``By embracing a totalising, but never fully totalised, philosophy of history, I am able to strive for a coherent, comprehensive and credible account of the complexity of contemporary experience. I stress the word 'strive'. No longer can grand narratives be prescribed from above, as they have been for much of the history of the world. Our stories must be forged from below.'' Helena Sheehan
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It was an interesting essay. It needed a brief mention of Hegel. It's a rarefied topic because US history departments are not into Hegel, the history of ideas, or Marxism of any sort.
I got into to this trying to work on my `understanding Strauss' project. What Strauss did was go back through a sequence of the history of ideas starting with Spinoza and reconstructed a non-standard story. The standard story is beginning around the time of Descartes and Spinoza, most scientific and academic disciplines and their master narratives were formed and its been progress ever since. Strauss followed a dialectic between central ideas of the enlightenment and the reactions to the enlightenment, the counter-enlightenment.
Although he played around with a lot of variations, he never reached too far beyond simple binaries like reason v. belief, fact v. value. The consequences have a lot of traces into the whole neoconservative movement where of course the neocons don't need facts, because they make facts. They are not nazis, most of them, but they share this fevered sense of predestination that without checking in on empiricism, they were meant to rule. Once you get into this mind set, it is pretty easy to see the connections with triumphant Capitalism, captains of industry, masters of finance and so on, the whole US imperial project.
CG