[lbo-talk] Hofstadter

[Seth Ackerman]

Doug Henwood 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?
>

Yeah, it's both of these things, especially what Dennis says. Only I 
wouldn't use the word 'apolitical' - I think there's a certain politics 
behind it. It's an emphasis on conveying people's subjective 
experiences, rather than explaining why things happened. One almost gets 
the feeling that 'explaining' is a form of imperialism, a way of doing 
violence to people's agency. It's very much influenced by Geertzian 
anthropology, where the goal is to reveal, with a minimum of 
interpretive intervention, a particular group's systems of meaning. 
Again, you can detect a certain politics there.

On Hofstadter, the whole idea of saying, for example, that there's a 
'paranoid style' in 'American politics' would elicit the response that 
this is an attempt at identifying  'national character,' which is 
essentialist, and effaces out-groups (who are often assumed a priori to 
take an oppositional stance) and generally a no-no.

Kelley mentioned the idea that history 'describes' while the social 
sciences 'explain.' There's some truth in that, but history wasn't 
always so militantly anti-explanation. The idea used to be that history 
explains, but it explains only a particular case, while the social 
sciences try to make generalized explanations over a wide range of cases 
(or all cases). Certainly historians 40 year ago did a lot more 
explaining than they do now.

Seth