The History Wars and Detachment

In her post, “A Canon Canon,” L.D. asks readers to suggest books related to the canon debates of the 1980s, which crystallized with the Stanford “Great Books” debate, L.D.’s dissertation topic. L.D. seems both excited and worried about her topic’s continued relevance, about how such relevance should or should not inform her approach. As she writes: “At some point—and I haven’t quite identified that point yet—the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, ‘making an intervention.’ This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.”

In the comments section, I posted the bibliography of the most important books I used and/or analyzed in my chapter on the topic of the canon wars (one chapter of nine on the history of the culture wars). My list of books provoked this response from L.D.: “This is both informative and illustrative. Your list instantiates exactly the oscillation I see ahead—a toggling between immediacy and remove, a scholarly debate as a historic ‘event’ and ‘detached’ scholarship about the event.”

Does writing about topics in such close proximity to our lives—temporally, professionally, epistemologically, politically, perhaps even psychologically—change our approach? Are we more likely to engage our subjects as contemporaries? Are we more likely to enter into the struggles that we are seeking to understand and analyze? I find these methodological questions fascinating.

I admit that when I first chose the culture wars as the topic of my second book, I had similar concerns. I had a dog in the race, so to speak. But I did not want to write yet another culture wars polemic, yet another missive against all that is wrong in the world. To my happy surprise, once I began my research I felt less of a subjective pull. I started seeing historical subjects worthy of historical analysis. Yes, I disagree with many culture warriors (and I even agree with a few). But I also feel detached from them. I suppose this is as it should be (although my former self would be surprised not only by my detachment but also by my comfort with such detachment).

None of this is an endorsement of detachment in and of itself. Sometimes, I think, a full-throttle polemic is in order (as I hoped to make evident by the example of my very un-detached essay on Teach for America). But I also think learning how to be detached from the culture wars has improved my ability to understand them. In writing my chapter on the canon wars, I felt like a distant observer, much as I would if I had written a chapter on the Constitutional Convention. I held no more affinity for a poststructuralist obliterator of canons like Stanley Fish than I did for a traditionalist defender of them like Allan Bloom. I identified no more with Richard Rorty than with Dinesh D’Souza (this definitely came as a surprise). Of course, this does not mean I sought faux “objectivity” in the fashion of some half-wit television host like David Gregory: “Let both sides present their case, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle; or, at least we won’t be accused of bias, the ultimate sin of political reporting).” No, in writing my canon wars chapter, detachment meant I had the freedom to point out the contradictions that inevitably formed the arguments of all of my subjects, such an approach being a means to a better historical understanding.

In sum, L.D.’s “tricky methodological challenge” is not necessarily mine. For the most part. I am currently writing a chapter on a topic from which detachment is proving more difficult. The topic is the “history wars” and the chapter deals with some of the infamous controversies about public history from the 1990s, especially the brouhahas over the Enola Gay and National History Standards. It also is an intellectual history of the methodological debates about the historical discipline that were embedded in these larger public history struggles. Historians are the main subjects; historiography is the central content. In other words, this chapter hits close to home. The reason for this is not because I want to take sides, although I am more tempted here than in my other chapters. Rather, I am finding detachment more difficult because the explanations and arguments offered by historians are my own. I have been trained to think like my subjects. More than that, given that my subjects are some of the most influential historians of the last few decades, given that their books have often been de rigueur in graduate historiography seminars, it’s not too far fetched to claim that I have been trained to think like my subjects by my subjects.

By the early 1990s, a debate had ensued about the proper approach historians should take to the past. On the one hand were traditionalists, who caustically criticized the hold social and cultural history had taken on the larger discipline, to the demise of traditional political and, yes, intellectual history. They charged that New Historians were relativists who no longer believed in the longstanding purpose of the historical craft, to shed light on the truth. For instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one such traditionalist, maintained that privileging the “holy trinity” of race-class-gender was an ahistorical imposition of present concerns on the past. On the other hand were postmodernists on the order of Hayden White, who provocatively claimed that the work of the historian was no more than “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” The contours of this debate were not new, but the political urgency of it was unique, given the larger context.

Most professional historians sought to carve out a middle ground in these historiography wars. In their 1994 book, Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob sought to “take on both the relativists on the left and the defenders of the status quo ante on the right.” Eschewing both epistemological (if not political) extremes, they argued in favor of “a democratic practice of history [that] encourages skepticism about dominant views, but at the same time trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability.” But, while charting this middle ground, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob offered a compelling analytical framework that explained how historiographical developments had contributed to a traditionalist-postmodernist binary that seemed false. Social historians, who came of age in the 1970s on the heels of the sixties liberation movements, wrote histories of marginalized groups, predominantly blacks, women, and workers, that complicated traditional, often triumphalist narratives of the United States. But they accomplished this with traditional methodologies and epistemologies. “Social historians did not oppose the standards of objectivity or the codes of professional discipline; they used those very standards to challenge the traditional interpretations which had excluded marginal or nonconforming historical groups.” That said, no matter their objective intentions, social historians undermined the premise of historical objectivity by revealing that historical narratives were always partial, always political. “It is as if the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record had dug a potentially fatal hole into which history as a discipline might disappear altogether.”

I can’t detach from these subjects because their analysis seems, well, truthful. As such, I see Telling the Truth as both a primary and secondary source. (The same goes for a few other sources, especially Peter Novick’s brilliant That Noble Dream, which emerged from the same historiographical crisis about the "objectivity question.")

Some Muddled Thoughts* on Truth, Non-Fiction, History, and Objectivity

When Peter Novick passed away recently, I immediately thought of the enormous impact that That Noble Dream had on my generation of graduate students.  The book was published in September, 1988, the very month that I began graduate school. The book's importance to many of my fellow graduate students and myself rested on at least three factors: first, it immediately became a centerpiece of the reading list for the historiography / methods course that we all took in our first semester of grad school (i.e. it was going to be "on the test"); second, it provided a historical narrative of the professional identity as historians that we had all recently decided to assume; finally, as Jim Harrison commented at the time (and, more recently, on this blog), the book was a "serious meditation about the state of things in the late 80s," and thus very much spoke to the particular world of historical practice that we were all entering at the time.**

I was going to write something to this effect in response to Tim's invitation to comment on Novick's passing (I would have liked to say something, too, about The Holocaust in American Life, which was also a book of enormous importance to me), but I never got around to doing so. And the moment passed.

In part, I hesitated to write my memories of That Noble Dream in the late 1980s because I felt that the whole question of objectivity was less front-and-center in the profession today, that the book, while still a fine piece of scholarship, had (not surprisingly) lost its immediate currency. But I couldn't manage to formulate exactly what had changed in this regard.***



Then, late last week, This American Life announced that, for the first time, they were retracting a story.   "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," an episode-long exploration of conditions in a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, that manufactures products for Apple, originally aired back in January and was an excerpt from a longer staged monologue by Mike Daisey who traveled to Shenzhen to investigate working conditions there.  It turns out that many of the details of Daisey's story were fabricated.  Though it's worth listening to the entire TAL story devoted to the retraction, the executive summary is that Daisey successfully, if temporarily, hid his fabrications from the show's producers by lying to them about, among other things, the name of his translator, thus essentially making fact-checking the details of the story impossible. When the translator was later located, the fabrications became obvious and Daisey fell back on pseudo-defending himself by insisting that, since he is not a journalist, it's wrong to hold him to the standards of journalism.

When this story broke, I commented on Facebook that "I've grown increasingly tired of people who try to pass fiction off as nonfiction. The issue of working conditions in China is a serious one, but fabricating stories about bad working conditions there does not help the cause. And simply saying 'I'm not a journalist,' as Mike Daisey does, won't do. Nonfiction storytelling needs to be not fictional, whether or not one calls it journalism."

In a variety of interesting ways, this is not quite Novick's "objectivity question." But it's a cousin of it. And, like Novick's book was in the 1980s, the Daisey scandal is very much of its time.  From the controversy over James Frey's pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces to the recent publication of John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's The Lifespan of a Fact, which anticipates the controversy and undoes the scandal by making the nature of truth the very topic of the book itself, we find ourselves in a moment that both has an unusually high regard for non-fiction storytelling, yet is very unclear on how to define the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

Then, just today, Aaron Bady published a really smart and interesting post over at The New Inquiry**** entitled "The McNulty Gambit."*****  Starting with the subplot from Season 5 of The Wire in which Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) invents a (media friendly) serial killer in an effort to attract public concern to crimes that would otherwise be ignored, Bady mounts a semi-defense of fabricating evidence, with reference to the Daisey case, the recent Kony viral video, the Three Cups of Tea fiasco, and the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.  It's an interesting effort.  Rather than summarize Bady's post in detail, I'll just suggest you go read it.

I'll wait.

Now that you're back, let me note a couple things about Bady's piece that bothered me.

Here is what I think are the nut 'graphs of Bady's post:

what these fiction writers also have in common is a certain objective sense in which they are right, in which the story they are telling is true. While their subjective accounts tend to be the least true part of it (the most damning lies have to do with Daisey’s description of his personal experiences, for example), but behind those subjective untruths, we also find a broad field of objective accuracy: Foxconn is a terrible place to work, Joseph Kony really is a nightmare, building schools in Afghanistan is a good thing to do, and Syrian repression is no joke. Marlo really was a serial killer. 

This is not a defense, of course, but it is worth saying: if we only emphasize the lies in these accounts, we thereby overlook the extent to which they were saying true things. And it is also worth remembering that truth is not an either/or. One can easily deceive by telling nothing but the truth – telling it selectively, misframed, etc – and one can also tell a kind of truth by using statements which are, on their own, untrue. This is why fiction matters, and why journalism never rests onquite the firm bedrock of objectivity that it needs to pretend it does. But again, this is not a defense, just an attempt to describe a problem that we often have vested interests in failing to acknowledge, the blurriness of the line that separates fact from fiction.

What bothers me here is the slippage in Bady's post between right and true.  Bady seems to want to argue that, though not true in one sense, the falsehoods in these stories are true in some other sense.

But this seems like a wholly unnecessary bit of water-muddying.  Certainly Daisey, Frey, Tom MacMaster ("Gay Girl in Damascus"), and (the fictional) McNulty absolutely understood that they were telling falsehoods and did what they could to cover up that fact. What each was interested in wasn't arriving at some higher truth, but rather compelling action, which each felt couldn't be done by simply sticking to the facts.

Bady understands this. And most of the rest of his post concerns precisely what one needs to do to compel action (more about this later).  But for some reason Bady starts the discussion by attempting to reframe the it in terms of the complexity of truth, almost suggesting that a lie that compels good action might be another form of truth.

Sorry. I'm not buying.

There is, of course, a tradition stretching at least back to Plato that argues in favor of "noble lies" or socially necessary falsehoods.  It is a tradition that, at least today, is largely associated with the political right.  I can't say I find this tradition very attractive. But speaking of noble lies seems to me a good deal clearer and, in a certain sense, more honest, than attempts to rebrand putatively socially necessary falsehoods as some other form of truth.  The story of the McNulty Gambit is, in fact, a story about noble lying.  We will be clearer about the virtues and vices associated with this strategy if we are honest about what it entails.

My other dissent from Bady concerns his post's concluding thoughts about the seemingly futile reformism of many of the efforts that he discusses.  In situations that require fundamental structural changes--the political situation in central Africa, crime in Baltimore, working conditions in China--Bady's protagonists spin yarns that seem to instead point to inadequate and local changes--killing Joseph Kony, capturing Marlo, boycotting Apple products.  This flawed reformism, Bady argues, is intimately linked to the limitations of narrative:

[B]ecause such stories are derived from their audience – and its imaginative capabilities – they will for that reason demand and privilege reactions to the problem that are maddeningly simplistic in their very imaginable practicality. Kony is bad and so he must be killed by the military, because that’s something we can picture, can visualize; fundamentally restructuring the Central African system of political economy and governance is impossibly and unthinkably remote. Apple is bad and must be regulated (or shunned or something), because, again, that’s something simple we can imagine happening (as opposed to any alternative to the advanced industrial capitalism that makes Foxconn all but inevitable). And MacMasters later admitted that he had given his story an ending, an ending that is striking by its plausible realism: “I was going to end the story with having her be free, and get out of country — end of story.” But this ending is necessary precisely because individual escapes happen every day (while a real solution to the Syrian crisis is unthinkably complicated).  

Each of these outcomes are imaginable, in part, as a direct consequence of the fact that they do not trouble the status quo. We can imagine those reforms, because they are essentially superficial adjustments of a system that not only remains intact, but which we – in our thinking about what is and isn’t possible – rely on and presume. 

All of which is simply to say: it’s in the nature of grand structural transformations that we will always have great difficulty picturing what the end-state would look like. And because we feel we have to, we tend not to, falling back on the narrative patterns we know better. 

I think, in principle, quite the opposite is the case. Our ability to imagine fundamental structural change is, if anything, more dependent upon, and more helped by, fictional narratives, than is the reformism of these particular efforts.  Our culture--and most other cultures of which I'm aware--is full of stories that imagine vast, fundamental changes in the world:  from the Book of Revelation to the entire genre of secular utopian (and dystopian) fiction.  The world's great revolutionary and reactionary movements have compelled transformative action--for good and ill--precisely by substituting fantastic tales for quotidian truth, often labeling the fiction a kind of higher truth (Stalinist Socialist Realism comes most immediately to mind, but just about any millenarian religious movement or radical political movement has similar structures).  Bady is right that the reformism of these efforts is worth noting. But that reformism is accidental; it does not reflect any limits of the McNulty Gambit.

Let me conclude by pointing this discussion back in the direction of historical practice (without ever quite getting there).  None of the figures that Bady discusses are historians. Despite historians occasionally playing with narrative and fiction, even the most postmodern of us tend to go no further than knowingly making stuff up that we simply cannot know and admitting as much (and even that is a bold, and IMO rarely entirely successful, maneuver).  To the best of my knowledge, the canons of historical practice still explicitly forbid passing on knowing falsehoods as the truth.

And yet the "objectivity question," to the extent that it still exists, revolves around similar issues.  The quest for a "usable past" is not entirely dissimilar from the desire to tell stories that will compel action.

So I'm back where I was when I didn't write about That Noble Dream the week before last, wondering how exactly this moment of our culture's continuing struggle to reconcile narrative and truth is reflected in my own profession.  And wishing, I suppose, that I had a guide as good as Novick around to help clarify these issues for me.

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* What is blogging for if it is not, occasionally, for muddled thoughts?

** This was particularly the case in the Princeton History Department, which played a starring role of sorts in Novick's final chapter on the David Abraham controversy, which had occurred just a few short years earlier.  Several years later, I'd actually become friends with David. Though he was teaching at the University of Miami's law school, he continued to live in Princeton, NJ. And, during summers, he played softball with me on the History Department's B-league softball team, the Revolting Masses (fwiw, the more serious / skilled A-league History Department squad was called the Machiavellian Moment). But in the fall of 1988, David was very much an historical actor and, as of yet, unknown to me personally.

*** One way or another, I would have asked younger readers of this blog whether this book mattered to them at all.  So I might as well do so here.  Does it?

**** The New Inquiry's format, like that of the sports-and-culture blog Grantland, incorporates marginal notes, a marvelous (and marvelously old-fashioned) way of presenting additional information that turns out to be particularly well-suited to the web.  Certainly it beats the crap out of these jerry-rigged footnotes. Memo to myself: when this blog finally migrates to Wordpress, let's see if we can incorporate marginal notes in our new design!

***** The piece is apparently partly inspired by Slavoj Žižek's recent talk on The Wire, which I have yet to listen to.  Bady's description of that talk as "usefully wrong about lots of things, and strikingly insightful about a few," however, seems to me one of the best general descriptions of Žižek's work that I've ever read.

On Detachment; Or, Should Intellectual Historians Be Attached to Our Subjects?

With this post, I do not entirely wish to return to the question of objectivity that perennially consumes historians. Peter Novick has written most of what needs to be written on “that noble dream.” Plus, the matter seems entirely too “Historical Methods 101.” That said, my recent reading of Mark Gerson’s intellectual history of neoconservatism, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, has compelled me to revisit the question: To what degree should we strive to be detached from our subjects, even when we mostly agree with them?

The reason for my return to the problems of objectivity and detachment is that I think Gerson is too in love with those he writes about, neoconservative intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Although his book is often insightful about the origins, meaning, and influence of neoconservatism, it suffers from, at best, hagiographic tendencies, at worst, acute sycophancy.

First, praise for the book: Gerson is correct in pointing out that neoconservatism is mostly a movement of intellectuals. Neoconservatism does not lend itself to easy identification with specific political positions, because it’s more a mode of thought that combines elements of both liberalism and conservatism. Gerson writes: “Whereas neoconservatism rejects the liberal notion that a society of atomized individuals pursuing their interests and following their desires will somehow lead to a common good, neoconservatism insists on the liberal idea that involuntary characteristics such as race, rank, and station should never restrain an individual. Likewise, while neoconservatism rejects the traditional conservative emphasis on the authority of tradition and glorification of the past, it shares conservative concerns with order, continuity, and community” (9). Gerson correctly points out that “it has been a primary neoconservative project to inject American democratic discourse with a different language, one that accounts for responsibilities as well as rights, obligations as well as payments due” (276).
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Gerson thoroughly explores these competing, sometimes contradictory aspects of neoconservatism, beginning in the 1950s with liberal anticommunism, and ending in the 1990s with a discussion of culture war issues such as the role of religion in the public square, and the debates over multiculturalism and political correctness. He masters the essence of the neoconservatives: their disdain for the sixties counterculture; their growing belief that government programs tended to create more problems than they solved; their defense of Israel and Jews in general, which often fed into their critique of black politics after 1967; their animosity towards the so-called “academic left,” etc… All of this guides us to a fuller understanding of neoconservatism, its roots, and how it has come to influence policy.

But, Gerson’s love affair with the neocons—or, more precisely, his neoconservative ideology—leads to a failure in scholarship. Gerson does not subject neoconservative ideas to any sort of critical lens. He rarely questions or scrutinizes neoconservative premises. He assumes as given that which needs to be proven.

For example, Gerson writes: “The rise in black anti-Semitism in the 1970s accompanied the rise of anti-Semitism among radicals of all races” (158). His two major examples of black and left anti-Semitism: criticism of Israel, and siding with black parents instead of Jewish teachers during the 1967 Ocean Hill/Brownsville teachers strike. With regards to the former, there have long been debates about whether it is appropriate to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism; an honest scholar would have nodded to this debate at the very least. With regards to the latter, the history of that teacher’s strike is far too complex to boil down to an ethnic scrum between Jews and blacks. Yes, some blacks displayed anti-Semitism, just as some of teachers demonstrated anti-black racism during the heat of the strike. But the political divide was between those who supported community control of schools, black activists and some of their liberal allies, such as Mayor John Lindsay, and those who supported the United Federation of Teachers, which rightly feared community control would encroach upon professional autonomy. And in truth, blacks and leftists could be found on either side of this power struggle; anti-Semitism was peripheral.

Examples such as this abound in Gerson’s book. It is one thing to agree with the neocons on these matters. As someone who has been accused of ideological heavy-handedness, I am not interested in lecturing Gerson or anyone else about objectivity, which I have never thought desirable much less possible. But it is quite another thing to write a book about neoconservative intellectuals and never undertake a serious analysis of those who disagreed, other than to offer up a few straw men to dissemble. This is flat out annoying.

Now, to bring up some broader methodological and theoretical problems: surely my hyper-awareness of Gerson’s hagiography must be rooted in my political disagreements with him. No doubt I forgive likeminded scholars for similar transgressions. I ask myself: do I unknowingly fail to subject those intellectuals I like to the type of scrutiny I proscribe for Gerson? If so, does Slavoj Zizek’s dictum—that the “ideological is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence”—hold true? How do intellectual historians remain detached from those subjects they agree with and even admire? Is such detachment possible or desirable? I welcome feedback.

On Detachment; Or, Should Intellectual Historians Be Attached to Our Subjects?

With this post, I do not entirely wish to return to the question of objectivity that perennially consumes historians. Peter Novick has written most of what needs to be written on “that noble dream.” Plus, the matter seems entirely too “Historical Methods 101.” That said, my recent reading of Mark Gerson’s intellectual history of neoconservatism, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, has compelled me to revisit the question: To what degree should we strive to be detached from our subjects, even when we mostly agree with them?

The reason for my return to the problems of objectivity and detachment is that I think Gerson is too in love with those he writes about, neoconservative intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Although his book is often insightful about the origins, meaning, and influence of neoconservatism, it suffers from, at best, hagiographic tendencies, at worst, acute sycophancy.

First, praise for the book: Gerson is correct in pointing out that neoconservatism is mostly a movement of intellectuals. Neoconservatism does not lend itself to easy identification with specific political positions, because it’s more a mode of thought that combines elements of both liberalism and conservatism. Gerson writes: “Whereas neoconservatism rejects the liberal notion that a society of atomized individuals pursuing their interests and following their desires will somehow lead to a common good, neoconservatism insists on the liberal idea that involuntary characteristics such as race, rank, and station should never restrain an individual. Likewise, while neoconservatism rejects the traditional conservative emphasis on the authority of tradition and glorification of the past, it shares conservative concerns with order, continuity, and community” (9). Gerson correctly points out that “it has been a primary neoconservative project to inject American democratic discourse with a different language, one that accounts for responsibilities as well as rights, obligations as well as payments due” (276).
.
Gerson thoroughly explores these competing, sometimes contradictory aspects of neoconservatism, beginning in the 1950s with liberal anticommunism, and ending in the 1990s with a discussion of culture war issues such as the role of religion in the public square, and the debates over multiculturalism and political correctness. He masters the essence of the neoconservatives: their disdain for the sixties counterculture; their growing belief that government programs tended to create more problems than they solved; their defense of Israel and Jews in general, which often fed into their critique of black politics after 1967; their animosity towards the so-called “academic left,” etc… All of this guides us to a fuller understanding of neoconservatism, its roots, and how it has come to influence policy.

But, Gerson’s love affair with the neocons—or, more precisely, his neoconservative ideology—leads to a failure in scholarship. Gerson does not subject neoconservative ideas to any sort of critical lens. He rarely questions or scrutinizes neoconservative premises. He assumes as given that which needs to be proven.

For example, Gerson writes: “The rise in black anti-Semitism in the 1970s accompanied the rise of anti-Semitism among radicals of all races” (158). His two major examples of black and left anti-Semitism: criticism of Israel, and siding with black parents instead of Jewish teachers during the 1967 Ocean Hill/Brownsville teachers strike. With regards to the former, there have long been debates about whether it is appropriate to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism; an honest scholar would have nodded to this debate at the very least. With regards to the latter, the history of that teacher’s strike is far too complex to boil down to an ethnic scrum between Jews and blacks. Yes, some blacks displayed anti-Semitism, just as some of teachers demonstrated anti-black racism during the heat of the strike. But the political divide was between those who supported community control of schools, black activists and some of their liberal allies, such as Mayor John Lindsay, and those who supported the United Federation of Teachers, which rightly feared community control would encroach upon professional autonomy. And in truth, blacks and leftists could be found on either side of this power struggle; anti-Semitism was peripheral.

Examples such as this abound in Gerson’s book. It is one thing to agree with the neocons on these matters. As someone who has been accused of ideological heavy-handedness, I am not interested in lecturing Gerson or anyone else about objectivity, which I have never thought desirable much less possible. But it is quite another thing to write a book about neoconservative intellectuals and never undertake a serious analysis of those who disagreed, other than to offer up a few straw men to dissemble. This is flat out annoying.

Now, to bring up some broader methodological and theoretical problems: surely my hyper-awareness of Gerson’s hagiography must be rooted in my political disagreements with him. No doubt I forgive likeminded scholars for similar transgressions. I ask myself: do I unknowingly fail to subject those intellectuals I like to the type of scrutiny I proscribe for Gerson? If so, does Slavoj Zizek’s dictum—that the “ideological is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence”—hold true? How do intellectual historians remain detached from those subjects they agree with and even admire? Is such detachment possible or desirable? I welcome feedback.