Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Shout Out

Though I leave in a few hours to Spain I just wanted to post this piece from Volokh showcasing Dr. Dauber's prose to the world. It seems odd to me that the readers of the post are primarily interested in law while the post is written by an English professor razzing anthropologists (and English is more dutiful about historical accuracy? Is that even a problem for English? Maybe that's not what they claim to do?). I think some of the commenters ignore that when responding.

My quick two cents is that Dr. Dauber complains about the dissolution of disciplines. In the old days people would study a discipline, their discipline, and ignore others. That was annoying. So people woke up and said, "My, our discipline is so removed from reality we need to politicize it!" And thus everyone became a political theorist. Which is bad, because the world already had too many of those (and also bad for my job prospects). And now we have humanities scholars running around like political theorists without any context (intellectual, historical, etc), which is, again, annoying.