On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:18:44 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> A recurrent topic on lbo-talk is the question of "Why is the Left so
>
> Given this fact (and it is a simple empirical fact of history),
> there is
> a second phenomenon that needs explantion. Why do so many left
> theorists
> devote themselves to a false and misleading effort to explain left
> weakness rather than attend to the crucial task of explaining
> occasional
> left strength.
I think the answer to that question is that most people who have become leftist theoreticians, came of age politically, during those relatively rarer periods when the left was in fact strong. I think it is a natural human tendency to assume that the conditions that obtained when one was maturing are the ones that normally exist. It requires the development of some degree of historical perspective to realize that such is not the case and that the historical norm is one of leftist weakness.
It's sort of like the people who were shocked by the Finkelstein and Churchill cases because they errneouslly assumed that American universities were normally protective of academic freedom. When in fact the historical norm in the US is that academic freedom is something that US universities have more often honored in the breach rather than in practice. To get some historical perspective on that one can read Thorstein Veblen's account of US universities from nearly a century ago, The Higher Learning in America. There, Veblen recounted the influence that business interests, business ideologies, and business models had over American academic life in the early 20th century. Which only shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Like many of the other more able academics of the time, Veblen himself was run out of the academy. A fate that at that befell such diverse people as the philosopher C.S. Peirce, and and the behavioral psychologist John B. Watson, as well as many numerous less well known people.
Jim F.
>
> Carrol
>
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