I can’t remember when exactly but earlier this year, around xmas maybe I dunno, I finally finished Thompson’s mammoth Making book, which was fantabulous. More Thompson is on my summer reading list, once summer finally settles in. For now, some quotes, all from Herbert Gutman, many referencing or quoting Thompson.
Gutman quotes Thompson “There is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth or change or a culture” while at the same time “we should not assume any automatic, or over-direct correspondence between the dynamic of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life.” (In Gutman’s _Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America_, 33, the Thompson quotes are from the Making 97 and 192.)
Gutman writes that historical “[t]ransitions differ and depend upon the interaction between” groups who enter a condition or structure new for them and that structure or condition “at specific historical moments. But at all times there is a resultant tension. Thompson writes: “There has never been any single type of “the transition.” The stress of the transition falls upon the whole culture: resistance to change and assent to change arises from the whole culture. And this culture includes the systems of power, property-relations, religious institutions, etc., inattention to which merely flattens phenomena and trivializes analysis.” (74. The Thompson is from the “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” essay, 80.)
Gutman writes that “a great deal is misunderstood and lost by exclusive emphasis on national policy and on the intent of national leaders. (…) In another context the British historian E.P. Thompson has perceptively criticized such a perspective because it neglects “the tensions and lines of growth in movements which … have always been exceptionally responsive to problems of local social and industrial context.” (194, from an essay called “Homage to Tom McGuire in a volume edited by Briggs and Saville.)
Gutman quotes Braudel that “victorious events come about as the result of many possibilities,” and that “for one possibility which is actually realized, innumerable others have drowned. (…) [I]t is necessary to give them their place because the losing movements are forces which have at every moment affected the final outcome.” (67, I can’t find a citation for the Braudel quote, anyone know it?)
Gutman is more than a ventriloquist or quote hunter (*ahem*). He writes that “in studying the history of dependent American social classes” which he defines as “slaves and poor free blacks, immigrant and native-born wage earners, male and female blue- and white-collar workers, and union and nonunion laborers” “how they interpreted and then dealt with changing patters of economic, social, and political dependence and inequality becomes our major concern. Studying the choice working men and women made and how their behavior affected important historical processes” is what Gutman champions. (”Labor History and the “Sartre Question” in Power and Culture, 326.)
In an interview Gutman says that “the 1880s [were] a period of intense debate over the ways in which capitalism had transformed America” in response to which “[w]orking-class movements developed alternative institutions and beliefs. The cooperative, for example, was a very important central institution in that period. There were thousands of working-class cooperatives. Most of them failed, but that is not the point. If you look at the scale of enterprise, the cooperative was an appropriate response to wage-labor dependency. (…) The cooperatives were anti-capitalists but have often been treated as spurious and utopian working-class efforts. That’s a mistake.” (”Interview with Herbert Gutman” 335.)
On “labor histories (…) of the Old Left - such as the work of Philip Foner” Gutman says that “[a]t the core of the labor history of the Old Let was a critique of the traditional leadership of the American labor movement. This leadership, it was argued, consistently misled well-intentioned workers and thus was responsible for the failure of a sustained socialist movement to emerge in the United States. This “essentialist” critique was made not simply of the craft unions but of the earlier so-called utopian unions as well. The Knights of Labor, according to the Old Left, were as much bearers of false consciousness as the American Federation of Labor. This explanation of the absence of a socialist movement in the United States was inadequate and misleading. But it rested on a certain politics and a deterministic philosophy of history. (…) The new labor history also rests on a certain politics and is inspired by a distinctive philosophy of history. Much of it, in this country and in Western Europe, developed in response to and out of the decomposition of classical Marxism. One things of someone like Thompson. His work comes out of the Marxist tradition while it reacts against Stalinist historiography. This new labor history rejects the deterministic models that the labor history of the Old Left rested on” but is no less to the left. (342.)
“Much of the new labor history - at least the best of it - rejects what is essentially the Old Left’s version of the Whig fallacy of history. It refuses to look at a period of history simply as a precursor of the moment that we are currently living in. Freeing ourselves from the present in that way brings to life movements, brings to life a politics in the past, that were submerged by the crude presentism of the older labor history whether of the left or the center.” (343.)
In response to the question “why has there been no mass socialist movement in the United States?” Gutman responds “I don’t think that is a well-put historical question. We need to put aside notions that workers’ movements have developed properly elsewhere and in the United States they developed improperly (…) and then ask a set of very, very tough questions about what American workers actually thought and did - and why. Once we free ourselves of the notion that it should have happened in one particular way, then we stop looking for the reasons why it didn’t happen that way. If we don’t, then we end up offering explanations like the high rate of social mobility or that workers had the vote in America or a whole series of other single-factor explanations, as answers to what is a nonhistorical question.” (343.)
Gutman continues, “there is a Marxist version of the Whig fallacy. It comes from an essentialist view of workers or the working class, one that emphasizes a predetermined pattern of historical development.” (343.)
Asked what’s left of Marxism after the ideas of a direction or progress of history is left, Gutman responds “What is left when you clear away the determinist and teleological elements is good questions that direct your attention to critical ways of looking at ongoing historical processes. A fundamental contribution of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxist thinking is a set of questions having to do with the way in which one examines class relations and how they change, the way in which one examines the institutionalization of power, the way in which one examines popular oppositional movements, the way in which one examines the integration of subordinate or exploited groups into a social system. Those are some very useful questions. (…) Look at any given set of class relations. Most of the time subordinate populations live with their exploitation. They make adjustments. They create institutions to deal with inequality, to deal with the unequal distribution of scarce resources and wealth. They do so without seeking to transform the conditions that create or sustain their inequality. Then, under certain circumstances - none of them predictable - that acceptance is transformed into opposition.” (344.)
“One subject of great interest (…) given the collapse of deterministic models is the study of the conditions under which popular opposition emerges. (…) Once a movement has emerged, its tenaciousness, its successes, its limitations, are all questions for historians of popular movements, especially if we put aside notions of an elite, vanguard leadership.” (345.)
“In his argument with Stalinism and determinist Marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre put it very well. He said that the essential question for study - this is a paraphrase - is not what has been done to men and women but what men and women do with what has been done to them. That is also a Thompsonite formulation. (…) W.E.B. Du Bois argued for this approach when he wrote _Black Reconstruction_, and it is what C.L.R. James’s historical writings are about. One you surrender the fixed older forms of historical explanation and process, the future becomes open.” (346.)
“The way in which you examine a world people make is to show that world in formation (…) to examine a structural relationship, you cannot neglect the process by which that relationship was formed, how it developed. If you either ignore or misunderstand that process, then you can give almost any meaning you want to the relationship and to its constituent parts.” (353.)
[Note to self, revisit Kant on moral vs natural philosophy and try to map that in relation to debates about structure and agency]
damn quote hunter indeed. i’m sympathetic to the question of what is left of marxism when the teleological and determinist content is removed, and if such is sustainable. i think in the end it is destabilizing for the theories, hence the violent opposition of marxists and the obscurity (unfoundedness) of many post-marxist thinkers. i doubt i can back that up outside of prejudice though. I just saw some book by Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and was curious…
Comment by todd — May 8, 2007 @ 5:23 am
Poverty of Theory is definitely worth reading. Lately I’ve been reading the broader debates on the English New Left that it was part of, especially the sometimes bitter exchanges between Thompson and Perry Anderson. Together I think they are a pretty good, broad schooling in marxian debates over social structure and history, in which both make good points.
Also have been reading Thompson’s more directly political work from around 1960, where he tries to revive William Morris’s revolutionary strategy as a third alternative to the perennial ‘reform or revolution’. In the context of postwar Britain, the idea was that socialism may actually be growing within capitalism, and that the appropriate strategy for socialists was to identify where, defend and extend to and beyond the limits of the existing social structure, which would eventually trigger a political-economic crisis and make possible full-blown revolution. This was definitely a product of post-war boom conditions, and is much harder to conceive these days, but I can’t help but think it remains the most thinkable way a revolution could take place in a modern capitalist society.
Comment by Mike Beggs — May 8, 2007 @ 5:48 am
hi Todd, Mike,
Todd, I think I agree with you except that I don’t think the problems that result are serious if one has good politics (they’re pseudoproblems!), they become serious problems only for those who are already problematic (or, who have problems…). Which is to say, it’s a productive destabilizing and is a good thing.
Mike, can you give me the names of the stuff you’re reading? It all sounds great. I’ve run across a number of references in the U.S. labor history I’ve been starting to read a bit of (Gutman’s a good example) where people are basically like “whoa Thompson changed everything for us!” One of the things I’d eventually like to argue is that historical vs philosophical inquiry are both valuable modes of thought such that privileging exclusively theoretical reading is narrow/one-sided and contains an implied false dichotomy. Gutman says at some point that one of the good things about reading history is that it shows things taken for granted as actually contingent in origin and as things which can be got rid of, which is quite nice I thought. Theoretical work can have that effect too I think but is more likely to prepare one for the general idea - things are contingent etc - than to help one in imaginatively experiencing a time prior to a given taken for granted thing.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 8, 2007 @ 8:00 am
Who exclusively privileges a “theoretical reading”? Of course, it should be obvious that a purely empiricist approach is no better than this ostensibly “pure theory”!
Comment by Craig — May 8, 2007 @ 11:43 am
hi Craig,
I agree completely. I wasn’t clear. As for who privileges exclusive theoretical reading - many people in philosophy departments. Me, much of the time. At one point, my reading list was Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and secondary sources on those. That’s a relatively narrow list in terms of discipline or approach, particularly given the way I wanted to approach this stuff.
My point is not “yay historical and boo theoretical works.” I really like philosophy quite a bit, even love it. But lately I’ve been reading a lot more works of history and I’ve noticed that I think there are some comparable effects on occasion. (I also have a hard time changing gears, I feel like a manual transmission car with a bad clutch. Part of trying to think this through, find points of differences and similarities, is to see if I can’t make that shifting easier or at least understand it.) When I said “privileging exclusively theoretical reading [over historical reading] is narrow/one-sided and contains an implied false dichotomy” I had in mind that the reverse of that is also true, but I’m a lot less likely to do the latter than I am the former. Part of what I’ve found exciting about Ranciere and Thompson and now Gutman is that they read different stuff - archival materials and history books _and_ Althusser and Sartre. That’s awesome. I have no idea if that’s common for historians, I expect not, but in my (limited) experience, Ranciere and Foucault as philosophers who read history works and historical archives are much more rare than Thompson and Gutman are as historians who read philosophical works. (Not to make the historian/philosopher distinction overly neat. Also, I’m inclined to say that the relationship of each of these four to marxism or materialism - as a tradition of thought which doesn’t fit neatly into disciplinary boundaries - is relevant here but that may just be a statement of my pro-marxist prejudice. I certainly don’t have sufficient evidence to really argue the point. I also should admit that part of the stakes of what I’m trying to think through here _is_ a normative claim about what marxism/materialism should look like. At this point that too is primarily a prejudice or intuition rather than an argument.)
Trying to get clearer on what I mean… At some point Rorty and Habermas got into a kerfuffle over the (lack of) genre distinction between philosophy and literature. There’s problems with the debate but I remember the positive content being that there are positive effects to be had from all sorts of text but that at the same time it’s not clear that one kind of text provides a privileged access to one kind of effect. (Implied here in my head is a conflation of literature and history which I realize is something that needs an argument, but I don’t have one to make about it right now.) Maybe this is trivially true or banal, but it wasn’t to me. I got into philosophy initially because I was attracted to the idea of an archimdean point from which to look at and imaginatively re-order the world, and other academic disciplines. That’s a bad idea and doesn’t bear scrutiny, but in my (limited) experience is one which still alive in some philosophy departments in the US.
Saying “there are other ways to get the good things you get from philosophy” isn’t a dis on philosophy. It’s saying in part that well-balanced mental meals are good for the mind’s digestion. If you already knew, that’s awesome and I’m jealous, it’s still new-ish to me.
I’m also interested in trying to sort out what distinguishes different types of work by genre. Sorting books into types for appropriateness for academic departments is clearly a dull task, but I think one could still have something like a meaningful set of fuzzy-edged genre distinctions based on a taxonomy of the effects that books have. If we took a typical work each by Quine, Faulkner, and Thompson it’s fair to say the first will be philosophy, the second literature and the third history. Other works are harder to place - Kierkegaard often troubles the difference between the first two, Ranciere sometimes troubles the difference between the second and third and sometimes the first and third or all three. Personally I’m inclined to say that the difference may be as much a matter of how one reads as it is in the texts themselves, but I’m not at all sure. I’m rambling.
Here’s a new attempt to make the point I was fumbling for in the last line of my last comment:
I read Marx for the first time (the 1844 Manuscripts, which is - or which I read as - more a philosophical text than anything else) and among my responses was “capitalism has not always existed and it can be eliminated.” That response, however, was solely in terms of propositional content. The affective content, so to speak, was for a long time for me “capitalism is eternal and nothing can be done about it” because I couldn’t imagine anything like winning or a society after winning. This is in part because the only nontheoretical work I was reading that addressed this were (and I was reading them as) evocative depictions of the problem(s) of already established capitalism - Grapes of Wrath, stuff on massacres etc. Starting to read detailed historical works (and to some extent works of fiction though I think for me there’s something about the truth claims in historical works) about the historical processes by which capitalism came about was part of changing that for me, as was reading more detailed historical treatments about moments of intense class conflict involving agency on the part of workers. The propositional content didn’t change but the affective or experiential content did. (Come to think of it, that’s probably a better way to talk about the types of different works and stuff that I’ve been talking about here.) I think one can proceed from propositional to affective content or the reverse. I’m generally much more comfortable with the former than the latter, but my comfort with that can cause problems as I often take my holding of a proposition to mean I also have the attendant appropriate affective content. When I have affective content without attendant propositional content I’m much more likely to notice and driven to acquire the appropriate propositional content, partly due to some incoherent rationalist intuitions I think.
Anyhow, yes pure empiricism is no better than pure theory. It’s actually worse, because it obfuscates its theoretical or interpretive decisions. Much ‘theory’ also has at least some point where one could build a portal to empirical matters (though it might take a lot of work to do that building), I think any place where there’s nonconditional existential quantifier. Philosophy of logic or mathematics might have no empirical content such that it could be called truly ‘pure theory’, I’m not sure as I don’t know that stuff much at all.
More than you wanted to hear in response, I imagine. Sorry. I’m procrastinating from other work. I found writing this productive though, so thanks for provoking me to do so.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 8, 2007 @ 5:18 pm
While it is true that philosophy is not history, that is harly a criticism of philosophy! Rather than finding what you’re looking for in either of philosophy (a noted anti-historical discipline, especially in Anglo-America) or history (a noted anti-theoretical discipline, especially in Anglo-America), you might find what you’re looking for in parts of the social sciences, which for the most part encourage - or at least allow - theoretico-empirical work. (I’m thinking of parts of sociology, political science, or political economy - the Foucauldians and the feminists have been especially good at work of this sort.)
By the way, you should never write what you think other people want to hear or read - especially on blogs. Writing that panders to its audience is the worst and most superficial crap there is!
Comment by Craig — May 8, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
hi Craig,
I wasn’t making a criticism of philosophy. I was making a criticism of not reading anything but philosophy. Like I said, I’d make the same criticism of reading only history but that’s a lot less of a likelihood in my case. I’m not averse to the ahistorical qualities of analytic philosophy. I think it’s reasonable to say there are metahistorical or trans-historical constants (one of them being that which makes different histories all identifiable as histories, not unlike your point to Jodi about sovereignty recently). Insofar as that may be the case, work that isn’t historical is eminently appropriate to dealing with those things. This spring I took two history courses (my first history classes since high school and my first classes approximating to the social sciences since my second year of undergrad). I enjoyed them a lot for the general reasons you offer as recommendations, and I’m keen to do read more of that kind of work. I also recognize that Thompson and Gutman are quite famous for being really good historians who were part of changing directions of the field in some ways, such that claims about them are actually claims about really good history, not claims about history.
As for writing what other people want, I can’t even write what I want to read let alone what other people want to read. I write for me, especially on this blog, to get clear on things I want to get clear on or to jot down a thought I want to keep. That’s part of why I have a hard time finishing papers and things. Once I get far enough to be satisfied with the ideas I lose interest in revising. My comment about writing more than you wanted to read wasn’t about the substance of what I wrote but about it’s length. You wrote a two sentence remark and I responded with 6 or 9 paragraphs. I was recognizing that that length may be tedious and apologizing for that, but not for the content. I’m sorry if the length of what I write makes it boring, I’m not sorry if the substance of what I write makes it boring. The former is potentially correctable via good editing and comes closer to being objective in a way, the latter is ineliminable and much more relative.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 8, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
Hey Nate,
Fotunately most of that stuff is online, especially if you have access to the New Left Review archives through university.
The early writings around the time of Thompson’s break with the Communist Party in in the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. Archive here: http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/home_index.htm
Then check out the first 12 issues or so of NLR. After this Thompson had a falling-out with Perry Anderson who became the new main editor. A couple of years later the debate starts, with Anderson’s “Origins of the Present Crisis” and some articles by Tom Nairn. These were not directed at Thompson, but Thompson attacked them in Socialist Register, his new home. Anderson and Nairn replied in NLR. You can get a full list of the debate in Anderson’s 1992 book English Questions, in which some of his pieces are reprinted - but they’re all online in the NLR archive. The Socialist Register also has a full text archive here: http://socialistregister.com/
Also check out Thompson’s debate with Kolakowsi I think in 1972 and 73. I don’t think “The Poverty of Theory” is available online, but is essential reading. It’s aimed at British Althusserians and Althusser himself.
Also you could check out Perry Anderson’s book from the early 1980s, Arguments Within English Marxism. It’s an overview and engagement with Thompson’s work. By this time things were more conciliatory and eventually they were appearing on the same speaking platforms. I have lots of respect for both sides in the extended debate and I think there’s a lot to be learned from both.
Comment by Mike Beggs — May 8, 2007 @ 11:34 pm
me, i’m rationalist as fuck. i don’t have to cite sources, i’m just like sitting in my study and seeing the pure light of reason and shit, and i’m like yeah.
Comment by todd — May 13, 2007 @ 12:32 am
I’m into sitting by the fire wondering if I’m made of glass or if an evil genius has deceived me or if I’m really a brain in a vat.
Thanks for the refs Mike.
Comment by Nate — May 13, 2007 @ 5:13 am