There are a host of key sins that all professional historians live in fear of committing. The sin of teleology – also known as whig history, also known as assuming that the spirit of things are inevitably headed in a particular direction of betterness – is one of these. Contingency, historians well understand, will pwn the dialectic every time. Or at least a good chunk of the time. Yet however successful we are, amongst ourselves, at dispelling the temptations of teleology, the model of history as an ever-forward march of progress remains nearly untouched in the public imagination. This seems Read more