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The underlying critique of the history discipline Rich is referring to here (follow the underlying quote tweets) reminds me of an incident from graduate school. It’s a seminar of first or second year grad students lead by a man known as a rather methodologically starchy ...
2/ historian, Gordon S. Wood. The topic of sociology is raised and we graduate students are all pretty clear that while sociologists must do some good things it’s a field encrusted in theory and probably a good bit of ideology.
3/ Wood asks a few questions, presses on a few points. And it becomes clear pretty soon that none of us can even define what sociology is as a discipline other than its being more theoretical or focused on society or maybe being more quantitative.
4/ Wood’s method was not normally Socratic but this turned out to be a painfully adept employment of it. In any case, it was and remains a good example of the dangers of critiquing a field you don’t seem to know much about, especially if the strength of your critique ...
5/ seems to be built precisely on not knowing things. Of course we were smartasses only a year or two out of college while this guy seems to hold a professorship somewhere.
