SEE DK CURRENT POST

Saturday, July 26, 2014

SEE DK CURRENT POST

This especially interesting observation re history, and history departments:

"Saddest of all, from my point of view, one of the ideas that Orwell cited as fashionable--that truthful history cannot be written--is now orthodoxy in most history departments." DK

This connects with comments I have made re the evils of disciplinary compartmentalization and specialization, and the notions of expertise and of experts, notions almost everyone has come more or less to accept, more or less blindly, in their everyday lives, partly from a kind of necessity generally, but also from gullibility, and from the many vulnerabilities of life in modern society. 

Race, gender, and orientation history are just several obvious examples, some of which he cites, of this specialization, within the discipline of history. 

One could list similar tendencies in many different disciplines of the social sciences. Sociology and psychology are classic examples. I think we even have things like gender and feminist economics now. And of course there is generational sociological history, or however one calls what S & H did.

Long ago, we started having things like ' area studies ', focusing on one particular culture, civilization, or group of countries.

The above observations were partly why I have found works which combine older and modern disciplines, histories of academic disciplines, and things like sociology of knowledge, philosophy of social and exact sciences, history of knowledge, history of ideas, anthropology of ideas, cultural history, social philosophy, economic history, political economy, ethics, moral philosophy, moral sciences, and which cut against the tendencies toward specialization, of particular interest.