The Problem of Appropriate Concepts

Presentism — anachronism — is usually taken as a mark of bad history.1 We engage in it when we think, talk and write about the past as if it were the same place as the present. Although most historians would concede that presentism is very difficult to avoid in practice, they nonetheless insist that it should be avoided as much as possible, and that we should strive to examine past people in their own terms, by their own lights, within their own context. Presentism is a form of ethnocentrism; the term ‘historicism’ was invented by nineteenth-century German scholars to denote the opposite of presentism.