can we write an alternative history of the 19th and 20th centuries, without all the political and economic theory?

I mean, this seems relevant to now too, not just to the idiotic argument about whether the Nazis were "left-wing." The Bush administration's attempt to apply an ideological/theoretical overlay (the War on Terror) on a complicated set of sometimes only tangentially related territorial, political and cultural conflicts has the obviously intended result of muddying the view of the world rather than clarifying it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-theory (although I am more or less anti-ideology). And I don't mean to diminish the role that both theory and ideology have played. Not all of the people who fought revolutions in the name of Marxism were just mouthing the words. But on the other hand, most (all) of the real Marxist/communist military movements (as distinct from social or political or intellectual movements) took root in countries primed for revolution by the presence of a clearly oppressed underclass and a clearly despotic ruler. I mean, the very fact that "communist" revolution happened not in hypercapitalistic societies but in feudal/monarchial/colonial agrarian societies should basically put the lie to the idea that the revolutions were ideological per se.

So anyway, I just think it would be useful to get away from all these 19th century theoretical models and consider our recent and current history as free as possible from their distorting influence. I don't think that seeing the world in theoretical and ideological terms helps anyone except people who want to use theory and ideology as weapons for their own purposes. (Hence Russia and China and everyone else suddenly discovering post-Sept. 11 that their own internal territorial/tribal struggles are actually part of the 'War on Terror,' just as any number of strongarm atrocities were countenanced in the name of fighting 'communism.')

seen this?

Yeah, the political compass helps a little. It gets away from the worst simplifications of the left/right spectrum. But it still pretends that history can be understood as competing ideologies -- everybody has a place on the compass, and their degree of conflict or compatibility depends on where they are -- which is only partly true. I mean, you can't understand the world in terms of 19th century economic theory and explain China's capitalist Communism. Theoretically, China can't exist. But if China is understood within the historical context of China, rather than within the artificial construct of Marxism vs. capitalism (or even East vs. West), then what's going on there makes perfect sense. Ditto Russia, where Putin is best understood as neither a continuation nor a negation of Soviet-ism, per se, but as a natural result of the country's political evolution over the past several hundred years.

Even the most obviously ideologically driven events -- the Cultural Revolution, say -- are only partly "ideological." The ideology is an overlay, a mechanism by which more basic political ends are pursued.

I'm probably not articulating any of this well. I just think that conceiving of the world in terms of conflicts between left and right, or east and west, or "terrorism" and "freedom," or whatever overlay you put on it, constricts and restricts the ability to see things as they actually are. It forces real people and real places into narrow conceptual channels where a lot of them don't really fit. And it leads to faulty thinking -- a lot of the American ideologues who took us into Vietnam really believed they were fighting a war on abstract communism -- they believed in abstract communism as an encompassing, unifying force -- which made it difficult if not impossibe for them to understand the war on the ground. I'm not sure how much the current ideologues really believe their hogwash about a War on Terror, but the more they say it, the more it gets repeated, the more likely it is to shape perceptions of the world and actions in the world in ways that are only sort of barely related to the world itself.

do you have a problem w/ "political and economic theory" in historical analysis, or is yer problem REALLY w/ a particularly stupid & self-serving "political and economic theory" (e.g., all this nonsense about "nazism REALLY = left-wing pinkos [ergo, liberals = intellectual heirs of fascism])? fr44r4publiKKK = enemy of rational thought.

i think he has a problem with "political and economic theory in historical analysis", ie. locating the shaping forces of the last 200 years in ideologies that are too broadly sketched, and grouping very disparate struggles and conflicts (with their own logics and cause-and-effects) into either left or right

Right, yeah. The theories and ideologies of the past few centuries are obviously important, and they represent an evolutionary series of efforts to quantify and hypothesize systems of political and economic behavior. But their application to the real world has always been tied up in broader and deeper tribal/territorial/political conflicts. There's this tendency to talk about, say, leftist rebels or right-wing death squads (in Central America, e.g.), or in the current case to talk about "Muslim extremists" as if Muslim extremists in the West Bank and Pakistan and Iran and Indonesia (or, Putin would have us believe, Chechnya) were part of the same overarching context.

It makes it harder to see and think about the contexts in each individual case. (It also, of course, makes it easier to convince people that invading Iraq is the same thing as fighting al-Qaeda.)

I seethe with Adam Smith inspired rage! His ideas were simple, beautiful and had gaping holes you could drive a battleship through. He lifted political economy to new heights, but he's become a sacred idol of the Ayn Rand crowd, like Aristotle was for the medieval scholastics.

None of this would matter except Ronald Reagan resold classical economics to the American public, like week-old bread in a bright plastic wrapper. AAARGH! Adam Smith's dead hand is strangling economic discourse in the USA!

To be fair to the Nazis were left wing argument; there's many a leftie who'd claim the Soviet Union was essentially a capitalist system

He went to art school when he was younger
He wanted to be a painter
Hitler was a vegetarian
He was also a non smoker

He hired gay and handicapped officers
He was concerned about overpopulation
If Hitler was alive today
He'd listened to the Cure, The Smiths and Depeche Mode

Not Einstürzende Neubaten?

Laibach, more like.

But you can't get away from theory really. Or at least not without radically changing the way that you talk about history. As soon as you start talking about "countries primed for revolution by the presence of a clearly oppressed underclass and a clearly despotic ruler" you're talking about theory (the idea of class and opression etc.)

I mean, if you're going to talk about history sans theory you can't talk about countries or groups or anything.

Yeah, nations and even tribes (or families, for that matter) are theoretical constructs to some degree. So right, you can't dispense with theory, as my hyperbolically reductive subject line suggests. I guess I'm mostly expressing frustration with the way our (i.e. American, at least) political and economic discourse continues to be shaped -- and, more to the point, distorted -- by anachronistic 19th century models that are ill-suited to actually describing our recent and current experience of the world. The persistence of arguments about capitalism and socialism, for example, reduce the complexities of economic systems (and the political systems that accompany them) to irrelevant cartoons. (John Ralston Saul has a good demolition of the capitalist/socialist "dichotomy" in 'Voltaire's Bastards,' but I don't have my copy handy.)

The left-right axis is preferable to the politicalcompass (etc.) maps, IMO.

Used properly, the left-right spectrum is contextual to individual societies and situations - there is no universal 'left' and universal 'right,' and views can't be categorized as either in and of themselves.

The Nolan chart/PC map/3-d maps confuse the issue further by trying to argue an objective placement for every position (PC is better than most because their questions also get at [b]why[/b] you hold your views rather than policy as sole ends). It's not so bad in and of itself, but it makes it easier for people like the Freepers to argue that "so-and-so is OBJECTIVELY left-wing!" or for people to lazily categorize themselves/others.

All of these constructs are only useful in certain situations. But no matter what the situation, a 2 dimensional chart is going to be more accurate than a 1 dimensional chart, because human thought runs in many, many dimensions.