In Defense of Presentism

Abstract

Abstract Most historians know one thing about presentism: that they are against it. Yet what exactly presentism is, they cannot agree. Is it a focus on modern history or a novel way of thinking confined to the present at the expense of both past and future? Does it mean speaking only to the concerns of the present or recognizing that “all history is contemporary history”? This confusion is a symptom of a deeper quandary: the very purpose of history writing itself. With the help of scholarship on presentism in other disciplines—philosophy, psychology, history of science, literary criticism—this chapter disentangles the various meanings of presentism, presents their ethical implications, and offers a tempered defense of presentism in history as a key to human flourishing.

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