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Examples
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Butterfield had complained about Whiggishness, describing it as "…the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present" - the tendency to see all history as progressive, and in an extreme form, as an inexorable march to greater liberty and enlightenment.
NYT > Home Page By ERROL MORRIS 2011
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His often repeated, most scathing complaint concerned Whiggishness - in history of science, the tendency to evaluate and interpret past scientific theories not on their own terms, but in the context of current knowledge.
NYT > Home Page By ERROL MORRIS 2011
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It's Whiggish history, and we all learned in grade school to avoid Whiggishness.
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It's rather an inverse Whiggishness - rather than trace a progressive march toward the liberal enlightenment of the present, we take a particular set of characteristics in the present - preferably those we hate - and find that, mirabile dictu, history marched that way all along.
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Finally, I return to the Whiggishness of the whole thing.
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Whiggishness is, I’m afraid, one of the two errors we perpetuate even when we know it’s an error the other is antiquarianism.
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