Apprehension

I'm giving my presentation on chapter 1 of Capital in about an hour. I'm apprehensive. The theory-heads in the seminar, most of them lit kids, are not to be trifled with. Further, as I learned last time, careful phrasing, an impeccable rhetoric, is key. We'll see how it goes.

Latest navel-gazing history thought: historians are poorly equipped to take theories seriously, this despite my earlier insistence that everything we do is (at least implicitly) informed by theory. The reason for this is that we study how ideas arose in context and fell out of favor in context. We study the historicity of things like "reason" and "justice" and, especially, "truth." Again, implicitly, we think that people in the past were wrong. Granted, they might not have been wrong at the time: when wealth was measured in bullion, maybe the major powers of Europe were right to think that there was only so much out there, so the proper economic role of the state was to grab up as much silver and gold as possible. Nevertheless, we now think that they were wrong: wealth can be created (think of "intellectual property") and those poor 17th-century saps were just lost in the dark on that.

My point is that even when confronted with really compelling, recently-written theory, historians are wary, because we know that this theory will be just another footnote in 20, 50, or 100 years. Maybe that's why so many historians "hate theory"; they sense how fragile and ephemeral it all is and they pretend that they can operate without it (I still think that they just replace formal, codified theory with informal, unwritten theory and proceed with business-as-usual in that case.)

Anyway, it makes taking classes in other disciplines harder. I think some of those lit and political science and philosophy kids still harbor some hope for truth.