Explain whiggism as used typically on this board. My looking

>>472416
Herbert Butterfield (1965) The Whig Interpretation of History

>>472433
OP said 'explain,' not 'Point me to a document I can spend hours reading.' If you don't want to discuss these things, I don't understand why you would post on this board (aside from a ghoulish desire to argue with people and give Australian historiography a bad name) or work in an academic and (at least conceptually, so on the one level that matters to you) education-related setting.

>>473435
Pay me and I'll treat you like an undergraduate.

>>473493
Stop stealing my chat up lines

>>473435
This is not a spoonfeeding board. What the hell do you want, a book review? Christ.

>We used to be so stupid and society used to be so less advanced than it is now. Everyone was retarded and we all believed ridiculous things about science and the world and how politics should work. We're so much smarter now than we were before!

Basically is how I understand it. The term seems to be mostly used by right-wingers who prefer some kind of more old-fashioned society and think most of society too easily assumes that everything is better today, and that there's nothing that we might want to go back to, whether we're talking about reviving elements of the 50s, the 1800s, or Ancient Rome, etc.

If you google "Whig history" alongside the term "neoreaction" or "Dark Enlightenment", you'll get good articles that go over the term that are written by modern young people.

Yeah, you might not agree with their ideas on society. But these are people who are actually truly non-Whig, most other Westerners in my view are Whig History believers, even if they've never heard of the term. So it's important to get the views of someone who's truly non-Whig.

I think we all engage in Whig History to an extent though. There's always aspects of society that we consider to be the best out of all periods of history, without really studying deeply how things were in other periods to put our beliefs to the test about which era did various aspects of life better.

Hope that made sense.

>>473493
>Pay me and I'll treat you like an undergraduate.
I like this one. It's on par with "I'll bet you 20 bucks I'm the best sex you'll ever have in your life".

>>473493

You remind me of the humanities grad students I am forced to be around at inter-discipline colloquiums.

>>472416
>>474185
A peek at Wikipedia gives this up under "Butterfield's Formulation":

>"It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present..."
>Typical distortions thereby introduced are:
>Viewing the British parliamentary, constitutional monarchy as the apex of human political development;
>Assuming that the constitutional monarchy was in fact an ideal held throughout all ages of the past, despite the observed facts of British history and the several power struggles between monarchs and parliaments;
>Assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (anachronism);
>Assuming that British history was a march of progress whose inevitable outcome was the constitutional monarchy; and
>Presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.

That seems to cover the typical use of the term, at least in the contexts I've seen it. And I agree that most contexts involve right-wingers of some stripe, as the other Anon said, varying from dreaming of the ye olden '50s to outright monarchists. Seems like a fair and relevant critique, but the general inability to imagine the future leads to it being used in a reactionary sense.

>>474279
You remind me of the soc-sci and STEM-tards who couldn't defend their discipline from the most basic epistemological challenge and who don't know how to cite existing literature.

>>474185
>>474323
Thanks to both of you for clarifying.

>>474445
>STEM-tards

Liberal arts major detected. Have fun working in the service industry.