> The following extracted from a cc e-mail. The author requested anonymity.
> Any comments on the last two sentences?
> [SNIP]
> Still, one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry when today's historians
> interest themselves deeply in theory, practically for the first time
> ever...and it turns out that the theory is "Theory". I'll take mindless
> empiricism any day.
Perhaps there is not all that much difference. As far as I can see what is called "Theory" (with the uppercase T) consists primarily with the manipulation of abstractions generated by mindless empiricism. Where would Theory be without such mindless empiricist abstractions without social or historical content as: Desire, The Subject, Social Construction, Neurosis, Discourse, The Phallus. These of course are not explanatory categories but merely the shape that contemporary "sophisticated" empiricism tends to take, and as such constiture a topic for the theoretical (lower case t) historian -- to uncover the sources of that shape. From this perspective, the emotive force of your friend's "I'll take mindless empiricism any day" is unnecessary. If positivism and mindless empiricism did not hide in Theory that would not mean that they had disappeared but that they had found some other appearance. The historical theorist's (lower case t) remains the same -- to display the historical content of the ideological appearances.
Carrol