[lbo-talk] Hofstadter

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 10 23:29:38 PST 2006


I am sorry to say that the debate about what causes major historical changes did nor end with the Brenner debate. Not exactly sorry to say it, but there was, more recently, the debate around Francois Furet (and his crowd) and the French revolution, in which Furet et amis defended an idealist/cultura; reading of the FR against the Marxist orthodoxy of LeFebvre, Sobel, and their comrades.

OK, that was 15 years ago. But there, of course, a debased version of the same debate going on over the wreckage of the Russian revolution, with Fukayama's right Hegelian (history as the march to9wards capitalist democracy) as the highest point and a zillion lower points based on revivals of the Great Man (or Bad Man) theories of history.

Well, I'm not a historian, so I can't comment with much accuracy or knowledge on trends in historical writing, just on what I pick up on the way. I wonder what influence, if any, the work of people like Michael Mann have had on historical scholarship. And off in his own corner (there is Charles Tilly (yeah, I know he's technically a sociologist), implacably concerned with the explanation of large scale change.

So, anyway, I don't think those concerns were buried with the Brenner debate. Which does, after all, continue in a form in Ellen M. Wood's endless recycling of the issues. It is probably true, though, that debate in history about openly Marxist theories like Brenner's has no has much traction since Brenner's papers, but what do you expect?

Anyway, it's late and I have to go to bed.

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> >>Is it a Cox-like shyness about generalizing about
> patterns
> >>of thought, because everything is so
> incommensurate?
> >
> >
> >From my experience as a history grad student, it's
> more an
> >apolitical disinclination to speculate about what
> causes major
> >changes. I think the last big debate over a
> question like that
> >among historians was maybe the Brenner (from Robert
> Brenner) debate
> >about the transiton from feudalism to capitalism.
>
> Yeah, well Brenner's a red. But the Brenner debate
> was, what, 25-30
> years ago, right?
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

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