Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> People organize their thoughts by stories. Anecdotes about criminality and other
> abuses helped to form those stories. The people who do theory CAN, but not
> necessarily do help to give those stories coherence. Yet Carroll is correct
> emphasized the importance of people on the ground doing person-to-person organizing,
> even Karl Marx never did that kind of organizing that Carroll is emphasizing.
The theory is, I think, of crucial importance to the people doing such organizing; one of their tasks is to simplify & paraphrase such theory to bring it into relationship with more concrete levels of understanding, and the more deeply they understand the fundamental theory the better prepared they will be to select from and/or simplify that theory in appropriate ways to fit particular situations or particular people in those situations.
At the level of fundamental theory agents are _merely_ personifications of social relations. Dogmatism is the belief that without translation that theory can guide practice. What one might call reverse-dogmatism is the belief that unless the theory can guide practice it is bad theory.
Carrol