[lbo-talk] "pointing finger of the neighbourhood"

[Carrol Cox]

Jim Farmelant wrote:
> 
> And Skinner also explicitly defended that view in
> *Science & Human Behavior*,  *Beyond Freedom
> & Dignity* and other works.  Other thinkers
> have also rejected the idea of history as
> being the product of autonomous individuals
> as well.  The French Annalists were rather
> explicit about this as well as any number
> of French structuralist and post-structuralists
> like Foucault and Althusser.
> 
> In American social science, the sociologist
> Bruce Mayhew was very explicit on this
> subject as well.
> http://www.marxmail.org/archives/Mar99/mayhew.htm

The late University of Chicago literary scholar, Wayne Booth, once
remarked parenthetically that he did not believe in immortality because
he did not believe in the "atomic individual" assumed by the doctrine.
Now Booth was neityher a marxist nor a behaviorist, but though he never
developed the historical implicatins of his position, it clearly makes
nonsense of the kneejerk affirmation by B & Dog of the absolute power of
isolated & autonomous individuals, existing prior to and independently
of social relations, to make history as they choose.

Carrol