Levine refers to historicism as a "local context" (and notes that "the emphasis on local contexts has troubled me")
she agrees that each historical period has a "specificity" (a truism of historical approaches) but is skeptical of the charge of "presentism"-- she does not agree that it is "a grave ethical error to draw too close a likeness between past and present"
"I have always thought, none of our research matters unless it is generalizable, unless we can learn something from it that has implications beyond its own time"
"I have never been convinced that the main value of historicism, even for historicists, lies in the distinctiveness of past periods. The most historically minded scholars choose to study gender norms in ancient Rome or eighteenth-century global commodity routes precisely because comparable arrangements of power operate now: because gender and commodity forms still organize us, carrying their pain and injustice with them; because distributions of authority and goods continue to restrict life and labor; and because we can reflect on the contingency of our own ordering principles when we know that they have at other times been organized otherwise"