the conservative view of history

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the withering away of the state seems a lot more likely to produce a dystopia than the obverse, at least to me. tech bro philosopher-kings, panopticon societies, etc.

you know you're onto something there the state has been undertheorised in marxist theory. Lenin's revisions of it beingan apparatus are not really sufficient. it's not just a machine is it. the machine can be dormant but the inputs can still feed into it and the outputs can still receive.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I am trying to make an opening in theory to encapsulate the conservative tendancies of the left as well.

good vs bad nations.

Well yeah, there are plenty on the left who think this way, too - they just tend to like the countries that conservatives hate and vice-versa. (Edit: although maybe that's exactly the point you were making?)
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I thought this might have something to do with the likes of Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson.

Who would you count as conservative historians? Is there a conservative school, generation or tendency we are referring to?

It seems to me we are in a very good period for historical writing of all tendencies - such as, say, Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher or Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
personal as opposed to impersonal domination. the naturalisation of personal domination as transhistorical.

I'd be interested to hear you enlarge on this.

I mean, if the idea is that on one hand you have the traditional idea of Great (and Terrible) Men being the prime movers of history, and on the other hand an explanation totally in terms of impersonal things like the distribution of resources (the Jared Diamond approach), class struggle, Spenglerian culture-cycles or whatever, then isn't there room for a bit of both?

To take a pertinent example: you could say that the social-cultural-economic conditions in the USA since 2008, or maybe 2001, made it possible or even likely that "someone like Trump" would become POTUS. The trouble with this argument is that no-one is "like Trump", and I find it hard to imagine how anyone without his very particular personal characteristics could have come from nowhere (politically speaking), embarked on a political career aged nearly 70 and become president five minutes later.

Of course, if the general conditions and mood in the USA hadn't been what they were then Trump presumably either wouldn't have won, or wouldn't have run in the first place, so it does go both ways. Significant people can influence the social landscape, and the social landscape shapes the people that grow up in it, so maybe the personal vs impersonal view is to an extent a false dichotomy?
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well if you see trump only in terms of the US maybe. but we seem to be living in a global reactionary period. all the uprisings of 2008-2012 failed or were recuperated into the state machine. not just occupy, greece, Egypt, Syria Spain Italy etc etc etc.

Like history is comprised of jump cuts and crescendos right. like i said we live in extremely complex systems with all sorts of emergent properties. which is why i don't get the kind of middle class fear of revolution being unpredictable. well we know so little even in non-revolutionary situations. how do you expect us to predict? all this tends to be is i like being a professional.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
who knows what would have happened if the uprisings spread to Russia and Putin was overthrown? none of us tbh.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
who knows what would have happened if the uprisings spread to Russia and Putin was overthrown? none of us tbh.

That's an interesting thing to ponder but it's hard to think of a country where that's less likely to happen. I'd almost expected it to happen in China before it happened in Russia.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you say that but there are a lot of yellow unions in democratic turkey you know. I think Vlad's authoritarianism is not as out of the ordinary as people make it out to be.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's basically the far right colonising liberal democracy right. democracy is identified with majoritarianism, subversion and disinformation. but actually it is still democracy, however much contorted it may be. cos democracy ain't an ideal unto itself, it's a mechanism by which specific social relations in a specific period are guuarded right.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the far right realised that they couldn't go full scale palingenesis. they had to appeal to that grey zone where centre rightism shades into actual blood and soil racism.

this is why, compared to most of the classical left their praxis is more in tune with contemporary trends.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Is there a conservative school, generation or tendency we are referring to?

well

Thomas Carlyle

Thucydides as opposed to Herotodus

Austrian School as opposed to Frankfurt School

The Practice of History as opposed to What Is History

i haven't read anything by Niall Ferguson but I have to imagine yes. Victor Davis Hanson.

but idk as we're specifically talking about historians so much as like the title says "view of history", as it informs one's world view

the why and the how of history - why do people do the things they do, why do events occur as they do - rather than the what

historians and historiography play a large if usually indirect role in framing that view, outlining its boundaries.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
also there's overlap between a conservative view of history and historians who are conservatives but they're not the same thing

you could say the same thing for a "liberal view of history", "Marxist view of history", etc

it's a map is not the territory situation
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
also there's overlap between a conservative view of history and historians who are conservatives but they're not the same thing

you could say the same thing for a "liberal view of history", "Marxist view of history", etc

it's a map is not the territory situation

yeh I'm not so interested in what historians individual convictions are. Hobsbawm and EH Carr were relatively conservative compared to the situationists understanding of history for instance.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Tangential hit and run post that I'll try and develop later - I'll admit that disliking Corbyn and his associates as much as I do has pushed me back into more Conservative positions. Interesting to observe in oneself, it's like hairs coming out of your nostrils as you get older - "Hmmm, maybe Alistair Campbell isn't that bad after all".
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
couldn't go full scale palingenesis
they saw what happened with cats like Pinochet and the Greek colonels. or the KKK here. their brain trust types ain't stupid like the rank + file.

it's not exactly new - David Duke was onto this tip 30+ years ago, for one - but elide the jackboots with nice haircuts, code the bigot ugliness into plausible deniability.

those mfers have now lucked into a period highly receptive to their views, the last decade plus having been a Steve Bannon wet/fever dream and all.

the truly gross part is people never learn (incidentally this is why history is important) so you can get away with slight variations on basically the same playbook over + over.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
haven't read anything by Niall Ferguson but I have to imagine yes. Victor Davis Hanson.

but idk as we're specifically talking about historians so much as like the title says "view of history", as it informs one's world view

the why and the how of history - why do people do the things they do, why do events occur as they do - rather than the what

historians and historiography play a large if usually indirect role in framing that view, outlining its boundaries.

LOL, go and stand in the corner, Craner...
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Tangential hit and run post that I'll try and develop later - I'll admit that disliking Corbyn and his associates as much as I do has pushed me back into more Conservative positions. Interesting to observe in oneself, it's like hairs coming out of your nostrils as you get older - "Hmmm, maybe Alistair Campbell isn't that bad after all".

these days i just ignore jezza tbh. but then ive never thought electoral politics really meant anything, even when i was a quietist liberal.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
what gets me riled is syria, but tbh i think a lot of that, these days at least, is the left being about 40 years out of date with history. so you just get anti-imperialism when its still believed that it is not in russia's interest in crushing middle eastern autonomous movements. But despite their tensions in Syria US and russia have been working towards same goal. this is just as bad as the turkish conservatives who think ISIS is an american creation. people are really politically uninformed these days where they can't even get basic facts correct. but i guess that is how the spectacle rules, these days.
 
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