Social Class and Marxism: Defences and Challenges by Neville Kirk

Author:Neville Kirk [Kirk, Neville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351899666
Google: uzorDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 10155825
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: the virtues of realism

The general conclusion thus emerges that Vernon, Joyce and Stedman Jones effectively dissolve reality/being into the processes of thought and language, and do not offer a convincing defence of their anti-representational practices. Idealism is pervasive. Shifting languages and discourses circulate and sometimes overlap, but any real external (i.e. empirical) controls are conspicuous by their effective absence. Circularity and self-confirmation become the idealist norm. There is no way off this discursive merry-go-round apart from the option of making and breaking concepts against complex evidence, the ‘real’ task of social history: but the latter represents far too ‘modernist’, misguided and mundane a purpose for Joyce’s and Vernon’s post-modernist juggernaut.

A more precise conclusion to be offered is that, in conflating being and language, Joyce, Vernon and Stedman Jones fail to make the necessary distinction between, on the one hand, existence and, on the other, interpretation, understanding and meaning. These are two distinct, if interconnected, areas of life. Eagleton’s criticisms of the ‘inflation of discourse’ in the post-structuralist thought of Laclau and Mouffe can usefully be applied to the work of our three historians. ‘A way of understanding an object’, observes Eagleton:

is simply projected into the object itself, in a familiar idealist move. In notably academicist style, the contemplative analysis of a practice suddenly reappears as its very essence. The category of discourse is inflated to the point where it imperializes the whole world, eliding the distinction between thought and material reality. The effect of this is to undercut the critique of ideology – for if ideas and material reality are given indissolubly together, there can be no question of asking where social ideas actually hail from. The new ‘transcendental’

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