You didn't address Luke's question. What Luke was addressing was something you'd said that had nothing to do with anything Max or Doug typed. You used ad hominem to attack de Long by maintaining that his work isn't nearly as great as Sweezy's and, therefore, the implication was that De Long ought to shut up. Steve wrote, "i believe the point was made, which you hid from, that Monopoly Capital > was a work that far exceeds your own accomplishments. forget that the
> dobb sweezy debate has generated far more serious theoretical > discussion among marxists and non-marxists than i expect we can find > your work generating outside your blog?
de Long and everyone else ought to ignore such criticism. They are meaningless. Do you, Steve, have to be as productive as De Long in order to criticize him, on substantive grounds?
That, btw Joanna, is what Carrol means by principled discourse. Steve's charge wasn't principled; it was unprincipled. But, he means more than that, since what he's been trying to say is that, it's not just about whether one uses ad hominem (which all of us end up doing...), but goes into it a bit more deeply in a post that was a Prolegomean to Varieties of Left Rhetoric. It was quite good and I have learned much from Carrol. We can, of course, bitch at him and others for not living up to the ideal of principled discourse -- but then, that's not exactly an argument against the position, but against the person. that is, it's ad hominem tu quoque and it's really quite useless for advancing a conversation.
Note for further development. As illustrated on LBO (and elsewhere too) there seem to be three general categories of posts expressing a negative view. I will label those three Criticism, Polemics, and "Polemics Disguised as Criticism." Examples of the first two may be valid or invalid, well or badly written, etc., but they are legitimate forms with a long and honorable tradition on the left. (I am speaking now of discourse within the left, in contexts in which it is assumed that all readers and responders are in some sense "leftist.") The third category is always illegitimate and disruptive of conversation within the left. It is objectively dishonest, though I do not think it is consciously so on the part of the writers. In future posts I will be examining instances of all three categories.
Polemics: the writer openly blasts a position -- not a person, though usually polemics will, not for the better, incorporate personal attacks. There can be a wide range of styles and tones here, but in so far as a text maintains the decorum of the genre it will always return to a central thesis upholding a principle or set of principles (and condemning another principle or set of principes).
Criticism: the writer points out to someone with whom he/she has fundamental unity that he/she is fucking up in some way or that such and such an argument is not consistent with the principles shared. Criticism always specifies its targets (proper names: persons or group), and always makes clear the fundamental unity of critic and criticized. It is important to maintained a principled stand in polemics. An unprincipled stand in criticism reduces the criticism to pure babble.
"Polemics disguised as Criticism." I'll leave this undefined for now.
To be continued.
Carrol
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2003 13:55:08 -0600 NOTES TOWARD A FORWARD TO A PROLEGOMENA TO AN INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATION OF VARIETIES OF LEFT RHETORIC