Ahistoricism

At the simplest level, the term refers to the disregard of history, either because of ignorance and/or ideological reasons, to explain the present. For example, in this country a common ahistorical view of the present, ideologically propagated by conservatives, is one that does not acknowledge that capitalism, as a dominant mode of production, in Western societies is not only of recent invention (beginning sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century with the onset of the industrial revolution and the demise of an earlier form of capitalism known as mercantilist capitalism where not only was profit-making based primarily on trade and commerce rather than manufacture, but the commodification of land, labor, and money was still in its infancy) but that its genesis was accompanied by much violence in the effort to proletarianize the European peasantry, on the backs of which, this mode of production arose. Instead, capitalism is often viewed as if it is an inviolable state of economic affairs ordained by God—as natural as air, rain, and fire.