"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:40:01 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


DiLorenzo is known mostly through the libertarian and right-wing blogs.
In
the mainstream of real historical scholarship, he's a curious sidebar --
not
for his scholarship, which is substantial, but for his interpretations,
which are consistently right-wing.

So I'm not surprised you came up with this. It fits your pattern of...er,
"scholarship." You flit your way through history, politics, and
economics,
Gunner, like a one-winged jaybird.

--
Ed Huntress

So on one hand you claim that he is a scholar of substance, but on the
other hand you are claiming he is full of ****?

Nope. He has a lot of facts, and a twisted way of looking at them.

There's a school of thought in academic publishing (it has a sarcastic name,
but I can't remember it right now) that says the best way to gain notoriety
is to cherry-pick your way through evidence and put together a story that
goes against the grain of mainstream scholarship. It doesn't matter if you
really believe your conclusions or if they represent a fair and reasonable
analysis. What matters is if you could make a plausible defense of it on
strictly formal grounds. If you can, and if you have a big enough mouth and
a prolific enough pen, you can make a name for yourself in the academic
world.

There are LOTS of these people in academic circles today. DiLorenzo is just
one example. The "creation scientists" are others. Our old friend Mary Rosh
(Dr. John Lott) is another.

You could describe it in a variety of ways but the thing these people have
in common is that they work backwards from conclusions to evidence. They're
anti-scholars: instead of seeking the truth from evidence, they start with a
conclusion (their "truth") and work backwards to assemble a case. They work
like lawyers, in other words, rather than scholars.

So DiLorenzo, whose political views are easy to see if you ever read any of
his economic treatises, starts with the conclusions that the Reconstruction
Amendments destroyed American society, and that Lincoln was largely
responsible for those amendments; and that his assumption of wartime powers
began a precedent of presidential authority that has damaged the
Constitution. He never really proves his case for these things. They are
assumptions, and his audience of malcontents comes to the party believing
many of the same things, as part of their generalized, unfocused resentment
against government.

And then he assembles a story based on that premise and builds a case
against Lincoln from every possible angle, picking his examples to reinforce
the idea that everything we learned about Lincoln actually is a lie, that he
was politically corrupt and everything else that you can think of that's
really, really bad.

This has become quite easy to do with almost anyone and almost any issue, if
you put your mind to it and use the vast research resources that are
available today. Your favorite blogs thrive on it; it's the key to their
existence. And, in your own small way, you've become one of them yourself.
Like the blogsters, you're "Internet smart." You know how to gather data to
reinforce a case you've already concluded. What you don't do, or won't do,
is gather the data in a scholar's way, to turn that data into knowledge.
Instead, you turn it into ammunition. Like DiLorenzo.

--
Ed Huntress