Eminent Historians by Arun Shourie

Author:Arun Shourie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2014-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

18

The appeal of ‘The Theory’,

and the antidote to it

‘Progressives’ of the kind we have been surveying have always recognized the power of ideas and evidence. And, therefore, of those who will generate, garner, broadcast these. They have devoted time and resources to this activity, to inveigling idea-men into their fold, to knitting networks among these ‘intellectuals’.

And they have always seen that ideas have to be worked out at two levels. To attract intellectuals, a theory must be, first, The Theory of Everything – that is, it must explain all the phenomena which are of interest to the intellectual in that particular context: Marxism laid claim to doing exactly this. Second, it must be difficult to comprehend, sufficiently obscure at points for the intellectual to fill years trying to ‘interpret’ it, eventually to ‘develop’ it further: part of the reason the manuscripts of the early Marx were even more attractive than his later, published writings was that they were even more opaque than the latter. Scholars spent lifetimes fixing what the ratios were which, when measured, would tell the tale Marx had said would unfold, they built careers and repudiated friendships determining what exactly the rate of profit was which was to be declining – for the rate everyone understood it to imply did not show any sign of declining! Mao’s essays ‘On Contradiction’, ‘On Practice’, ‘On Dialectical Materialism’, the later one ‘On Dialectics’ were just as masterly in their opacity and obscurity.

But as far as the ‘masses’ are concerned, the complexity and incomprehensibility of these ideas serves an entirely different function. They naturally do not comprehend them. But the fact that they can be told that the theory is there, the belief that it has all been worked out, that what is happening – the course history is taking – is entirely in accord with the formulations of the theory, that what the party or its drummer boys – these intellectuals – are proposing to do is what the theory shows ought to be done, that the programme is bound to succeed because it accords with the march of history which the theory has already unravelled to the elect – these are a potent hallucinogen.

Progressives have always seen the value of the theory as stupefacient. Of course, they denounced other priestly classes for keeping the rites and texts of their religions secret, but, as far as their own texts were concerned, they made sure that these remained mysterious. And, to use their favoured expression, if one looks at the question ‘objectively’, that is if one goes by what the objective effect of the deed was, we notice that the elucidations of the texts – by an Althusser, for instance – were designed to reinforce the notion that the texts were abstruse and deep, that their true meaning could be discerned only by the elect few, that what these worthies had in turn discovered to be the true meaning was itself beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. It followed that the

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