Who Were the Sea Peoples?

It is a crucial matter in thinking about the social sciences to realize that not every -- perhaps even not most -- functional explanations in the social sciences depend on any actor consciously willing that the end product of the function in question be realized. For instance, Marx's class-based analysis of social life does not depend on the "capitalists" deliberately conspiring together to further the interests of "capital": it is enough that the capitalists meet at the same parties, vacation in the same resorts, send their kids to the same elite schools, etc.: through this persistent social interaction, they will arrive at the same views on issues affecting the balance of power between capital and labor, and so on, all the while sincerely believing that they are analyzing each individual question from a completely objective point of view. And so it is with functional explanations of support for the current military-industrial complex: there are many, ma...

Social scientists usually think we can't possibly understand individual historical episodes unless we can place them in some general category and under some general law. But the exact opposite is true: there is no way we could place historical events in general categories and draw them together under some law unless we already understood them individually! Not to pick on Mises, but in Theory and History he made this mistake in a very explicit manner: he claimed that, without theoretical categories, we could never understand historical events. This is logically absurd: what he is claiming is that there are agglomerations of historical events about which we understand nothing individually, but then we come and slap upon them a theoretical framework, and only then can we begin to do history. But without already having an understanding of these events as historical episodes, how would we possibly know what theoretical principles might apply to them or what agglomerations are sane a...

"The development of a historical tradition may involve deliberation, argument, the canvassing of rival interpretations, followed perhaps by the adoption of some agreed compromise or the springing up of rival schools. Consider, for instance, the relation between the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; or the rival schools of political thought which all claim, with some show of reason, to be based on the Marxist tradition. Think of the interplay between orthodoxy and heresy in the development of religion; or of the way in which the game of football was revolutionized by the Rugby boy who picked up the ball and ran. It would certainly not have been possible to predict that revolution from knowledge of the preceding state of the game any more than it would have been possible to predict the philosophy of Hume from the philosophies of his predecessors. It may help here to recall Humphrey Lyttleton’s rejoinder to someone who asked him where Jazz was going: ‘If I knew where Jazz was go...