'Missing Context'

Marxism is a dialectical system, which on some levels means that it is more interested in where we have been and where we are going than where we are at now. (Sometimes emphatically so.)

For this reason, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, when I was starting out as an undergrad, it had lately been at its most invasive and sometimes rather damaging when applied to the period (supposedly) prior to capitalism, slavery etc. 

 

Central to this were a group of French historians who operated under the banner of the Annales School, which included Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Duby, Braudel and Le Goff also became key figures.

By the mid-80s the discipline as a whole had seemingly put them back in their boîte, extracting useful research and insights, but no longer permitting their like to run riot around the past, particularly the late medieval and early modern past. 

 

Each new intake of historians at Cambridge was immediately notified who the ‘enemy’ were: those academics who would try to apply grand theoretical structures to reality, suppressing pesky facts and events wherever necessary.

Such thematic obsessions might be all right for the Anthropology department, but we would fight tooth and nail to keep them out of our faculty.

Back then we had the sense that the battle had been won, that we were the mop up operation. The irony is that the left-wing ultra-theoretical approach is now arguably more endemic within English-speaking academia than it ever was in the French, and thus — with apologies — more international. 

 

This has to have occurred in part because the USA has always had an antagonistic relationship with big, complex history (#oldworldroblems) and the surrounding popular culture relentlessly works to turn this into bite-sized, easily digestible chunks for local consumption, which in practice involves a lot of seepage into the wider world. 

 

Mass-market historical narratives are the perfect fodder for Marxists, because the peskier facts often come pre-suppressed. They work their peculiar magic, and suddenly the dead and the unborn appear to have greater 'rights' than the living, and one can feel absolved of the need for anything resembling a viable (and humane) plan for the here and now. 

 

And this fosters an environment where non-experts are actively encouraged to shout down (and shut down) people who bring deeper, more multidimensional perspectives to the table.

'Missing Context' is just the start of it.