Anti-Climacus

When I attended IHS seminars with some regularity, the first lecture would usually be given over to a discussion of the history of libertarianism and classical liberalism. One of the upshots of the lecture was the idea that good academic research requires the willingness to periodically question all one's assumptions and arguments and discard those which do not bear scrutiny. It's certainly a rosy picture about academic life--who really ever changes their mind?--but as a general first principle, I find it compelling.

Along these lines, I've been following Ta-Nahisi Coates' thoughts on the Civil War, and the writing of histories of the Civil War, with some interest. Way back when I was but a tiny aspiring academic, I read my way through the major histories of the period, avidly watched Ken Burns' documentary, the whole nine yards (also: I was 10). Mostly I was unaware of the context in which the various major historians wrote, and so regarded Shelby Foote and James McPherson (among others) to be equivalent properties: I now recognize this to be wrong.

This exploration of Foote is of particular interest. Foote comes off as a scholar who came into the profession with certain ideas of how the Civil War worked, that slavery was not the main cause of the war, or the south's resistance was based around a system of honor which it is proper to romanticize. He seems to have come to understand in the interval that these positions are wrong--that slavery was a substantial moral evil, as was Jim Crow and the failure of Reconstruction, that the KKK (even the 19th century 'nonviolent' KKK) was bad--but still holds to all his old beliefs, and has never managed to reconcile them. The result is tragic and not a little sad. But admitting you're wrong is difficult even in the best of cases, and when it's something as foundational as this is for Foote, it causes all sorts of problems.

All this commends the virtue of periodically challenging one's assumptions. I recently had just such an opportunity: on the recommendation of a friend, I read Discipline and Punish, and found it both more interesting and less controversial than the conservative political theory hype would have one believe. But more of that in a later post.