Comments on: On Diamond (Not Again!)

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:06:46 +0000

I really enjoyed David Christian’s Maps of Time, which seems to me to orient itself to science without making that an exclusive or aggressive choice–there’s plenty of provisional language throughout when he knows either that he’s drawing on a literature with depths that he doesn’t have a lot of personal command over, or a literature that has met with disagreement within its own specialized community. Moreover, though he’s not personally interested in microhistory, I thought he left plenty of room for it to have its own relevance and character.

By: Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:00:29 +0000

I suspect the McNeills have the best chance of lasting…

Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, read together, still seem to me to have considerable legs…

By: Sherman Dorn

Sherman Dorn — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:21:59 +0000

Thanks!

I’ve been wondering whether I should be on a rant about not only Diamond’s macro-historical bent but those of others — Graeber, Acemoglu and Robinson, and Reinhardt and Rogoff — but then I’m not sure whether I should be mad at them for oversimplifying or mad that none of them are historians or mad at history as a field for discouraging “big history” to leave the genre open to these interlopers. But then again, we’re supposed to be interdisciplinary, and Peggy Reeves Sanday’s “big anthropology” book on creation myths and gender never bugged me.

I think you’re right that there is use in teaching Diamond, perhaps jointly with some of the other “big histories” as well as small histories. Read Diamond against Acemoglu and Robinson, or maybe Graeber against Viviana Zelizer (to pick an historical sociologist Graeber doesn’t apparently know about), and be all Gerald Graffian.

By: Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:21:09 +0000

Now that’s a *lot* better…

🙂