--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
"At the level of fundamental theory agents are merely_personifications of social relations."
You mean "representatives" of social relations? What is the point of talking about agents stripped of their individual voice, their understanding, their moral passion?
BobW
>
>
> 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
>
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