Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jul 18, 2010, at 2:26 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > So why not respond just
> > to the abstract of this article?
>
> Man's first disobedience? How boring! Who cares about a first anything? That was so long ago. Why are we disobedient today? Must be some use for it! First has nothing to do with anything.
Not borsing; it's probably quite interesting. But no one can read everything. Every so often I insist that posters should read Wood, Postone, Albritton, & Tamas. A few do. Most don't. So? Since when does subbing to LBO put your reading schedule under the jurisdiction of Carrol Cox? And on what basis does one argue that the question of histroical analysis and its methods of less importance than crime rates in the South?
One purpose of Abstracts is to allow the reader to judge whether or not to read the whole. In this case, the Abstract as such seemed important; but it did not make a case for the importance of the whole article, or the relative importance (to a dozen or so other topics taking the same amount of time). I would give _some_ time to some other poster's reports on his/her visit to the whole text.
Everyone makes this sort of judgment that a given unread text is best left unread. I could give a list here of 100 articles on PL which I found interesting and the reading of which eventually led back to what I (and the editor of Milton Studies) thought was a new perspective on PL. But a hundred more articles and books on PL have been written since. Why should anyone on this list read any of it?
You really have to face the reality that not a single person in the world today has read or will read even all the essential books and articles.
Carrol
>
> Doug
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