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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
In the beginning was the Theory. Even before the collapse of Soviet communism, the glow of Marxism in American (and European) universities was beginning to dim. Now we look back on our own investment in Marxism, not always with satisfaction. At best, the theory did not so much fail historians, as historians, in their efforts to redress the lacunae in the theory, wrote around it to the extent that theory ultimately became marginal to their enterprise. This is hardly surprising since Marxism, having given up pretense to science by the mid-1960s, became largely a critical theory in the sense that its main sources were European thinkers – Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Althusser – who sought to repair the crumbling walls and beams remaining from the wreckage of Stalinism.
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2. For a more detailed elaboration of this distinction. see Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1991). chap. 3.Google ScholarAlso see the interesting discussion by Seltzer, Mark, “Writing Technologies,” New German Critique (forthcoming, 1993).Google Scholar
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