[lbo-talk] Hofstadter

[Seth Ackerman]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
>> Doug wrote:
>>
>>> What do you mean by that? Isn't political history pretty important?
>>
>>
>>
>> Classical political history,  also legal and military history,  is 
>> associated with positivist notions of proof and is now more often 
>> called the "great men" school of history.  It was blown out of the 
>> water beginning with the French Annales school in the 30s.
>
>
> Now I'm confused. I thought the criticism of Hofstadter was that he 
> blamed the masses too much for right-wing paranoia and manipulative 
> elites too little. Now he's a Great Man theorist, just like the target 
> of that Gang of Four song.
>
Well, I think it's important, but Dennis summarized the currently 
prevailing attitude toward political history pretty accurately, above. I 
was exaggerating a little when I said pol-hist almost doesn't exist, but 
there's some truth in it.

Of course, almost all historical topics ultimately relate to politics in 
some way. But studying politics explicitly (from a Great Man pov or 
ortherwise) has fallen out of fashion. The cutting edge stuff that's 
classified as political history these days might more accurately be 
described as the study of the culture of politics - it involves things 
like close hermeneutical readings of the multiple meanings of patriotic 
pageantry in colonial Maryland. Don't get me wrong, it's politics in a 
very broad sense, but it's not what you'd normally associate with 
political history.

As for Hofstadter, I think it's safe to say that almost no graduate 
seminars assign him anymore. And I suspect if you tried out his argument 
(about the masses and rightwing paranoia) with a room full of assistant 
profs, the first thing they'd say is that you can't talk about "the 
masses" because it assumes Americans were all alike. Which, again, has 
some truth to it, but it's a lens that places pretty firm limits 
(probably intentionally) on what you can say about American politics.

Seth