The “Theses on Theory and History” call, crucially, for a two-way relationship between history and theory, for “theoretically grounded history and historically grounded theory”: history grounded by theory, not merely decorated, as with a clever epigraph, or even just informed, borrowing a concept or an analytic gesture; theory grounded by history, not merely contextualized.
The “Theses” specify what history gains from this two-way relationship with theory: a history that is not merely “tales told by victors and moralists”; a history that reveals “the operations of power and sources of injustice”; a history open to “alternative epistemological inquiries”; a history, above all, unburdened from the bad empiricism that renders the archive, with its ignorances and inequities, an image of reality.
The “Theses” suggest that this project has been stymied by conservative forces in the discipline of history. Any who doubt the truth of this need only read what the masters of...
