All: if you're going to comment, please engage with the specifics of the article (there are a lot of them) and not just its baity title. (We've changed that above now.)
This is a book review of The_Machiavellian_Moment.[1] I haven't read it. Sounds interesting. The reviewer's comments are more about modern interpretations of the American revolution and constitutional convention than the events themselves.
The US constitution was the result of an attempt to build something that wouldn't easily break. That's clear from the debates at the convention, and the Federalist Papers, all of which survive and are still widely read. The US constitution was Version 2. Version 1 was the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak central government subordinate to the states. That government was closer to the United Nations or the European Union than a national government. It wasn't strong enough.
The framers knew they needed a strong central government. They expected the British to come back and try to re-conquer the United States, which happened in the war of 1812. The obvious solution was a monarchy. Hamilton wanted that. (He wanted to be King.) Nobody else did. They'd fought a war to get out from under a king.
The other worry was descent into anarchy and mob rule. Which is what happened in the French revolution. Followed by years of civil wars, then Napoleon.
So the framers wanted something between those extremes. They had the advantage that most of the colonies already had elected representatives and governors, and that seemed to be working. So there was a model to copy.
Much stability was built-in, such as 6-year terms for senators. Impeachment was made possible but hard.
The President can't dissolve Congress and call a new election, as in a parliamentary system.
Congress controls spending. It's not perfect, and it's being stressed at the moment, but it's still holding together.
Most of the rest was trying to work out the spheres of control of the federal and state governments. The original plan was that the Federal government is in charge of war, foreign policy, and interstate commerce, and the states do everything else.
That's still pretty much the case. There's far more interstate commerce, but most government is still state level and below.
That's rare, worldwide.
There were many arguments and compromises. But the Framers, on the whole, did a good job. It's worth reading the Federalist papers as a design exercise.
There are strange interpretations of what the framers did.
There are people who claim they were divinely inspired.
But no; the debates show lots of arguments and compromise.
They were very afraid of failing. "We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately". Which would have happened had Britain won the war of 1812, which was a close thing. The
British reached the Capitol and burned it.
We actually attacked Canada first in 1812 and attacked residential property up there. The British came into Washington DC and destroyed Federal Stuff but they left the civilian stuff mostly alone.
"Yes, the United States attacked first in the War of 1812, by declaring war on Great Britain and invading Canada on June 18, 1812, marking the official start of the conflict."
While not directly related to the intellectual debates that surrounded the creation of the Constitution, I do recommend _America's Revolutionary Mind_. A detailed account of the better ideas in the culture at the time in the decades leading up to July 4, 1776.
paxys 1 days ago [-]
The definition of both history and politics is vague and broad enough that there's guaranteed to be a complete overlap between the two. Anything that ever happened is history. The reason why things happened a certain way (at least in the form it was written down) is politics.
gsf_emergency 14 hours ago [-]
>Pocock’s claim is that history writing is, to some extent, political in itself.
Future historiographers might note a similar relationship between the papers of computer scientists and the economy..
In particular:
>history is the most powerful element in the construction and destruction of self-knowledge of political societies
I wish the reviewer had attended to the novel thing that Pocock had pointed out about the age-old tension between collectivism and humanism, though:
The time scale factor. (Think tech debt)
The key phrase 'Machiavellian Moment' is only mentioned in passing as
>the difficulty he faced in reconciling an ideal of citizenship with the uncertain and temporal character of republics.
JasserInicide 1 days ago [-]
I only read a chunk of the article but this stuck out:
In sum, Pocock was paradoxically under attack for being too liberal, but also for not being liberal enough. Said differently, Pocock was criticised for being too American and for not being American enough – all the more intriguing for a New Zealander.
If you have both sides criticizing you, chances are you got pretty close to a truth. Reminds me of Dave Chappelle, someone that both left and right culture warriors turned on in recent years.
75hfe02 1 days ago [-]
This is a lazy heuristic. It abdicates actually engaging with the substance of what someone is saying and weighing it against your own judgement in favor of seeing how much of a spectacle they've managed to create. No, creating more of a spectacle does not indicate that someone is closer to the truth.
jakelazaroff 1 days ago [-]
I have both flat earthers and round earthers criticizing me for my "cylindrical earth" theory. Chances are I'm pretty close to the truth :)
giraffe_lady 1 days ago [-]
I have always liked the programming version of this: "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration"
basfo 1 days ago [-]
With that argument, fascist regimes would be pretty close to the truth, since they were criticized by both liberal democracies and communist countries.
Also, you’re assuming there are always only two positions on a given topic. I know it might look that way on Twitter—most people today seem weaponized to pick one side or the other—but real social studies are far more nuanced than that.
The fact that everyone criticizes you only means that whatever you say doesn’t align with their narrative, not that you’re close to the truth.
Loughla 1 days ago [-]
I find it interesting that we're in a post truth society now, and it may not mean what I think it means. While considering your last paragraph I realized that post truth doesn't necessarily mean absence of fact.
It's simply people trying to write history while living it instead of waiting for it to actually be history or relying on experts to maintain an historical account. Facts don't matter. What gets remembered is all that matters, really.
Fascinating.
yardie 24 hours ago [-]
"If everyone is telling me I'm wrong, then I must be right!", is also an interpretation.
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
The other option is that if both sides are critisizing you, you are completely nuts. Saying the moon is made of green cheese isn't going to get support from the progressives or reactionaries.
jrflowers 1 days ago [-]
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aloisdg 1 days ago [-]
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dang 1 days ago [-]
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar—we're trying for the opposite here. You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, of course.
No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. Almost every sphere of human activity has history attached to it. Anything you do, people did before and there is a chain of influences and knowledge. We have to concede that the major developments in any of those histories do intersect with politics. For instance, if we trace the history of almost anything across the years 1940 to 1950, we almost certainly cannot ignore the both the disruptive and reinforcing effect of World War II. A lot of progress in STEM was accelerated by the war. But there isn't going to be a detailed political discussion there if our historic focus is something in STEM and not politics. The political details are tangential to that kind of history.
That's not to deny that there isn't an interesting point of view in exploring the connections among different threads of history. James Burke's fantastic Connections series comes to mind.
Some people are keenly interested in the history of their profession or hobbies. E.g. musicians interested in the history of music, or the development of their favorite instrument and such. Hackers, software devs and computer scientists interested in the history of computing and retrocomputing. Etc. Usually they are not into the political connection unless they are also interested in politics.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview, with what we might call party politics. History is always political because you can’t document every event that occurred during a given time; you’ll inevitably choose certain events over others. That very selection reflects a political stance, whether you realize it or not. Moreover, the subject itself is inherently political—for example, if you’re writing about music history, why focus on European composers rather than on whatever Chinese music existed at the time?
There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings.
An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
You are talking about the potential of political bias.
Actual political history itself can have political biases.
An apolitical history can also have political biases.
The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who.
I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
>An apolitical history can also have political biases.
seems contradictory. If you lived on earth, there is no "apolitical lens" to look in. You can only try to grab a truly comprehensive view by finding and studying multiple lenses.
>The biases aren't what make political history political
If you lived in a country, or need a public press to post your findings, or are simply hidden in exposure based on some private company with their own biases, I'd say all those are connected to the political.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
"Politics permeates everything" just seems to be like overeducated foolery.
What is the test you are using to detect politics, and what is the evidence that it universally detects politics in everything?
And if it detects politics in everything, how do you know the test works? Counterfactuality is lacking. There has to be some calibrating example of something in which the test finds no politics.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political.
History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.
tremon 23 hours ago [-]
humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political
Do you have a direct quote for that? For me, this seems like more than a mere misunderstanding of Aristoteles' work. In Politics book 1, he already explicitly distinguishes between "oikonomike" (the household) and "politike" (the city state) as being two different spheres of engagement. So the claim that any human action is by itself political is just plain false, as actions can either be political or domestic. I struggle to think of any work where he classified mundane acts such as eating as belonging to either category, it seems out of character to me.
Secondly, in Ethics Aristotle stated that he considered politics as a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself: the goal of man is to lead a morally virtuous life, and the goal of the community is to enable and enhance the moral character of its citizens. Therefore, the virtuous man engages in politics to increase the virtue of his entire community, in order to breed more virtuous men. He was also quite clear that public education was required (Politics, book 8) to mold the young into successful statesmen. Both of these seems at odds with your assertion that "humans are political beings" by default.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political.
Aristotle said politics is the study of how communities can achieve “the good life” through governance and organization. He said we are political animals (zoon politikon) who naturally form communities, such as the polis (city-state), to achieve common goals and virtue.
The idea that any human action is political cannot be attributed to Aristotle. It is also a silly and amateur assertion — to breathe is not political, to think is not political, to eat is not political, etc.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
Well, that depends on what you eat. Do you eat meat, or are you vegan?
Breathing is a physical action, so there isn’t much to debate there. However, even some physical actions—like using the bathroom—can have political or cultural dimensions. For instance, why do you use a toilet instead of a bidet, as is common in parts of Europe or South America? That choice is shaped by cultural and economic factors that influence your behavior.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> For instance, why do you use a toilet instead of a bidet,
Because my bathroom is too small to house a bidet.
Also, a bidet and toilet don’t serve the same purpose so your example is a false choice.
> Well, that depends on what you eat. Do you eat meat, or are you vegan?
The choice of what to eat can reflect or engage with political and social systems, but it isn’t a political act. It is a personal act. And “to eat” is also not a political act.
text0404 1 days ago [-]
is your bathroom too small because you don't make enough money for a larger bathroom? is it because of government regulations regarding habitations? why are you living in that location? what circumstances led you to make that decision? ie, even the size of your bathroom has its own politics in the sense that it contains a history of decision making and power dynamics.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
Japan solved the problem under the constraints of no room for a bidet. You can put a Japanese style shower toilet seat on almost any toilet. Mainly the size of the bowl (front-to-back dimension) has to be suitable so that the front loop of the seat sits aligned with the porcelain.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
Thank you. I'm well aware of the innovation in bidet and toilet technologies to assist in more hygienic defecation routines and the different environmental impact such as less toilet paper, different energy considerations, plastics, water usage, etc.
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kazinator 1 days ago [-]
I just farted; is that political?
Note that absolutely nobody is around.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
It depends, would you still have farted if someone else were around?
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
Yes, but very, very quietly. So that would obviously be political.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview,
“Political” refers to things related to the governance, policies, or affairs of a country, organization, or group. Usually involves the structure of power, decision-making, and public administration, and debates or actions concerning laws, rights, or societal issues.
Having a worldview is not a political act.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
Having a worldview is a political act. In fact, even having a sense of right and wrong is political. My point is that humans are inherently political beings: we don’t live in a vacuum, and our values, life choices, and even our language arise from a particular social system. Everything we do is political.
Your perspective seems limited to the more common or everyday meaning of “political,” and I understand that; however, in social studies, “political” usually has a much broader scope.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> In fact, even having a sense of right and wrong is political.
You’re confusing politics with ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies moral principles and values, focusing on what is right, wrong, good, or bad in human behavior.
Ethics focuses on morality, while politics addresses power and governance, though they often overlap in discussions of justice and societal well-being.
> Having a worldview is a political act.
Having a worldview is not inherently a political act, but it can become political when that worldview influences or interacts with societal structures, policies, or governance. A worldview shapes how you see justice, power, and societal organization, which may align with or challenge political systems or ideologies.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
Just the fact that you dress up is a political act, you are accepting and reproducing that being naked is wrong, or at least you do it because you can't do it otherwise due to social punishment. Or you go naked, and that's also a political stance. If you live in a society, everything you do is political.
And that's ok, there isn't anything wrong with that.
>Having a worldview is not inherently a political act
yes it is, because that world view doesn't come up to your head in the vaccum, is result of all social interactions you had in your life and every thing you saw etc, and from that you are creating a political posture. You may not take any action and be completely silent about it the rest of your life (doubtful) but even not talking about it is a political act.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
> Having a worldview is a political act.
Are you in the USA? This is just something they promulgate in the educational system, along with the idea that there is always room for another opinion that is just as valid, even after domain experts have reached consensus using rational evidence.
jakelazaroff 18 hours ago [-]
So you’re saying that… their worldview is a result of politics.
xondono 1 days ago [-]
Not OP but I think you’re confusing “politics” with “bias”.
History is biased, I don’t think anyone would debate that, but bias isn’t necessarily political. There’s lots of reasons for people to think some item or story is worth preserving, and most of them aren’t about politics.
The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
>The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.
Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.
>the academic study of government and the state.
That's all it is. unless you are truly independent and in the wild, it's hard to say anyone isn't influenced by politics. Hence, biases. Bias in this lens is a byproduct of your environment, managed by politics.
xondono 23 hours ago [-]
> Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.
You keep making a point that no one is bringing up. Not only I don’t believe that, as a non-US citizen living in Europe I don’t even care about your two parties.
But there’s quite a stretch between “humans are biased” and “what you think about how society should work influences absolutely everything you do”.
As a silly example, I have quite a collection of music. I keep physical copies of the ones I think are more important to me. If a future archeologist were to find them, they’d get a biased picture of what people listen.
But my taste in music has nothing to do with my beliefs about politics. There’s artists there with every type of conviction, from different eras, from different countries,..
“Everything is political” is a great slogan for activists to get people to do what you want them to do, but like all slogans it’s not actually true.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
Bias is often just a product of human cognition: i.e. one of the cognitive biases. Your environment is political, so your cognitive biases are tinged with politics.
tremon 9 hours ago [-]
That's just stretching the meaning of the word "political" so broad that it ceases to have meaning at all. For an act to be political, it needs to engage with the environment with an intention to change or entrench it. If you include in your definition actions that are the result of a certain political climate, you have simply nullified the word.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
It's also just as simple as experiences. even if we could remove all bias, we don't know what we don't know. aspects like language barriers don't help either in terms of properly sharing such histories either.
marknutter 1 days ago [-]
If someone documents a natural disaster like a Volcano engulfing an entire city, that's not political in any way, that's just recording facts that any historian regardless of their political views would record.
basfo 1 days ago [-]
There have been N volcano eruptions over the history of mankind, why you are taking focus on one and not the other is the political part.
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
The choice of which cities they document and what they cite is definitely political. For example, what city do you think of with that description? It's probably Pompeii and not Herculaneum, let alone Cuicuilco, Vestmannaeyjar, or NA 860.
tremon 9 hours ago [-]
So, what was the political motivation of Pliny the Elder to document the Vesuvian eruption that destroyed Pompeii, as opposed to e.g. the numerous eruptions of Krakatoa?
duped 1 days ago [-]
That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics.
They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
It's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
I guess you could write a pure technological history that just says what was invented and how it works, but that would be awfully dry and rather uninformative. As soon as you start discussing who did it and why, you’re in the realm of politics, even if not the presidents-and-kings sort of politics.
This site is a perfect example. It presents itself as a technical forum where politics is occasionally tolerated but never the focus. And yet you could probably write an entire book about the politics behind the name of the site itself, never mind its history, rules, culture, and means of support.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
You're in the realm of politics, but politics is still not the front-and-centre focus of your story. You're not telling a political history; but you need to reference politics in order to explain the timeline, or situations of when one of several equally good solutions "won" and such. It is still a history of the technology and not political history.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
History is written by the victors, though. And no one is omniscient. It's a bit hard to say "just the progression of discoveries" as if every voice is equal.
And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.
DiscourseFan 1 days ago [-]
The “victor” here is the technology which allowed you to survive into adulthood and fed you inexpensively and clothed you and supports the infrastructure for this forum which lets us have this discussion in the first place. The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy, the conditions which unleashed it held back by their own stubborn insistence.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
that's a pretty bizarre angle. we're overlooking centuries of abuse because "it made my life easier"?
My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country.
>The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy
and the biases of the winners, yes.
DiscourseFan 24 hours ago [-]
You are both the winner and the loser here. The right to vote is immaterial if the underlying conditions don't change, or change regardless of how you want them to. The silicon valley tech companies bought this most recent election, they donated the most money to both parties, and would fill up the cabinets of the president with their allies regardless who won, you were just voting on the flavor. But this is not a "bad" thing, insofar as it accelerates the pace of technological development, which creates both great wealth and great alienation and leads to increasing turmoil and civil unrest. But that is on account of "politics" itself, which legitimates the regime of industrial leaders and not industry itself, the tech founders and not the technology.
DiscourseFan 1 days ago [-]
The conditions of possibility of that extraodinary technical development are political. cf Marx, Capital vol 1
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
The conditions may be, but the development itself isn't, and the prior work which that development references and depends on likewise isn't (and had political conditions of its own quite possibly unrelated to the present ones).
DiscourseFan 1 days ago [-]
It is still shrouded by the spectre of the political
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
Even if so, that's a different claim from the content being political.
DiscourseFan 1 days ago [-]
its not not-political
19 hours ago [-]
tossandthrow 1 days ago [-]
Attribution in science is one of these areas where people are led to believe that is apolitical.
But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy.
An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.
labster 1 days ago [-]
Or how women’s contribution to sciences were continually overlooked and sometimes purposefully hidden, going along with the social/political status of women.
History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
You two point out something important: a history that appears apolitical on the surface can have a social/cultural/economic/political bias in it (whether conscious or not) by omission or emphasis.
As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them".
Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
tremon 8 hours ago [-]
Why do you assume that table was named differently in other parts of the world? I lived on the west side of that curtain, and I was also taught it was called Mendeleev's Table.
tossandthrow 1 days ago [-]
> Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
It sounds like you are talking about intent rather than politics - you example does, however, seem to be made with intent.
labster 22 hours ago [-]
I think they’re just not used to thinking about historical study. Even in science, do you focus on the Great Men like Einstein and Newton, or do you choose an Annales approach like Connections? Neither is wrong, but there are right and left overtones to these approaches. The way you assign causes is not always clear; even events themselves are socially constructed. History is a map to the past, but the map is not the territory.
atoav 1 days ago [-]
You may say the history of some niche topic isn't political, but it is and I am pretty sure most historians would agree. E.g. if you look at technological inventions you just have to look how that history treated prior or parallel inventions by people who were seen as lesser by those who wrote the history books, that means women, people of non-european cultural and ethnic decent.
Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to.
Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails.
Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.
cess11 1 days ago [-]
Which of these histories do not reflect any ideology, any regimes, any political settings, are expressed in a universal language, &c.?
Dalewyn 1 days ago [-]
>No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories.
No, history of any kind is always political.
Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
History is written by the survivors and descendants. Not all those who are vanquished are so completely eradicated that they don't have descendants; and even in those unfortunate cases, someone unrelated to them will dig up and reconstruct their story as best as possible, and tell it to the world. Some of the loudest voices are from the descendants of those who had been trampled.
Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.
johnnyanmac 1 days ago [-]
>Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory?
Sure, feel free to research how much resistance (no pun intended) there was over the mass adoption of transistors. the years of meetings and debates, the propoganda and fear tactics against transistors, the subjective claims over quality and safety of vacuum tubes.
This wasn't just some iterative upgrade like an RTX 2080 to a 3080.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
A transistor and tube don't know anything about politics though.
You can't hold a referendum to eliminate the Early effect from a transistor, or Miller capacitance from a tube stage.
We can give an accurate and informative technical history of electronic parts, while completely avoiding discussions of mass adoption struggles, and vendors spreading FUD and whatever other fluff. If you add some that to the story it's still primarily a technological story and not political.
throwawayq3423 1 days ago [-]
Just the concept of "history" depends on a shared objective reality, which is under attack in 2024 more than any other time.
14 hours ago [-]
delichon 1 days ago [-]
Thermodynamics. Politics is about the struggle to control the flow of energy between organisms. History is about creating narratives of that struggle, in order to learn to tap the flow or to direct it. To a first approximation, a history that's disinterested in politics is like a football game commentary that's disinterested in the score.
devindotcom 1 days ago [-]
I realize this is largely a lost battle but strictly speaking "disinterested" means no interest in the sense of "conflict of interest." A disinterested party has no "interest" in one outcome over another and can therefore be trusted to be impartial in the matter. "Uninterested" means what you wrote, they are not interested in something in the more everyday sense of the word. Not everyone thinks it matters but the two words do have distinct meanings, and in some situations (like in conversations about values, politics, etc) it is actually worthwhile to be precise so that one does not inadvertently mislead the reader.
delichon 1 days ago [-]
Merriam Webster agrees with you for word sense 1a, but with me for word sense 1b. So you win and I agree that uninterested is a better choice here.
LordDragonfang 1 days ago [-]
I mean, beyond even the general truism that history is written by the "victors" - not just in war, but in soft political power as well - the choice of which parts of history you decide are important enough to present and which you omit is itself inherently a political decision.
ajuc 1 days ago [-]
It's not written by victors. Look at Jewish history. Or Polish. Or basically any small European country.
If anything - losing and surviving makes you more likely to write what you went through than just winning. And people who believe their pasts were better than futures tend to look into history more.
History is mostly written by survivors, and losing is a powerful motivation for self-reflection.
You can even see it in US with the different attitude people have towards civil war history. How many hardcore civil war history enthusiasts do you know that are mostly interested in Union?
viraptor 1 days ago [-]
> Or Polish.
Yeah... I don't know how it is these days, but my history lessons covered being attacked and under occupation for a very long time. But when Poland expanded the size, it just happened in the background. It's ok, I'm sure nobody was affected and it wasn't worth mentioning. Let's just be proud that it reached from sea to sea.
LordDragonfang 1 days ago [-]
You're ignoring that I specifically included soft power. Garnering sympathy as an underdog is a historically effective form of soft power.
To your point: not to sound like an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, but it's pretty clear that while the Jewish people have been the victims of many tragedies, they also have managed to accumulate a great deal of political soft power as well, even while being a disadvantaged minority.
That's why certain types are so obsessed over the so-called "culture war". While some people just want a right to live and love who they want, the currently dominant cultural factions see that as a threat to their ability to, among other things, control the narrative of history for their own gain.
ajuc 1 days ago [-]
I am Polish. I know this from experience. The parts of history we focus on are the parts where we lost. When a society loses political power - it focuses on history and culture to survive (as opposed to "integrating"). Which influences the culture in a self-reinforcing way. Very easy to end up with martyrdom complex.
That's what Jews have been doing for 2000 years and their history is one of the best studied out there.
When a society wins political power - it looks into the future. A few eggheads will write the history but nobody'll read it.
Soft power is secondary - it comes FROM losing and focusing on history. Victors go split the loot, losers go write how they were the "moral winners".
AlotOfReading 1 days ago [-]
> When a society wins political power - it looks into the future. A few eggheads will write the history but nobody'll read it.
Afrofuturism didn't come from winning any kind of political power. It came from the opposite. Similarly, white American males aren't fascinated by Rome, the American Civil War, and WW2 because they collectively lack any representation or political power.
ajuc 16 hours ago [-]
Black people in USA certainly gained political power over time and white people lost it.
There is still white privilege, but the direction is obvious.
ashoeafoot 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jrflowers 1 days ago [-]
Why are you writing like Dennis from It’s Always Sunny? You could have just posted “I am very smart :-D”
ashoeafoot 9 hours ago [-]
The disability does not dissappear by knowing about it. Im a guy in a mental wheel chair, same as you.
Rendered at 23:15:37 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
(Generic ideological tangents are boring and therefore off topic here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
The US constitution was the result of an attempt to build something that wouldn't easily break. That's clear from the debates at the convention, and the Federalist Papers, all of which survive and are still widely read. The US constitution was Version 2. Version 1 was the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak central government subordinate to the states. That government was closer to the United Nations or the European Union than a national government. It wasn't strong enough.
The framers knew they needed a strong central government. They expected the British to come back and try to re-conquer the United States, which happened in the war of 1812. The obvious solution was a monarchy. Hamilton wanted that. (He wanted to be King.) Nobody else did. They'd fought a war to get out from under a king.
The other worry was descent into anarchy and mob rule. Which is what happened in the French revolution. Followed by years of civil wars, then Napoleon.
So the framers wanted something between those extremes. They had the advantage that most of the colonies already had elected representatives and governors, and that seemed to be working. So there was a model to copy.
Much stability was built-in, such as 6-year terms for senators. Impeachment was made possible but hard. The President can't dissolve Congress and call a new election, as in a parliamentary system. Congress controls spending. It's not perfect, and it's being stressed at the moment, but it's still holding together.
Most of the rest was trying to work out the spheres of control of the federal and state governments. The original plan was that the Federal government is in charge of war, foreign policy, and interstate commerce, and the states do everything else. That's still pretty much the case. There's far more interstate commerce, but most government is still state level and below. That's rare, worldwide.
There were many arguments and compromises. But the Framers, on the whole, did a good job. It's worth reading the Federalist papers as a design exercise.
There are strange interpretations of what the framers did. There are people who claim they were divinely inspired. But no; the debates show lots of arguments and compromise. They were very afraid of failing. "We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately". Which would have happened had Britain won the war of 1812, which was a close thing. The British reached the Capitol and burned it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machiavellian_Moment
There are also Anti-Federalist papers as well. https://history.nycourts.gov/about_period/antifederalist-pap...
Future historiographers might note a similar relationship between the papers of computer scientists and the economy..
In particular:
>history is the most powerful element in the construction and destruction of self-knowledge of political societies
I wish the reviewer had attended to the novel thing that Pocock had pointed out about the age-old tension between collectivism and humanism, though:
The key phrase 'Machiavellian Moment' is only mentioned in passing as>the difficulty he faced in reconciling an ideal of citizenship with the uncertain and temporal character of republics.
In sum, Pocock was paradoxically under attack for being too liberal, but also for not being liberal enough. Said differently, Pocock was criticised for being too American and for not being American enough – all the more intriguing for a New Zealander.
If you have both sides criticizing you, chances are you got pretty close to a truth. Reminds me of Dave Chappelle, someone that both left and right culture warriors turned on in recent years.
Also, you’re assuming there are always only two positions on a given topic. I know it might look that way on Twitter—most people today seem weaponized to pick one side or the other—but real social studies are far more nuanced than that.
The fact that everyone criticizes you only means that whatever you say doesn’t align with their narrative, not that you’re close to the truth.
It's simply people trying to write history while living it instead of waiting for it to actually be history or relying on experts to maintain an historical account. Facts don't matter. What gets remembered is all that matters, really.
Fascinating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's not to deny that there isn't an interesting point of view in exploring the connections among different threads of history. James Burke's fantastic Connections series comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
Some people are keenly interested in the history of their profession or hobbies. E.g. musicians interested in the history of music, or the development of their favorite instrument and such. Hackers, software devs and computer scientists interested in the history of computing and retrocomputing. Etc. Usually they are not into the political connection unless they are also interested in politics.
There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings.
An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)
Actual political history itself can have political biases.
An apolitical history can also have political biases.
The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who.
I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.
seems contradictory. If you lived on earth, there is no "apolitical lens" to look in. You can only try to grab a truly comprehensive view by finding and studying multiple lenses.
>The biases aren't what make political history political
If you lived in a country, or need a public press to post your findings, or are simply hidden in exposure based on some private company with their own biases, I'd say all those are connected to the political.
What is the test you are using to detect politics, and what is the evidence that it universally detects politics in everything?
And if it detects politics in everything, how do you know the test works? Counterfactuality is lacking. There has to be some calibrating example of something in which the test finds no politics.
History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.
Do you have a direct quote for that? For me, this seems like more than a mere misunderstanding of Aristoteles' work. In Politics book 1, he already explicitly distinguishes between "oikonomike" (the household) and "politike" (the city state) as being two different spheres of engagement. So the claim that any human action is by itself political is just plain false, as actions can either be political or domestic. I struggle to think of any work where he classified mundane acts such as eating as belonging to either category, it seems out of character to me.
Secondly, in Ethics Aristotle stated that he considered politics as a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself: the goal of man is to lead a morally virtuous life, and the goal of the community is to enable and enhance the moral character of its citizens. Therefore, the virtuous man engages in politics to increase the virtue of his entire community, in order to breed more virtuous men. He was also quite clear that public education was required (Politics, book 8) to mold the young into successful statesmen. Both of these seems at odds with your assertion that "humans are political beings" by default.
Aristotle said politics is the study of how communities can achieve “the good life” through governance and organization. He said we are political animals (zoon politikon) who naturally form communities, such as the polis (city-state), to achieve common goals and virtue.
The idea that any human action is political cannot be attributed to Aristotle. It is also a silly and amateur assertion — to breathe is not political, to think is not political, to eat is not political, etc.
Breathing is a physical action, so there isn’t much to debate there. However, even some physical actions—like using the bathroom—can have political or cultural dimensions. For instance, why do you use a toilet instead of a bidet, as is common in parts of Europe or South America? That choice is shaped by cultural and economic factors that influence your behavior.
Because my bathroom is too small to house a bidet.
Also, a bidet and toilet don’t serve the same purpose so your example is a false choice.
> Well, that depends on what you eat. Do you eat meat, or are you vegan?
The choice of what to eat can reflect or engage with political and social systems, but it isn’t a political act. It is a personal act. And “to eat” is also not a political act.
Note that absolutely nobody is around.
“Political” refers to things related to the governance, policies, or affairs of a country, organization, or group. Usually involves the structure of power, decision-making, and public administration, and debates or actions concerning laws, rights, or societal issues.
Having a worldview is not a political act.
Your perspective seems limited to the more common or everyday meaning of “political,” and I understand that; however, in social studies, “political” usually has a much broader scope.
You’re confusing politics with ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies moral principles and values, focusing on what is right, wrong, good, or bad in human behavior.
Ethics focuses on morality, while politics addresses power and governance, though they often overlap in discussions of justice and societal well-being.
> Having a worldview is a political act.
Having a worldview is not inherently a political act, but it can become political when that worldview influences or interacts with societal structures, policies, or governance. A worldview shapes how you see justice, power, and societal organization, which may align with or challenge political systems or ideologies.
And that's ok, there isn't anything wrong with that.
>Having a worldview is not inherently a political act
yes it is, because that world view doesn't come up to your head in the vaccum, is result of all social interactions you had in your life and every thing you saw etc, and from that you are creating a political posture. You may not take any action and be completely silent about it the rest of your life (doubtful) but even not talking about it is a political act.
Are you in the USA? This is just something they promulgate in the educational system, along with the idea that there is always room for another opinion that is just as valid, even after domain experts have reached consensus using rational evidence.
History is biased, I don’t think anyone would debate that, but bias isn’t necessarily political. There’s lots of reasons for people to think some item or story is worth preserving, and most of them aren’t about politics.
The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.
Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.
>the academic study of government and the state.
That's all it is. unless you are truly independent and in the wild, it's hard to say anyone isn't influenced by politics. Hence, biases. Bias in this lens is a byproduct of your environment, managed by politics.
You keep making a point that no one is bringing up. Not only I don’t believe that, as a non-US citizen living in Europe I don’t even care about your two parties.
But there’s quite a stretch between “humans are biased” and “what you think about how society should work influences absolutely everything you do”.
As a silly example, I have quite a collection of music. I keep physical copies of the ones I think are more important to me. If a future archeologist were to find them, they’d get a biased picture of what people listen.
But my taste in music has nothing to do with my beliefs about politics. There’s artists there with every type of conviction, from different eras, from different countries,..
“Everything is political” is a great slogan for activists to get people to do what you want them to do, but like all slogans it’s not actually true.
They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.
This site is a perfect example. It presents itself as a technical forum where politics is occasionally tolerated but never the focus. And yet you could probably write an entire book about the politics behind the name of the site itself, never mind its history, rules, culture, and means of support.
And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.
My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country.
>The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy
and the biases of the winners, yes.
But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy.
An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.
History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.
As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them".
Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
It sounds like you are talking about intent rather than politics - you example does, however, seem to be made with intent.
Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to.
Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails.
Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.
No, history of any kind is always political.
Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.
Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.
Sure, feel free to research how much resistance (no pun intended) there was over the mass adoption of transistors. the years of meetings and debates, the propoganda and fear tactics against transistors, the subjective claims over quality and safety of vacuum tubes.
This wasn't just some iterative upgrade like an RTX 2080 to a 3080.
You can't hold a referendum to eliminate the Early effect from a transistor, or Miller capacitance from a tube stage.
We can give an accurate and informative technical history of electronic parts, while completely avoiding discussions of mass adoption struggles, and vendors spreading FUD and whatever other fluff. If you add some that to the story it's still primarily a technological story and not political.
If anything - losing and surviving makes you more likely to write what you went through than just winning. And people who believe their pasts were better than futures tend to look into history more.
History is mostly written by survivors, and losing is a powerful motivation for self-reflection.
You can even see it in US with the different attitude people have towards civil war history. How many hardcore civil war history enthusiasts do you know that are mostly interested in Union?
Yeah... I don't know how it is these days, but my history lessons covered being attacked and under occupation for a very long time. But when Poland expanded the size, it just happened in the background. It's ok, I'm sure nobody was affected and it wasn't worth mentioning. Let's just be proud that it reached from sea to sea.
To your point: not to sound like an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, but it's pretty clear that while the Jewish people have been the victims of many tragedies, they also have managed to accumulate a great deal of political soft power as well, even while being a disadvantaged minority.
That's why certain types are so obsessed over the so-called "culture war". While some people just want a right to live and love who they want, the currently dominant cultural factions see that as a threat to their ability to, among other things, control the narrative of history for their own gain.
That's what Jews have been doing for 2000 years and their history is one of the best studied out there.
When a society wins political power - it looks into the future. A few eggheads will write the history but nobody'll read it.
Soft power is secondary - it comes FROM losing and focusing on history. Victors go split the loot, losers go write how they were the "moral winners".
Afrofuturism didn't come from winning any kind of political power. It came from the opposite. Similarly, white American males aren't fascinated by Rome, the American Civil War, and WW2 because they collectively lack any representation or political power.
There is still white privilege, but the direction is obvious.