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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 understanding and not making value judgements of the object of his study. I wish to defend the idea that abstaining from judgement of value is untenable from a moral and political viewpoint and also from an epistemological viewpoint. It is, in fact, an updating of the most sterile relativism which not only disguises or does not grasp the logic of understanding but also locks the person who maintains it into a dialogic inconsistency. In other words, it seems to me to be an updating of the most antiquated historicism, to put it in terms that belong to the historians; or of the most rudimentary emic viewpoint, to put it in the language of socio-cultural anthropology. For the fact is that this problem—whether it is proper and legitimate, and not a mere unjustified distortion, to make value judgements about aspects of other cultures, eras, ways of living, mentalities or suchlike matters—this problem, I say, has been recurrent and still is, both in the realm of history and in that of anthropology. However, to say that comparison and judgement of value are inseparable from the process of understanding must not be taken in the sense that the scholar, once his labour has concluded, should emit something like a moral ruling about whatever he may happen to have studied; still less that what he writes should resemble an unavowed or explicit sermon. What is being said is that comparison and judgement of value are inseparable from the logic and effective conduct of research itself, which could not be at all successful without them.
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