Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 01:00:37 -0500
Subject: Re: E.P. THOMPSON VS. LOUIS ALTHUSSER


Ralph, I have a hard enough time understanding how you interrogate a table
(maybe instead of bright lights, you threaten it with matches?), but how a
table interrogates you is completely beyond me.

I can't comment on EP's polemic about Althusser, since I know nothing about
it, but he definitely takes his anti-theory bit too far. There's a passage
in the Making of the English Working Class where he rightly skewers some
other historian for doing an average of income or consumption or something
over England county by county, without taking into account the fact that
the counties varied in population, and in fact the worse off counties had
larger populations. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that when one
averages, one should do it correctly, he goes on to ridicule the whole
notion of averaging as something only a subhuman philistine would do. As
Mark Twain said, " One should be careful to get out of an experience only
the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that
sits down on the hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid
again -- and that's well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one
anymore."

Rahul




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