Reviews for Making history

The average rating for Making history based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-21 00:00:00 Michael McDougall These days any leftist with a spine might feel a bit queasy about reading something by Alex Callinicos. However, as Trotsky once said of Plekhanov, "it does no harm to learn from him every now and then." This is one of the professor's earlier, and very academic, works. The goal as I understand it is to present a theory of human agents in society that can both stand up to the rigor demanded by academic social science and conform to Marxist theory and practice. To do so the book takes on the state theorists who were contemporary at the time such as Giddens, Skocpol and Mann, as well as the attempt to frame Marxism in an analytic or rational-choice model as attempted by Cohen and Elster. Making History is therefore very dense at points, and it's hard to see where Callinicos is going when (for example) he spends the second chapter disputing minutiae of linguistic theory. Nevertheless there are passages of theoretical brilliance here, including a takedown of methodological individualism that I'm sure I will return to. Callinicos was influenced by Althusser early on, and this influence shows very clearly. Here he is not the dull man summoned to defend a decrepit party apparatus through boring repetitions of Leninist credos, but an incredibly eclectic thinker drawing on a number of sources outside Marxism to frame a better historical materialist explanation of society. This is far from the ultra-orthodox defender of "the IS tradition" and the view that everything done or said by that tradition was indubitably correct. How the mighty have fallen. I read this book because I'm a grad student in the social sciences and I need some understanding of the underlying issues of philosophy that Callinicos addresses. If you have similar predilictions you will find it rewarding. If not, it will probably bore you and you are better skipping it.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-20 00:00:00 Daniel Ostrander نظریه "ساختن تاریخ" آلکس کالینیکوس با شرحی که تلقی¬های نابسنده از عاملیت به دست می دهند آغاز می گردد. کالینیکوس نشان می دهد که برای همساز کردن ماتریالیسم تاریخی مارکس با اثرگذاری واقعی عاملان در جهت¬دهی تاریخ، می بایست نظری تلفیقی به حیات اجتماعی داشت. از نظر او کنش فردی بدون فعلیت یافتن قابلیت¬های ساختاری امکان پذیر نیست. و از دیگر سو منافع عینیِ جمعی حلقه ای غیرقابل انکار در پیوند یافتن تجربه آگاهانه افراد و ساختارهای کلان است.