Ron Stanfield writes: 
"I study cultural and intellectual history in an attempt to reveal the 
sources  
of the distempers we suffer daily. I seek to propose and to advocate, so to 
help in my small way invigorate the democratic and liberal (free) process 
of  
making a living and living in an orderly and sound society." 
 
This topic is the subject of The Clarendon Lectures (1993) delivered by  
Stanley Fish at Oxford, just published as "Professional Correctness:  
Literary Studies and Political Change" by Oxford University Press. 
 
To give the flavor of the argument, Fish wrote: (pp.74-75) "...to  
think that by exposing the leaks in a system you fatally wound it,  
is to engage in a strange kind of deconstructive Platonism -- strange  
is because Platonism is what deconstruction pushes against -- in  
which the surface features of life are declared illusory in relation  
to a deep underlying truth or non-truth. It is in the surfaces,  
however, that we live and move and have our being (it is surfaces all  
the way down) and no philosophical demonstration of their  
ephemerality will loosen their hold ...[T]rying to figure out what a  
poem means will be quite a different activity from trying to figure  
out which interpretation of a poem will contribute to the war effort  
or to the toppling of patriarchy." 
 
Or (p.106): "[R]eflection is either (a) an activity within a practice  
and therefore finally not distanced from that practice's normative  
assumptions or (b) an activity grounded in its own normative  
asumptions and therefore one whose operations will reveal more about  
itself than about any practice viewed through its lens." 
 
To which I gloss: If you write history, write it well for whatever  
reasons you choose, and we will or not be persuaded to its argument by  
your skill and craft as an historian; but as historians,  do not expect  
us to THEREBY attend to your politics. 
 
E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics 
Duke University, Box 90097 
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097 
 
Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838  
Fax: (919) 684-8974 
E-mail: [log in to unmask] 
Web Site: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html