I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled “The German Ideology” — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.
I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled “The German Ideology” — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.