Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 9:34:27 PM
It is odd how one's politics can subtly color one's work.
I recently began reading Frederick Kagan's
The End of the Old Order and found it terribly enjoyable. As usual, I completely ignored the jacket blurb about the author, mostly because qualifications don't matter to me. Good writing and scholarship is good regardless of credentials, and no credentials will make bad writing good. In any case, while reading through it, I found very little indication of the author's political persuasion. There was a single mention of "Reagan's malapropism about the Soviet Union", but it was low key enough I just assumed the author was the usual moderate liberal that writes most history in modern universities. (In contrast, while quite enjoyable Donald Kagan's
The Peloponnesian War was rife with political bias, so much so that I found it somewhat less enjoyable than I should have, as the politics tended to distract from what was otherwise an enjoyable survey of a fascinating period.)
In fact, I enjoyed the work enough that I ordered two other works by the author,
A Military History of Tsarist Russia and
The Military Reforms of Nicholas I. And whent he first arrived today, I was arther surprised. You see, Frederick Kagan is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Which was surprising for two reasons. First, because AEI fellows usually don't get much shelf space at big chain bookstores, which is where I found the first of his works I read. But second, because I was surprised to find a conservative historian, as modern history departments have a very strong liberal bias. Next to departments of sociology, journalism and economics, in my experience history is one of the most politicized departments in many universities*.
There really isn't much of a point here, simply a mention of my surprise that even when there is nothing explicitly political in one's writing, I have a tendency to find more enjoyment in the writing of those who share some of my political beliefs.
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* Obviously I am excluding such purely liberal inventions as "gender studies" and "ethnic studies" and so on. Clearly those would be far to the left. What is interesting is that the two fields in which I considered graduate study, history and economics, are among those I find most biased to the left. (My undergraduate degree was in history, but I was late in apply for the GRE, and so ended up taking the LSAT instead, got a 48 of 48 and spent a year in law school before dropping out. Later I was about 15 credits short of a BA in economics when I took the GRE, got 800/800/800 and was accepted into a fairly prominent university's doctoral program. However, lacking money and being maxe dout on loans, I could not both afford tuition and moving cross country, and so when I could get no scholarships I ended up not completing even my BA. Eventually I did enter grad school to study computer science, but, as I had worked in the field for 5+ years at the time, I found the theory so far divorced from reality I left that program as well after 18 months. You can see the legacy of my studies in some of my complaints about the academic dogmatism in software. See "
Examples From Another Field", "
Object Oriented Programming, Apple Computers and Justice", "
"Best Practices"" and "
More Examples From Another Field".)