[lbo-talk] "History of Ideas" A footnote was ...Threat

Philp Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Fri Nov 21 07:30:21 PST 2008


On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
>
> Philp Pilkington wrote:
> >
> > It
> > also calls into question the whole notion that the history of ideas can
> be
> > looked at ahistorical or synchronically/structurally as a series of
> > definitive "breaks"...
>
> [For another post: Scope and Limits of what we call "science." I would
> regard class struggle as _beyond_ the scope of anything that can
> usefully be labelled "science."]
>
> "History of Ideas," crudely, doesn't exist. The phrase implies (and this
> implication is confirmed by most texts attempting such history) that
> ideas have a history of their own. They do not. As Miles points out,
> ideas are social practices, not separable from the other social
> practices within which one finds them.
>
> Carrol
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

Third times a charm...

Well, I did say "from a strictly materialistic point of view" (i.e. ideas/"ideology" generated from a material base) as I thought that's what you were getting at. Actually, I don't think you can logically say which "way around" it works, it seems to me to be a dialectical relationship and thus beyond the realm of strict cause and effect.



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