Quoted: Kant's Categorical Party Imperative

Brandon Watson summarizes Immanuel Kant's guidelines for a successful dinner party:

(1) The number of guests should follow Chesterfield's rule: no fewer than the Graces (i.e., three), no more than the Muses (i.e., nine).

(2) The dinner party must exist not merely for physical satisfaction but also for social enjoyment. (This is the reason for the bounds on the number of guests.)

(3) Anything indiscreet that is said at the table stays at the table: there is a moral sanctity to the dinner party, and a duty of secrecy, because without the trust made possible by these it is impossible to have enjoyable culture. This is not a mere matter of taste; it is a matter of the fundamental preconditions that allows free exchange of ideas in social interaction.

(4) When the dinner party is a full one, and there is plenty of time, the conversation during the dinner party should go through three stages:

(a) Narration, i.e., exchange of news
(b) Ratiocination, i.e., lively discussion of the diversity in judgment at the table
(c) Jest, i.e., play of wit

Thus the conversation should always begin with raising pertinent and personal material then move into lively discussion until, tired from the hard work of arguing and reasoning, everyone settles down into lighter talk that leads to laughter. According to Kant, with his nineteenth-century German skepticism about how interested a woman could be in heavy intellectual conversation, when women are present the last stage is especially important, so that by being given a chance to respond to teasing they can show their own intellectual merits.

(5) No dinner music whatsoever. Kant regards it as one of the most absurd innovations in his time.

Obviously, liveliness is the key to a successful dinner party. Fortunately, Kant gives us guidelines for that as well:

(6) Choose topics of conversation in which everyone is interested, and always give people the opportunity to add their own topics, if they are appropriate.

(7) Never allow an extended silence. There can be momentary pauses in conversation, but no more.

(8) Do not change the topic unless necessary and especially do not keep jumping from one topic to another. The conversation should flow naturally and exhibit an organic unity of its own. The reason for this is that in a symposium, as in a drama, the mind occupies itself in part by reminiscing over what has previously occurred and tying the various phases together. A conversation that keeps changing topics is as disconcerting as a play that keeps changing topics and themes.

(9) Dogmatism is to be forbidden absolutely, whether it be on the part of the host or on the part of the guests. When people get too serious and insistent, start making jokes to divert them back to play rather than business.

(10) When serious conflicts arive that really and truly cannot be devoted, self-discipline is essential so that passions do not run too hot. Tone is absolutely essential; even if very serious topics are broached, every effort should be exerted to avoid any estrangement of the guests from each other.

We tend to think of Kant as a dry and humorless moralist, but this is actually a very insightful description of social interaction.

Comment Elsewhere: Freud's Projector

In a response to a post noting a particularly unhinged bit of public paranoia, I wrote

Some people really need to apply Occam's Razor more often. And Freud's Projector less.

I thought I was just being a little clever with the parallel construction, but Scott claims (and Google seems to confirm) that I was actually being original: the phrase "Freud's Projector" doesn't seem to appear elsewhere on the internet. I'm inordinately proud of this.

Say what you like about Freud -- I certainly do -- but the concept of 'projection' remains a powerful tool for diagnosing social pathologies.

Quotation: Mark Twain's "The War Prayer"

I got the Babylon 5 series over the holidays, all five seasons plus Crusade and some movies. Yeah, I'm a geek. Anyway, we were watching the episode The War Prayer and noted, after it was over, that the War Prayer itself was never directly invoked in the show. It's there by implication, but not more. In the course of the discussion, I realized that my spouse, who's usually much better read than I, especially on anti-war stuff, didn't know the source of the reference, Mark Twain's very short story "The War Prayer." It's worth noting that the link to the story, the first link in the google search, is to a B5 fan site. I found it, and read it aloud, which was surprisingly hard.

It seems appropriate, in these days of struggle, passion, and overweening faith, to quote the core of it, the usually unspoken prayer behind a prayer for God's aid in victory:

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

Read the whole thing. Even having read it before, even knowing this core bit, the whole thing has a great power. We must be careful when we pray.

Comment Elsewhere: God and Vegetarianism

Over at Acephalous, where I learned that the creators of South Park also wrote a musical based on the Packer expedition, I commented on Sarah Palin's invocation of the immortal sentiment, "If God didn't intend us to eat [X], then why did he make them edible?" I remarked:

The theology is twisted. God didn't intend for humans to eat animals. Genesis, Chapter ONE*:

29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Only later, after the abomination and destruction of all life but Noah&Co., does God permit the eating of meat. Chapter Nine:

1: And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
2: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
3: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

God then goes on to start writing the rules of Kashrut. God may have made animals (and people) edible, but allowing them to be eaten was Plan B.

* KJV, since I'm sure she wouldn't accept any other translation.

Quoted: We can do that?

Just browsing through some ScienceBlogs stuff and ran across the following passage:

Producing proteins in the lab (often in bacteria) is pretty routine work. However, producing a posttranslationally modified protein can be much more difficult, because you generally have to have access to an enzyme that will perform the desired modification. On the other hand, it is generally much simpler to mutate the source DNA, and then use that DNA to produce a modified protein (generally with one amino acid substituted for another)

Routine? Simpler to mutate?

Wow.

History Quotations

It's been a while since I posted some new quotations.

Here's a great collection of quotes about history that I found via Winter Rabbit (whose discussion of rights, religion and law is quite provocative). Some good ones:

E. L. Doctorow:
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Edward Gibbon:
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Etienne Gilson:
History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

Friedrich Von Schiller:
The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

George Bernard Shaw:
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

George Bernard Shaw:
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

P.S. it's not exactly a history quote, but I just ran across Terry's posting of the full "We are the music makers / we are the dreamers of the dream" poem cited in Willy Wonka. The last line is one I might use in my history collection: "For each age is a dream that is dying, / Or one that is coming to birth."

Krugman's Rules

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman's four rules for research [via]:

1. Listen to the Gentiles

2. Question the question

3. Dare to be silly

4. Simplify, simplify

Quotation: "It subverts meritocracy."

Via Andrew Sullivan, Paul Campos relates a tale from a Mr. Harry Hopkins (yes, it's third-hand. Doesn't mean it isn't true.):

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

Quoted: Obama in Cairo

I thought of this today:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.

Nothing else I'm thinking is printable.

Quotation: "We are what we imagine."

"Myth has been called "the smoke of history," and there is a desperate need for a history of the Hindus that distinguishes between the fire, the documented evidence, and the smoke; for mythic narratives become fires when they drive historical events rather than respond to them. Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat, sparked a revolution in India in 1857. We are what we imagine, as much as what we do." -- Wendy Doniger [via]

Quotation: Malthus on the search for truth

From the first chapter of Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population:

The advocate for the present order of things is apt to treat the sect of speculative philosophers either as a set of artful and designing knaves who preach up ardent benevolence and draw captivating pictures of a happier state of society only the better to enable them to destroy the present establishments and to forward their own deep-laid schemes of ambition, or as wild and mad-headed enthusiasts whose silly speculations and absurd paradoxes are not worthy the attention of any reasonable man.

The advocate for the perfectibility of man, and of society, retorts on the defender of establishments a more than equal contempt. He brands him as the slave of the most miserable and narrow prejudices; or as the defender of the abuses. of civil society only because he profits by them. He paints him either as a character who prostitutes his understanding to his interest, or as one whose powers of mind are not of a size to grasp any thing great and noble, who cannot see above five yards before him, and who must therefore be utterly unable to take in the views of the enlightened benefactor of mankind.

In this unamicable contest the cause of truth cannot but suffer. The really good arguments on each side of the question are not allowed to have their proper weight. Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross. He will not even condescend to examine the grounds from which the perfectibility of society is inferred. Much less will he give himself the trouble in a fair and candid manner to attempt an exposition of their fallacy.

The speculative philosopher equally offends against the cause of truth. With eyes fixed on a happier state of society, the blessings of which he paints in the most captivating colours, he allows himself to indulge in the most bitter invectives against every present establishment, without applying his talents to consider the best and safest means of removing abuses and without seeming to be aware of the tremendous obstacles that threaten, even in theory, to oppose the progress of man towards perfection.

Just ran across it. Not thinking of anything in particular except that the public sphere is bigger and faster than it used to be, but not all that much better, perhaps.

Why do we only psychoanalyze the misstatements of politicians we dislike? I don't know but we do.

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."
-- President George W. Bush, 12 January 2009

Bigotry Still Rules

Sometimes you read something you have to share:

In the summer of 2006 I attended the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. One of the guest presenters was ninety-five year old Johnnie Carr, the woman who took over the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1956 after the successful bus boycott when Martin Luther King, Jr. went on to form the Southern Christian Leadership Convention. Carr told stories and fielded questions. I'm not sure how the topic of gay people came up but at the mention of the word "homosexual" her face shriveled up and she moved her hand in a wide sweeping gesture, then exclaimed, "Those DISGUSTING people!" She made some inaudible comments then said the word “DISGUSTING” again. She said this even though Bayard Rustin, the man who co-founded SCLC with King, who assisted in the creation of the Committee on Racial Equality in 1942, organized the first freedom ride and the March on Washington, and helped King convert wholeheartedly to non-violence, was gay. I looked at Waldo Martin and Pat Sullivan, the two seminar leaders, and they looked away but, to their credit, they did not stop the tape recorder.

After Carr left and our group reconvened, I looked around and asked (it took no small amount of courage for me to raise this question and risk losing their respect or being seen as a troublemaker): "Did she really say that gay people were disgusting?” Everyone shrugged it off. An African American professor from North Carolina said, "Oh, that's just her generation." Martin replied, "She's a devoted church lady, that's just the way they see things." I responded, "That doesn't make it hurt any less."

Now imagine someone lobbed the same spiteful word at a black person in 1955, at a time when key constitutional rights were not yet secured and violence or at least censure was always a risk. That person's entire character would be defined as essentially racist. It would not be shrugged away, especially not now because we as a nation have come to understand the history and impact of bigotry on African Americans.-- Lisa Szefel

Read the Rest

Vote!

Update (11:10 pm, EST): Wow.
Update (11:21 pm, EST): Right in the middle of McCain's concession speech, my local Fox affiliate cut away to a "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercial. This is not satire: it really happened, and it was grossly inconsiderate, surreal.

I had to switch channels to see him say "Let there be no reason for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth."

Theodore Roosevelt was shot

but he went on with the speech anyway (emphasis added)

Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.

Don’t you pity me. I am all right. I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to my speech either….
...
I ask that in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man’s quality of citizenship—to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or his birthplace…. in the same way I want our people to stand by one another without regard to differences of class or occupation.
...
I ask you to look at our declaration and hear and read our platform about social and industrial justice and then, friends, vote for the Progressive ticket without regard to me, without regard to my personality, for only by voting for that platform can you be true to the cause of progress throughout this Union.

There's a more complete version of the speech; the excerpts are great, but don't really do it justice.

Quotations: FDR's Economic Bill of Rights

I can't believe I'd never heard of this before, but there it is. This is from January, 1944, the State of the Union address in the heart of WWII.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Palin can't even tell the truth about her own faith

Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin interviewed by Charles Gibson (11 Sep 08): "I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words."

Republican Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, on the birth of her youngest son (22 Apr 08): In a letter she e-mailed to relatives and close friends Friday after giving birth, Palin wrote, "Many people will express sympathy, but you don't want or need that, because Trig will be a joy. You will have to trust me on this." She wrote it in the voice of and signed it as "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father." "Children are the most precious and promising ingredient in this mixed-up world you live in down there on Earth. Trig is no different, except he has one extra chromosome," Palin wrote.

Update: Welcome, Avedon readers!

Quotations from Tosh #13: Arthur Marwick

"History is the study of the human past, through the systematic analysis of the primary sources, and the bodies of knowledge arising from that study, and, therefore, is the human past as it is known from the work of historians. The human past enfolds so many periods and cultures that history can no more form one unified body of knowledge than can the natural sciences. The search for universal meaning or universal explanations is, therefore, a futile one. History is about finding things out, and solving problems, rather than about spinning narratives or telling stories." -- Arthur Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 300.

"The insistence that language determines ideas, and is itself a system arising from the existing power structure in society, is as grandiose a piece of speculative thought as ever dreamed up by Hegel or Nietzche." -- Arthur Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 301.

"Primary sources did not come into existence to satisfy the curiosity of historians. They derive 'natural', 'organically', as it were, or, more straightforwardly, 'in the ordinary course of events', from human beings and groups of human beings, in the past society being studied, living their lives, worshipping, decision-making, adjudicating, fornicating, going about their business or fulfilling their vocations, recording, noting, communicating, as they go, very occasionally, perhaps, with an eye on the future, but generally in accordance with immediate needs and purposes. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation and, obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with which the particular source comes into being as a concrete artefact." -- Arthur Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 302.

"If the historian finds himself resorting to metaphor or cliché, that may well be a warning that things have not been sufficiently worked out, and substantiated, to be conveyed in plain simple prose." -- Arthur Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 303.

"Society has a right to demand from historians accounts which can, if so desired, be used in trying to understand the evolution of political ideas or institutions, or the origins of the many conflicts throughout the world, or to gain the necessary contextual information for enjoying more fully a painting or a poem or some favourite tourist attraction. Those seeking such understandings will not be helped by some speculative theory about the need to replace humanism with radical ideology, or of the inescapability of their situation within language, but will want to feel that the explanations, interpretations, and information they are provided with are based on serious study of the evidence; and it will do them no harm at all if they are also made aware that all sources are fallible, that all study of them must be carried out in accordance with the strictest principles, and that there are always things which we do not know with any certainty."-- Arthur Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 304-5.

Quotations from Tosh #12: Postmodernism

"Historians, ancient and modern, have always known what postmodernism professes to have just discovered - that any work of history is vulnerable on three counts: the fallibility and deficiency of the historical record on which it is based; the fallibility and selectivity inherent in the writing of history; and the fallibility and subjectivity of the historian." -- Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 291.

"History will not stay written. Every age demands a history written from its own standpoint - with reference to its own social conditions, its thought, its beliefs and its acquisitions - and thus comprehensible to the men who live in it." -- William Sloane, AHR 1:1, cited by Gertrude Himmelfarb in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 291-292.

"In the common cause of radicalism, structuralists and poststructuralists, new historicists and deconstructionists, have been able to overlook whatever logical incompatibilities there may be between their theories. (This presents no great problem for deconstructionists, who have an infinite tolerance for contradiction and no regard for 'linear' logic.) Like the communists and socialists of an earlier generation, they have formed a 'popular front', marching separately to a common goal." -- Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact" (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 295.

"Under the impact of postmodernist literary approaches, historians are now becoming more aware that their supposedly matter-of-fact choices of narrative techniques and analytical forms also have implications with social and political ramifications. Essays on the state of the discipline often have a canonical form all their own: first a narrative of the rise of new kinds of history, then a long moment for exploring the problems posted by new kinds of history, followed by either a jeremiad on the evils of new practices or a celebration of the potential overcoming of all obstacles. The literary form that the argument takes has a very strong influence on the way that evidence and arguments are presented." -- Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 311.

"Our choices are political, social, and epistemological. They are political and social because they reflect beliefs in a certain kind of community of historians and society of Americans. They are epistemological because they reflect positions on what can be known and how it can be logically known. With diligence and good faith they may also be at moments reasonably, if partially, true accounts of the distant and recent past." -- Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 312.

Quotations from Tosh #11: Disciplines

"The monograph has been unsatisfactory, most commonly as literature but often even in the very analytical functions it was designed to perform." -- Richard Hofstadter, "History and the social sciences" (1956), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 218

"The more the historian learns from the social sciences, the more variables he is likely to take account of, the more complex his task becomes. The result may be that his conclusions become more tenuous and tentative, but this is a result to be welcomed. The closer the historian comes, with whatever aids, to the full texture of historical reality, the more deeply is he engulfed in a complex web of relationships which he can hope to understand only in a limited and partial way. While he may acquire some usable methods from the social sciences, I doubt that the new techniques that he may acquire will outweigh the new problems that he will take on. His task has not been simplified; it has been enlarged. His work has not greater certainty, but greater range and depth." -- Richard Hofstadter, "History and the social sciences" (1956), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 220

"Formidable criticisms have been written of the familiar distinction between the nomothetic sciences (which can make general laws about repeatable events) and the ideographic (which seek to understand unique and non-recurrent events)." -- Richard Hofstadter, "History and the social sciences" (1956), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 222-3.

"Unlike the philosopher of history or the philosopher of science; the working historian is not nearly so much interested in whether history can, after all, be logically classed with the natural sciences as he is in how far his mode of procedure is in fact a scientific one or could be changed to resemble it. Certainly, in the broad sense that he operates from a basis in fact, aspires to make warrantable assertions, and works in a self-critical discipline, the historian can see that he has something in common with science. But if the term science has any special meaning, he sees equally important differences. Since in his work quantification plays so limited a role, and since he cannot conduct experiments, or, strictly speaking, make predictions, he naturally feels that the difference between his methods and results and those prevailing in most branches of the natural sciences are of central importance." -- Richard Hofstadter, "History and the social sciences" (1956), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 223.

"Much of the claimed difference between the disciplines is hardly more than a series of attempts by the authors concerned to appropriate the work they happen to do for the discipline they happen to profess." -- Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (1982), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 226.

"The problem of agency is the problem finding a way of accounting for human experience which recognises simultaneously and in equal measure that history and society are made by constant and more or less purposeful individual action and that individual action, however purposeful, is made by history and society. How do we as active subjects make a world of objects which then, as it were, become subjects making us their objects?" -- Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (1982), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 227.

"But in the long run, even in the more esoteric branches of history, it must surely be the case that there will always come a moment when the historian, having worked out a solid conceptual basis, will need to start counting: to record frequencies, significant repetitions, or percentages." -- Emmanuele Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian (1979), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 238.

"Economic and demographic determinsm has not only been undermined by a recognition of ideas, culture and even individual will as independent variables. It has also been sapped by a revived recognition that political and military power, the use of brute force, has very frequently dictated the structure of society, the distribution of wealth, the agrarian system, and even the culture of the élite." -- Lawrence Stone "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History" (1979), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 257.