Presentism as an immanent quality of contemporary historical knowledge

Abstract. The author substantiates the hypothesis that presentism is an immanent characteristic of historical knowledge of the 20th–first quarter of the 21st century, and
suggests alternatives to its extreme forms in modern historical culture (since the mid 2000s). The problem of presentism is considered in relation to the concept of historical
culture. The relevance of this issue is primarily due to the increased need to explicate the immanent characteristics of scientific/professional historical knowledge in the context of expanding the boundaries of historical culture and the gap between socially oriented historiography and rigorous historical science within it. The theoretical framework of the research is set by the change of types of rationality/models of science: from classical to nonclassical, then to post-nonclassical in a postmodern situation, and an attempt is made to conceptualize a new historical culture in a post-postmodern situation. When analyzing the presentism of the last third of the 20th century, F. Artog’s concept of “historicity regimes” is complemented by the F. Fukuyama’s idea of the “end of history” and the theory of narrative(H. White, F. Ankersmit). The conclusion is made about the conceptual differences between the presentism of the first third of the 20th century, which was strictly conditioned by the nonclassical model of science, and the presentism of the last decades of the 20th century, which was conditioned by the post-nonclassical model of science and the historical culture of postmodernity. The hypothesis of a new variant of presentism in the historical culture of the first quarter of the 21st century is proposed, the factor of formation of which is post-postmodernity and the corresponding historical culture, the basic property of which was the process of renarrativization after the crisis of the metanarrative of the postmodern.

Keywords: presentism, relativism, historical culture, non-classical model of science, post-nonclassical model of science, post-postmodern, microhistory, renarrativization,
anthropological turn, principle of otherness, cognitive history.