Doug Henwood wrote:
> You don't have to be a Freudian (though it helps) to see jealousy
> lurking in white racist discourse about black sexuality, for example.
Perhaps -- but if you are a Freudian you immediately assume a psychological (i.e., a non-historical) cause -- and since even non-Freudians in the 20th century are rather spontaneous psychologizers, the air filled with psychological explanations of such behavior, and no serious efforts at historical explanation are made.
What happens if one at least *considers*, as a hypothesis, that people operate, within the social setting they find themselves, out of fairly intelligent and conscious efforts to explain the world around them, using the categories of explanation that that world gives them?
I don't know. I just know that way too many of the brightest people, who might provide us such social analyses, are headed off at the past by the Freudian wranglers and herded into psychological corrals.
We are left with two utterly powerless (or even destructive) hypotheses: (a) a mystical unconscious or (b) the rational choice theorists. The latter are also mystics in so far as they define a priori (rather than historically) what "reason" or "rational choice" is.
Carrol