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We will see when I start applying for jobs. If that turns out to be the case I may just reconsider my choice of a career in academia. I repeat, I will not compromise or even disguise my principles to get a job. I can always apply to be an official historian for the army and research and publish on my real interests on the side.
I may be making too much out of all of this. Don't let the Liberals punk you out of a good faculty position somewhere. Just try to employ Phid's tactic and you will be fine.
We will see what happens in a year or so after I retire from the military and have to look for a real job that is not as much fun as blowing things up and killing people. 23 years of playing army will probably make being a civilian hard, my dad said it took him a couple of years to get used to not being in the military after he retired. For all the military's shortcomings, and there are many, I am kind of used to the structure of it now.
Going from the Army to academia is going to be a real change of venue. Good luck. Your military training might come in handy, but then again Liberals are naturally timid creatures so they shouldn't be much of a concern.
I think I am starting to get a grasp on World-System Theory, it is pseudo-Marxism. Pseudo-Marxism because even more than the original it tries to cloak itself in the veil of academics. This lets its adherents convince themselves that 1. they are doing something useful and 2. if it is academic it must have value and if it has value then they must be right.Why cant leftists get away from Marx? Every attempt at practical implementation of his prescription has failed miserably. I think it is because if you read him it makes so much sense on the surface and invites belief. So believers just keep pounding their heads on the wall thinking it has to work. I also think they like the idea that they can talk other people into believing it and then they wont have to actually work or produce anything because they will be busy telling everyone else how glorious the worker's paradise is to work themselves.
Why cant leftists get away from Marx?
They have an inherent sense of "fairness" or "justice" which they think they can be achieved in this world. In essence, they are striving for perfection in an imperfect world.
I think I am starting to get a grasp on World-System Theory, it is pseudo-Marxism.
No, it's regular old anti-capitalist Marxism. It's all about how core states exploit peripheral, and semi-peripheral states. Immanuel Wallerstein was said to be the founder of this theory. And he is a Marxist/socialist.The World System Theory (of Int Rel) is racism. Just as imperialism was racism, this new-Left, anti-imperialism is also racism. Who heads/started it? White students from very liberal universities who think they know better and can bring justice to the world. Who headed imperialism? White Europeans who thought they knew better so they can bring justice to the world.Great, but long, article here about this.
I think I am starting to get a grasp on World-System Theory, it is pseudo-Marxism.
No, it's regular old anti-capitalist Marxism. It's all about how core states exploit peripheral, and semi-peripheral states. Immanuel Wallerstein was said to be the founder of this theory. And he is a Marxist/socialist.The World System Theory (of Int Rel) is racism. Just as imperialism was racism, this new-Left, anti-imperialism is also racism. Who heads/started it? White students from very liberal universities who think they know better and can bring justice to the world. Who headed imperialism? White Europeans who thought they knew better so they can bring justice to the world.Great, but long, article here about this.
Excellent article skiguy! I'm going to copy that link in my thread over at WoH. New Left philosophy is a cancer that threatens to derail yet another generation of scholarship.
They are Marxist certainly, but pseudo-Marxist in that they don?t just focus on economics as being determinative as Marxism does. Instead they focus on bringing about wider social change based on what they see as being a universal set of ethics. Of course, the exact precepts of that ethics are known only to the elect.I think my biggest problem with it is that it is activist history. They seek to explain the past on their term and then provide a prescription for the future. The future part is what gets me, I conceive of a historian?s job as being descriptions and analysis of the past to inform the present, not trying to read the tea-leaves to make recommendations on how to order society for the future.It is this whole notion that they can achieve what they consider ?good? change through their work that bothers me the most. Their activism removes any chance of academic respectability they have in my eyes. Maybe it is just the Rankean in me?
Any scholarship that incorporates modern ideologies into interpretation is detrimental. Trying to make source materials fit into a preconceived model is anathema to what scholarly research is supposed to be. Yet the vast majority of academics do it in one way or another. Ideology has no place whatsoever in research methodologies.
