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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Eh, there's a tremendous amount of projecting a particular modern viewpoint onto the past in that work. It's a bit nonsense.

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Admittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite.

And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.

That book is "rethinking" history but that rethinking curiously fits extremely well with a particular modern narrative. Some people eat it up. But separate a few decades in the future and it will seem like an extremely fad-driven interpretation of things.

The book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...

Yeah I agree with that. And I'd argue that it is still the same nowadays. People at the top probably knows clearly which interest group they are in, and which group they can rally up, and which ones they need to fight to the death -- even if they all belong to the same nationality -- and I'm not surprised if local interest groups ally with "foreign" interest groups to fight another local interest group. It is blurred.

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