history, not less, and more nuanced history" that would not be hampered, either by a vague appeal to presentist concerns, or by the temptation to slide back into "the old reassuring cognitive totalities of the Elizabethan world picture and the early modern mind" (ibid.
To these words, he traces the fundamental distinction that New Historicists liked to make between "traditional historicism"--which was said to entail an "absolute reduction of the fundamental heterogeneity of the past"--and the New Historicism itself, which in emphasizing "the historicity of the historian's practice" claimed to avoid both "a presentist projection of contemporary concerns into the past" and "an antiquarian obsession with the past per se" (14, 16-17).
 
 
 
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