Power users and mods just keep repeating: “History is not a science because culture (i.e., god) is all-powerful. We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories.”
I wish everyone in that thread a big
The OP is transparently there to start an argument. They have mostly good points, but that’s always a dicey means of communicating and it’s going to fall flat (as it did) if you take it to a niche community that doesn’t have a real fault line on the matter. OP is going to a small circle of history students, history academics, and dudes who watch 20-hour videos on Rome and asking “why aren’t you idiots Marxists?” – no shit there is no worthwhile response.
Of course the comments are obnoxious, and you also have mods in there doing the classic “we don’t want to talk about this so we’re going to call you uncivil for disagreeing” bit. A disaster of a thread all around.
I will never log off.
The eternal contradiction
We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories
Unless of course it’s anti-sovietism, neoclassialism, some half garbled form of zombie Keynesianism and of course the guiding star; white identitarianism
Then we reecive the blessing of all-mighty culture (i.e. god)
that sub is usually ok, but the annoying thing about it is if you write a massive wall of text and use whatever sources, you can say whatever unhinged shit and it’s treated like the word of god.
They just keep saying the same shit over and over again. I thought I was crazy to write that liberal historians have regressed to a pre-Enlightenment state and just replaced “god” with “culture,” but r/askhistorians is saying “yeah, that’s actually exactly what we do, and we’re proud of it!”
No scientist would ever say “it’s impossible to understand things,” but it’s apparently a totally normal take from libs to conclude that there are no patterns to human behavior and everything is just individualistic, subjective, and random.
interpreting history from a materialist lens makes you ‘biased’ or ‘ideological’, which is bad. historians are supposed to be like a machine, take input in and produce a compiled output of all the facts.
source: my favorite unbiased historian, renowned for writing a biography of Churchill where he said he did nothing wrong
i’ve never seen someone so pressed about intersectional theory. the AH people made a misstep in not identifying their practice as such but it’s pretty damn obvious.
they also misidentify why history isn’t science: because it’s literature and interpretation. it is not a science in which evidence cannot compel a conclusion, identifying the constant relitigation of history as a scientific process embarrasses the historian’s writing talent and expects there to be an attainable truth at the end of the process.
I’m getting a Master’s in history and I have no desire to read all that.
Too fucking bad! You’re gonna read it, and you’re gonna like it! Now START READING!
What historical period are you specializing in?
Medieval Europe. Doing my thesis on the crusades but I might abandon that path after years of floundering.
You could be grover furry 2.0 and spend time investigating the history of the Soviet union and become infamous in the historical world as a funny bit.
All serious though best of luck with your thesis dude!
Oof I hate their need to pad word count. So much of that part 1/2 guy’s response could have been omitted. Also the down votes, hoes mad.
This is a bit outside my experience with academic historians although the ones I run with are of a certain stripe. Then again I am not in a disciplinary feild like history and tend to disregard when my historian friends assert diciplinarity boundaries and norms because it feels like putting on a straight jacket that won’t help me with my work as a grad.
It’s 100% a bourgeois thing to say “this is physics and this is history, and they can’t interact.”
I didn’t read through the thread very thoroughly to get their take but it seems that even if culture was inhibiting to understanding history that an awareness of culture could mitigate this. Are there not theories of culture? I’m sure an anthropologist could help. I don’t see why it’s so damning lol other disciplines have learned to deal with this and the historians that aren’t doing this are certainly able to.
I mean, sociology is a field and ideology is a subject of study, it just so happens that sociology has maybe the strongest Marxist skew (in terms of proportion of adherents) of any academic field, which is a real
moment for these dipshits saying culture is a confounding variable for historical materialism as though it is an uncaused cause (hint: it isn’t)its
so this sub selects for the most annoying, racist bourgeois historians. the moderator who gave OP a long response revealed their attitude toward history as non-scientific due to “culture”. they backed this up by citing gender norms on clothing color being different in different areas. which is horrible evidence since gender as a concept was very similar in the two examples of England and Italy
I mean historical materialism has already been expanded to the idea of the school of global historical materialism by neo Marxists, who continue on from Marx like Samir Amin, if that’s what OP is looking into
In this reconstruction, the importance of developing an analysis of culture and its function in historical development is equaled only by the difficulty of the task. Its importance derives from the fact that the dominant bourgeois mainstream in the social sciences was initially founded on an overdy culturalist philosophy of history, and then, when this philosophy gradually lost its strength of conviction, took refuge in agnosticism, refusing any search for the general beyond the specific and, thus, remaining under the spell of culturalism. Vulgar Marxist theories are not fundamentally different. The thesis of the so called two roads tries unsuccessfully to reconcile the concepts of historical materialism with Eurocentric prejudice about the exceptional nature of European history; while the thesis of the “five stages” avoids the difficulty by minimizing specific traits to the point of artificially reducing the diversity of different historical paths to the mechanical repetition of the European schema.
The reconstruction of social theory along truly universalist lines must have as its base a theory of actually existing capitalism, centered on the principal contradiction generated by the worldwide expansion of this system.
This contradiction could be defined in the following way: the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. The material base of the tendency toward homogenization is the continuous extension of markets, in breadth as well as in depth. The commodity and capital markets gradually extend to the entire world and progressively take hold of all aspects of social life. The labor force, at first limited in its migrations by different social, linguistic, and legal handicaps, tends to acquire international mobility.Good quote. I am too tired to say more and maybe start an argument, but I this quote reads very agreeable to me.
No Reddit for me please, I’m trying to quit…
Anytime anyone tries to describe another field of study as a ‘science’ I want to bash my head in and then do theirs for good measure.
We can’t even decide what makes science ‘science’.
Whoever funds scientific research determines what science is
Marie-Madeleine Davy would very proud of this discussion
I’m not going to explain it, Im just going to smugly chuckle at my cleverness
you’re not arguing for grand theories right?
I’m arguing for historical materialism.
I’ve understood hm to be a method not a theory, no?
The underlying theory would be material causality?
Well, dialectical materialism, but yeah
wouldn’t it be both?
