I'm sort of flattered, but I've been told that my academic writing is hoch-analytisch, though perhaps better written than most of its ilk.
Now it was obvious that I was
>quite welcome in academia as long as my time was spent on properly academic
>projects, regardless of the politics contained abstractly there. They just
>had to keep abstract.
Not my experience in philosophy. It may have been my especially stupid and ractionary phil dept (Ohio State), but I also couldn't get hired elsewhere, even before I was fired and therefore hopeless tainted. The word on the grapevine was, "We already have a Marxist"--in philosophy, people here will be amused to know, this bourgeois liberal democrat passes for a Marxist, because he's a socialist--a market socialist, yet. Among ya'll I am so poor excuse for a Marxist I no longer even try to play one on TV, but in academic philosophy, I'm the wild-eyed monster from the Red Lagoon.
The situation in philosophy is more like that in econ than in soc. I cannot think of a single major (public or private) philosophy dept that has hired, much less tenured, a Marxist or a hard leftist in 15 years. Maybe more than 20. My old adviser Peter Railton at Michigan may have been the last one, and that was 1978.
Nathan says: [Academic leftists] rarely
> >lay out step-by-step programs for activists to evaluate.
>
>-This is important work, but it's not the work of an intellectual as I
>-understand the term. I don't mean to denigrate it, on the contrary, but
>-policy-wonking is precisely the purview of technical types who may not
>even
>-benefit in their activities from being intellectuals.
>
>Policy wonkery is not what I mean. When action is abstracted from
>political
>analysis, isolated from other issues, and turned into a "good government"
>prescription, that's one thing. But what is most needed is the broadest
>view of analyzing the situation we face, explaining the weaknesses of
>opponents that can be exploited, and reviewing the battlefield and likely
>responses to action. That involves often quite abstract and even
>"European" styles at times, but the question is whether there is a payoff
>for action at the end.
Well, yes, but that isn't "step by step programs for activists to evaluate." I guess I don't think there is any one kind of thing or range of things that left intellectuals are supposed to do. Or left academics, or knowledge workers or whatever tou call them. Lenin, for example, found it worth his while to engage in a debate about philosophy of science with Bolshevik followers of Mach; Marx spent most of his manture intellectual life deconstructing, as we might say to day, the writings of academic political economists in an enterprise taht he though specifically precluded concrete policy proposals. I don't think either of these were wasted efforts. My own intellectual proclivities and steengths are in fact philosophical and run exactly to that very high level of abstraction that Louis P despises, or so I gather from snippets quoted in the posts of others. Still, this serves the movement (or so I like to like) in helping to get things right and to legitimate left perspectives as something that can be discussed and even taught her and there.
>
>The classic Marx statement on it all was "The point is not to understand he
>world but to change it."
>
Um, the 11th Thesis on Feuerback reads, "The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change
it." I don't think "nur interpretiert" can be read as "not to understand."
The point of the Thesis is that we are also to change the world and not
merely to understand it.
jks
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