Search results for "usos del pasado"

Understanding our past : descriptions and judgements of value

2008

Historians have recently been expressing concern about the political uses of the past. However, there is considerable variation in what is understood by “political use”, and that variation is concomitant with what each author considers an unacceptable or misleading use of the past. Here I am going to refer to a particular political use of the past which is immediately related with the construction—some say “recovery”, others “imagining”—of traditions. The use that consists in stating that we cannot judge other times from our own time, that the values and beliefs of each age are so different and discontinuous from ours that the historian must make a moral epoché and devote himself to underst…