Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
How to determine whether someone is one the major historians: There is a book called The Brenner Debate, with articles and responses discussing B's thesis about the rise of capitalism. If the people in your field name a major debate after you, such that it can be referred to by just your name, and publish many papers on your work, you are a major scholar. That is how it is determined. I was a professor, I know the gig. Louis may regard this sort of thing as meaningless, but that's how it is done. It'[s not subjective, just "my opinion," although it is my opibion that Brenner's work is deeply original, profoundly argued, and carefully researched. I don't question Blaut's activist credentials--although Brenner is an activist too. I have read a couple of Blaut's books. I sort of liked the one of nationalism (if there is only one), but thought it nothing really remarkable, just pretty good. What I have seen of this Eurocentric stuff does not impress me in the least. I don't mean to take a position on the underdevelopment thesis stuff: Blaut might be right. But Brenner's a major scholar. Blaut is just a professor who is a good activist. --jks In a message dated Wed, 27 Sep 2000 10:31:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Justin: You're kidding right? There is no question who has the higher level of schilarship. Brenner is one of the major historians of our time. Blaut is just another professor. He might be right, but he can't touch Brenner for scholarship. Actually, Jim Blaut is not just another professor. For the past 3 decades he has been an activist in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, upon whose central committee his wife serves. As far as being one of the major historians of our time, I am not sure how one determines that. If it was Heineken beer, you can look at the label and see all the awards it has won. Or if it was country music, you can go by the awards people like Tim McGraw have accumulated. Do they have something like this for historians? Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
I don't think that Justin's test should be accepted uncritically. Weren't there debates about the Bell Curve? His test might have been somewhat valid in the past -- perhaps even in the time of the Brenner Debate -- but now with big $$$ promoting hacks . [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How to determine whether someone is one the major historians: There is a book called The Brenner Debate, with articles and responses discussing B's thesis about the rise of capitalism. If the people in your field name a major debate after you, such that it can be referred to by just your name, and publish many papers on your work, you are a major scholar. That is how it is determined. I was a professor, I know the gig. Louis may regard this sort of thing as meaningless, but that's how it is done. It'[s not subjective, just "my opinion," although it is my opibion that Brenner's work is deeply original, profoundly argued, and carefully researched. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
I wrote: Brenner clearly went out on a limb to attack the D-of-U school. And Blaut attacks back, also going out on a limb. I won't say which of these two has higher levels of scholarship. It seems to me that both "bend the stick" a little too far in an effort to make it straight (i.e., the exaggerate their positions, the way lawyers do in court). Justin writes: You're kidding right? There is no question who has the higher level of schilarship. Brenner is one of the major historians of our time. Blaut is just another professor. He might be right, but he can't touch Brenner for scholarship. One reason I don't say who has higher levels of scholarship is because pen-l already hashed this issue to death. Another reason is that I really don't like academic pecking orders (unlike my friend Paul K). In economics, as in most fields, there are "Big Names" who run "Big Name Departments" and get published in the "Big Name Journals" and get Big Grants. Of course, these folks (mostly male and white, BTW) are the ones who call the ideological tune of the profession. They are the ones who define which of the younger generation of economists become the new "Big Names," so that there's a vicious circle. (Part of the Big Name phenomenon is that works by previous generations are ignored, too, so that the Big Names can reproduce some of their results without attribution. In this perspective, Mankiw seems original.) But the "minor" names of the minor researchers can often be much more profound, especially once they get tenure and don't have to prove their political correctness to the Big Name crowd. Some of the best research gets done by the professors who are forced to teach undergraduates for a living and thus have to make their research relevant. Anyway, isn't _my_ research the best? No! it's all very subjective, especially in a non-science like economics. (In a real science, the new classical economists would have been laughed off the stage.) Today the LA TIMES dubbed Heberto Padilla (who just died) the "leading poet of Cuba." Aside from the political agenda of such a labelling (he was anti-Castro), how could anyone say that anybody is the "best poet"? Since economics is a form of poetry (relying heavily on metaphors, called "models") and history also involves a lot of subjectivity, I sneer at this kind of academic elitism. Btw, good lawyers do not exaggerate their positions. Okay, I'll restate it. A lawyer states his or her client's case (where the client might be the "people") as clearly as possible, leaving out or downplaying or reinterpreting as much information or reasoning as possible that could undermine that case. A lawyer uses rhetorical tricks, too. (In the case where I was on the jury, the defense lawyer, slipped in the phrase "of course" right before the sentence "the issue is whether or not the defendant was driving the car.") If that's not exaggeration, you're using a different dictionary. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
Louis writes: Yeah, there's a new Brenner debate goin' on as well. Mostly people refuting his NLR article on the imminent collapse of capitalism, just as they refuted his earlier articles claiming some kind of privileged status for the rise of capitalism in Great Britain. Brenner didn't claim that capitalism was about to collapse. Nor did he claim that GB was "privileged." (To over-use my previous analogy, it's like saying that Typhoid Mary was privileged, because she spread the disease to everyone else.) Louis reproduces one of his previous posts: For my money, the most succinct statement of the Brenner thesis can be found in the initial article of "The Brenner Debate," ... it states that England was the site of an exceptional economic transformation in the late 15th century. Elsewhere successful peasant revolts, especially in France, consolidated their control over small and medium sized farms. These plump and happy self-sustaining freeholders, relieved from the pressure to compete, produced food for their own needs, and a surplus for the local market. They were the hippies of their day. The French peasants in Brenner's story were only _relatively_ privileged compared to the English peasants. The hippie rhetoric is out of line. All it tells me is that Louis doesn't like Brenner. But in England they were defeated. With this defeat, English landlords gained control over 70-75 percent of the land, leased large parcels to capitalist tenants who then employed newly landless peasants as wage laborers. Under marketplace pressure, these capitalist farmers--the Monsantos of their day--introduced new technologies to make profits, including convertible husbandry systems ... The key for Brenner, however, was the existence of exploitative class relations. The English countryside was, as we used to say at Goldman-Sachs in the 1980s, lean and mean. again, this rhetoric is obscuring the argument. It's implying (without actually saying) that RB was equating the English capitalists farmers to Monsanto or Goldman-Sachs, which is obviously absurd. It's an effort to reject RB's views by making fun of them, instead of contesting his facts or logic. All it tells me is that Louis doesn't like RB. Once agriculture was transformed, leanness and meanness diffused out into the rest of English society, which then became a highly productive economic machine firing on all 8 cylinders, just like Reaganite America. Once you could put food on the table in sufficient quantities, the English ants could get busy and race ahead of all the European grasshoppers, especially the fun-loving French. this simply continues the same rhetorical trick. Brenner writes: "It seems, moreover, that agricultural improvement was at the root of those developmental processes which, according to E. L. Jones, had allowed some 40 per cent of the English population to move out of agricultural employment by the end of the seventeenth century, much of it into industrial pursuits. Obviously, English industrial growth, predominantly in cloth, was in the first instance based on exports, spurred by overseas demand. Yet such export-based spurts were common in Europe throughout the middle ages and the early modern period; but previously none had been able to sustain itself." Once this powerful growth engine is in place, colonial trade can be used to make it go even faster. But you have to have the proper engine first. By analogy, if you use hydrogen fuel in a dragster, you can easily go a quarter-mile in under 6 seconds. But if you put that same fuel into a Volkswagen beetle, you won't get there much faster than if you were using plain old gasoline. So gold and silver from Peru and Mexico was the fuel and England was the dragster. Portugal would have been a Yugo. This analogy makes sense to me. (I didn't know I had borrowed it from Louis.) In "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared," (in Aston-Philpin, "Brenner Debate"), Patricia Croot and David Parker argue that France was just as lean and mean as England, if not more so. Now this is a valid way of arguing, but the phrase "lean and mean" conceals more than it reveals. It's quite possible that the two countries were "lean and mean" in different ways. We're talking about the social relations of capitalism here, not some simple competition among countries. Large-scale farms were not even required for technological improvements on English farms, they say. Not only was manuring and new crops innovated on smaller farms, they also got into convertible husbandry. Such innovations were necessary for the survival of smaller farms that lacked the capital for large sheep flocks, the typical cash generator of 16th century England. They also insist that the French peasant was not that carefree and independent. Of course, RB never said they were "carefree and independent." It's been a long time since I read RB's
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
OK, maybe there is something wrong with the Big Name structure of academia: I wouldn't dispute that. Part of my point is that Brenner is a Big Name. Not all Big Names are any good: I know lots who aren't. But Brenner is a Big Name who is first rate. part of the way you can tell this is that he is debated as a person with views that are not merely important artifacts but might be true and are deep and valuable. How the hell else you can determine who is any good other than by reference to the views of the people who know best, I don't know. I mean, you can try to do it for yourself, but if your standards deviate from the experts' views, either you are a crank or you have to create new standards (as Marx did) that gathers new group of experts. The point that people disagree about who the experts are does not vitiate the standard: disagreement does not mean nobody's right, just that not everybody's right. Thus if certain right wingers take racial eugenics seriously, we differ because we think that they are rwong and by even thinking that they expose themselves to be pseudoscientists and cranks. Nuff said: I'll still take Brenner over Blaut as a scholar any old day. On the underdevelopment issue, I say nothing. --jks In a message dated Wed, 27 Sep 2000 12:31:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I wrote: Brenner clearly went out on a limb to attack the D-of-U school. And Blaut attacks back, also going out on a limb. I won't say which of these two has higher levels of scholarship. It seems to me that both "bend the stick" a little too far in an effort to make it straight (i.e., the exaggerate their positions, the way lawyers do in court). Justin writes: You're kidding right? There is no question who has the higher level of schilarship. Brenner is one of the major historians of our time. Blaut is just another professor. He might be right, but he can't touch Brenner for scholarship. One reason I don't say who has higher levels of scholarship is because pen-l already hashed this issue to death. Another reason is that I really don't like academic pecking orders (unlike my friend Paul K). In economics, as in most fields, there are "Big Names" who run "Big Name Departments" and get published in the "Big Name Journals" and get Big Grants. Of course, these folks (mostly male and white, BTW) are the ones who call the ideological tune of the profession. They are the ones who define which of the younger generation of economists become the new "Big Names," so that there's a vicious circle. (Part of the Big Name phenomenon is that works by previous generations are ignored, too, so that the Big Names can reproduce some of their results without attribution. In this perspective, Mankiw seems original.) But the "minor" names of the minor researchers can often be much more profound, especially once they get tenure and don't have to prove their political correctness to the Big Name crowd. Some of the best research gets done by the professors who are forced to teach undergraduates for a living and thus have to make their research relevant. Anyway, isn't _my_ research the best? No! it's all very subjective, especially in a non-science like economics. (In a real science, the new classical economists would have been laughed off the stage.) Today the LA TIMES dubbed Heberto Padilla (who just died) the "leading poet of Cuba." Aside from the political agenda of such a labelling (he was anti-Castro), how could anyone say that anybody is the "best poet"? Since economics is a form of poetry (relying heavily on metaphors, called "models") and history also involves a lot of subjectivity, I sneer at this kind of academic elitism. Btw, good lawyers do not exaggerate their positions. Okay, I'll restate it. A lawyer states his or her client's case (where the client might be the "people") as clearly as possible, leaving out or downplaying or reinterpreting as much information or reasoning as possible that could undermine that case. A lawyer uses rhetorical tricks, too. (In the case where I was on the jury, the defense lawyer, slipped in the phrase "of course" right before the sentence "the issue is whether or not the defendant was driving the car.") If that's not exaggeration, you're using a different dictionary. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
I thought my conclusion was obvious, so that I didn't have to say it. Maybe I'd choose Brenner over Blaut on one specific issue (say, the underdevelopment issue). But I'd never rank them in general terms. Maybe one is right about one issue, but the other is right about another. More likely, they're both wrong and both right in different ways, so that their perspectives need to be synthesized. One of the "modernist" habits that we should avoid is hierarchical thinking. That's the fallacy behind measuring IQ as a single number. At 03:31 PM 9/27/00 -0400, you wrote: OK, maybe there is something wrong with the Big Name structure of academia: I wouldn't dispute that. Part of my point is that Brenner is a Big Name. Not all Big Names are any good: I know lots who aren't. But Brenner is a Big Name who is first rate. part of the way you can tell this is that he is debated as a person with views that are not merely important artifacts but might be true and are deep and valuable. How the hell else you can determine who is any good other than by reference to the views of the people who know best, I don't know. I mean, you can try to do it for yourself, but if your standards deviate from the experts' views, either you are a crank or you have to create new standards (as Marx did) that gathers new group of experts. The point that people disagree about who the experts are does not vitiate the standard: disagreement does not mean nobody's right, just that not everybody's right. Thus if certain right wingers take racial eugenics seriously, we differ because we think that they are rwong and by even thinking that they expose themselves to be pseudoscientists and cranks. Nuff said: I'll still take Brenner over Blaut as a scholar any old day. On the underdevelopment issue, I say nothing. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
I have an additional point: one can't rank different people in terms of "scholarship," since there are different kinds of scholarship for different purposes. Someone who's trying to argue for a very specific point of history will mobilize all sorts of primary sources. On the other hand, someone who's trying to present a big picture might use secondary sources. Maybe this contrasts Brenner vs. Perry Anderson or Brenner vs. Blaut. I would much rather discuss specific points of what's wrong or right (in terms of facts, logic, ethics, how to achieve goals, etc.) than to rank different individuals. I wrote: I thought my conclusion was obvious, so that I didn't have to say it. Maybe I'd choose Brenner over Blaut on one specific issue (say, the underdevelopment issue). But I'd never rank them in general terms. Maybe one is right about one issue, but the other is right about another. More likely, they're both wrong and both right in different ways, so that their perspectives need to be synthesized. One of the "modernist" habits that we should avoid is hierarchical thinking. That's the fallacy behind measuring IQ as a single number. At 03:31 PM 9/27/00 -0400, you wrote: OK, maybe there is something wrong with the Big Name structure of academia: I wouldn't dispute that. Part of my point is that Brenner is a Big Name. Not all Big Names are any good: I know lots who aren't. But Brenner is a Big Name who is first rate. part of the way you can tell this is that he is debated as a person with views that are not merely important artifacts but might be true and are deep and valuable. How the hell else you can determine who is any good other than by reference to the views of the people who know best, I don't know. I mean, you can try to do it for yourself, but if your standards deviate from the experts' views, either you are a crank or you have to create new standards (as Marx did) that gathers new group of experts. The point that people disagree about who the experts are does not vitiate the standard: disagreement does not mean nobody's right, just that not everybody's right. Thus if certain right wingers take racial eugenics seriously, we differ because we think that they are rwong and by even thinking that they expose themselves to be pseudoscientists and cranks. Nuff said: I'll still take Brenner over Blaut as a scholar any old day. On the underdevelopment issue, I say nothing. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: 8 Eurocentric Historians
In a message dated 9/26/00 6:12:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Brenner clearly went out on a limb to attack the D-of-U school. And Blaut attacks back, also going out on a limb. I won't say which of these two has higher levels of scholarship. It seems to me that both "bend the stick" a little too far in an effort to make it straight (i.e., the exaggerate their positions, the way lawyers do in court). You're kidding right? There is no question who has the higher level of schilarship. Brenner is one of the major historians of our time. Blaut is just another professor. He might be right, but he can't touch Brenner for scholarship. Btw, good lawyers do not exaggerate their positions. Bad lawyers do it all the time, but a plain understated theory of the case is always the best approach. The best lawyers I have seen all employ this approach. --jks (a lawyer)
