David > Recent Status Updates

Very disappointing Dunning Reconstruction historiography, a racist twinge that didn't factor at into the Hicksian historiography Sheldon drew from, but I guess that's Old Virginia for you.

Repeats some of the bunk that the Populists were anti-semitic with reference to Hofstadter. Think Bridge is just hedging his bets with Hofstadter's as respect as it was at the time.

In Donnelly we have a clear picture of a common archetype among the American radical reformer: devoted to the reform cause, but with personal ambition in the pursuit of power.

Reproduces myths about Reconstruction and Grant Presidency through some passing references to corruption and bloody-shirt politics.

Written in very narrative form, early sympathetic work towards the Populists like Hicks but difficult to sort out where Kramer is taking artistic liberty with his descriptions.

Feel like Victor Berger hanging with the reformist gang like this

Rarely in American history can such horrible impacts on the course of history be ascribed to a single man as can that figure the American labor movement had in a certain Samuel Gompers.

Spinoza's chapter is almost absurdly small compared to others like Hobbes and Locke.

People who rate these early works so highly are glazing fr. It's good historiography and for seeing intellectual development but the writing is so bland and boring and so focused on literary cleverness to the detriment of everything else.

Marx really thought Stirner was a genuine ideological threat. I know Bauer would've been pissed he got like 30 pages and I'm still reading at 300 deep into Stirner.

You see the germs of the weaker parts of Poverty of Philosophy here, polemical satire over genuine philosophical analysis, but you also see the clear foundations of dialectical materialism and a deep critique of theory and thought for theory and thought's sake.

Thus far not sold on the "rethinking" of colonialism by the critique of James and Fanon. Scott does demonstrate that the James-Fanonian analysis of colonialism leads to a "vindicationist" view of colonialism that necessitates its overthrow through a "longing for total revolution," but I'm not sold on why we need to "rethink" that. Saying that it doesn't fit the postcolonial "problem-space" doesn't suffice.