ABSTRACT
Politics and history are closely integrated in Constantino’s writings, in the service of demystification and cultural decolonization: the dual task which he consciously and passionately pursues. He knows full well that the price we are asked to pay for the routinized “objectivity” of academic historiography is the reduction of the rich and complex dynamism of the live social process into isolated “ facts” and “ events.” Their transformation into petrified beads, with a hole in each, so that they can be conveniently arranged in a mechanical succession on the thread of lifeless chronology. In Constantino’s views: “ History for most of us is a melange of facts and dates, of personalities and events, a mixture of hero worship and empty homiletics about our national identity and our tutelage in democracy. History appears as a segmented documentation of events that occurred in the past, without any unifying thread, without continuity save that of chronology, without clear interrelation with the present.”2 To such view he opposes a conception of history which “must deal not only with objective developments but also bring the discussion to the realm of value judgments.”3 And since the value judgments referred to arise from the agonizing choices and alternatives of the present, politics and history become indissolubly integrated.
