Information on Druids

[pemerton]

Ferratus, I'm not quite sure who I'm arguing with here or what exactly the position is that you're coming from, but anyway, some responses.

The whole idea that the hand mill creates feudalism and the steam mill creates capitalism is indeed largely discredited (except for lingering baby boomers in sociology departents.)

As I said, few historians today accept Marx's theory of history.

The very idea that we are largely determined by collectively unconscious societal movements (materialistically or not) didn't have much truck when I was a history undergrad.

This is not what the theory of ideology is, as found in the early Marx and developed by the Frankfurt school, Habermas etc. It's hard to give actual examples of contemporary (neo-)Marxist analysis of particular institutions or phenomena, as it violates the board's "no politics" rule, but it is not regarded by all as discredited. If you want to look at a recent book that I think usefully deploys more-or-less Marxist notions, try Scott Veitch's "Law and Irresponsibility".

What you actually find if you look at history is that nuanced and sophisticated ideas can exist in all times and places. Sure we discover new things, even develop tools for reasoning such as the scientific method. However, we are just as much determined by our conscious mind as our unconcious.

Whether or not this is true has little bearing on the explanatory utility of the Marxist theory of ideology, which is not a theory of the unconscious but rather a theory of certain social phenomena.

Yeah, if the idea that we share some sort of species memory or shared societal mind is also definately discredited.

Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness is not any sort of account of a shared societal mind or species memory (and thus does not really resemble Jungian notions of such a thing). As with the Marxist theory of ideology, it is an account of certain social phenomena. To see the collective consciousness in action, perform the following experiement: walk into a restaurant, stand up on the counter and start taking off your trousers, and observe the near-uniform response of shock and horror from any onlookers (I perform a slightly tamer version of this experiment in class to explain Durkheim's basic idea to my students).

For all of these turn of the century social philosophers/scientists when I say that they are largely discredited I don't mean that it is impossible to find a few pearls strewn among the pig . However, it is still a whole lot of pig , because their methodologies were bad and their research sloppy, even for their time.

Well, I think anyone who can't find quite a degree of illumination of his/her experiences from Weber's writings on bureaucracy, and on other rationalising processes of modernity, hasn't spent enough time trying to work with and understand white-collar organisations!

I would leave everyone who followed in the footsteps of G.W.F Hegel to the historians to catalogue, and instead read people who have collected those pearls for us and actually use the methodologies which make them credible experts.

Well, I'm not sure who you're counting as a Hegelian - I don't think that Durkheim is a Hegelian in any particularly interesting sense, for example (he makes no use of the dialectic), and Weber is a neo-Kantian heavily influenced by Neitzche (a great anti-Hegelian). But I think that Raymond Geuss's defence of the dialectic (as developed by authors like Adorno) found in his Outside Ethics is very interesting, and persuasive to some reasonable degree. And three of my favourite historians are EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and MI Finley - all Marxists, although none in any very interesting sense a Hegelian, at least to my eye.