Sean Andrews - What We Should Want With History - A Meditation On Cultural Studies, Methodology, and Politics PDF

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No.
4 December 2013
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12041
What We Should Want with History:

A Meditation on Cultural Studies,
Methodology, and Politics
SEAN JOHNSON ANDREWS*
Abstract This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as
a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically
useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history.
Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural
Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P.
Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the
debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a
bourgeois revolution, Thompsons fundamental critique concerned Andersons use
of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not
nearly as clear-cut in practice particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Woods
attempt to intervene on Thompsons side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of
Capitlism. Woods understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and
Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and
methods, the essay develops Richard Johnsons account of Marxs use of abstraction
and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marxs framework is then deployed to
reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the
origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term
anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically-committed, and dialectical
attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in
advance.
*****
c. 2010: First a Bit of History
Twenty years ago, at the Illinois Cultural Studies Conference, Carol
Steedman presented a paper titled, Culture, Cultural Studies, and
the Historians. For Steedman, the decreasing importance of
history as a discipline in British Polytechnical education provides
the context for the rise of Cultural Studies, implying a relationship
between the denigration of strict disciplinary teaching methods on
a national scale and Cultural Studies own (to her mind) inadequate
historical practice. Steedman suggested that, as a new academic
framework, Cultural Studies would have history as a field of
pedagogy and practice: very soon more history (historical topics,
historical options) will be taught to undergraduates taking
* Sean Andrews is Assistant Professor of Cultural StudiesColumbia College,
Chicago and may be contacted at sean.johnson.andrews@gmail.com
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
What We Should Want with History
443
interdisciplinary degree courses than to those doing history in the

conventional manner. She famously ended her talk by asking,
What does cultural studies want with history? suggesting, in
turn, that this new housing for the practice of history would (lamentably) undermine the orthodox methods the discipline found
useful and valid: Will there be any room for detailed historical
work; or are students of cultural studies bound to rely on great
schematic and secondary sweeps through time? Will there be any
room for the historical case-study in its pedagogy? What good is it
all to you, anyway? Perhaps no good at all . . .1 Steedmans pessimistic prognosis of Historys future in the hands of Cultural
Studies is the reasonable conclusion of her skepticism at the emergent fields ability to do justice to the practice and teaching of
historical methodologies.
The purpose of the present essay is to engage directly with the
Steedmans concern: to consider the present status of Cultural
Studies own relationship to and use of historical methodologies. It
takes as its primary inspiration Meaghan Morris answer to
Steedmans question (What does Cultural Studies want with
History? What good is it to you?): An answer to Carol [Steedmans]
question is, Morris says, In the culture I live in history is the name
of the space where we define what matters.2
This is clearly a provocative explanation of the role history plays
in culture, but it basically refuses the methodological question in
favor of a more political one. She phrases her response between two
poles (neither of which are really Steedmans question): on the one
hand, she speaks to what had become a disciplinary assumption
within Cultural Studies
There has been in cultural studies for some years a discourse on the death of
history. The notion has something to do with changes in the mass media, commodification, and so on, which have shifted culture in such a way that, once upon a time,
there was a thing called real history and now theres something else.
In saying this, she inadvertently confirms Steedmans skepticism

about the status of History as a discipline in relation to cultural
studies (i.e. that Cultural Studies finds capital H Real History
obsolete, though in a more epistemological rather than methodological sense). Morris appeal for Cultural Studies to rethink this
and for explaining why cultural studies should want history is
made not to the discipline of History, but to what she notices as an
emerging passion for history across a range of popular cultural
activities. This passion was especially enflamed in relation to the
history of aboriginal people in Australia, a subject of immense
political importance in that context: unfortunately, academic cul 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No. 4 December 2013
444
Sean Johnson Andrews
tural studies had largely ceded the ground of this history not only
to popular but to otherwise very antagonistic political debates.
Therefore her answer to Steedmans question is that cultural
studies must want history if it is going to be able to intervene in
defining what matters.
Morris statement is an ironic place to begin a conversation about
historical methodology since it implicitly overlooks Steedman insistence about their use. Instead, Morris makes a plea for the political
necessity of engaging with something called history in whatever
way we can. The implication of Morris reply is that methodology
itself is less important than politics (Ill bracket for a moment the
place that theory plays in this case, the theory that she cites as
history is dead because of the media.) Between their positions is
a pronounced, but dialectical, tension one I would argue exists
between nearly all disciplinary methodologies and Cultural Studies.
I will therefore frame my discussion of historical methodologies in
the practice of Cultural Studies between them: addressing the
disciplinary methodologies of History and their ambivalent relationship to the politics of discussing something called history in our
popular, hegemonic discourses. After a brief framing, I will move on
to outlining a (historical) methodological program that Richard
Johnson (among others) advocated and demonstrate how it can
help assess a similar popular and academic use of history in
relation to the current debate over Intellectual Property Rights.
Politics and Methodologies
Meaghan Morris argues for the political necessity of discussing
history by observing that history remains an active space for the
projection of current popular imagination. In early 2010, in the US,
we saw similar uses of history the 2008 financial meltdown as
analogous to the Great Depression, the New Deal as analogous to
the following stimulus package,3 and, more pertinent to the latter
stages of this paper, the current expansion of intellectual property
rights as analogous to the struggle over the common in 17th and
18th century England. Certainly this is an important practice to be
able to investigate and ideally, such investigation would be on the
basis of the methodological practices (and disciplinary authority) of
historians.
But respecting methodologies and showing them (or their
practicioners) undue deference are two different things. On the one
hand, as Dennis Dworkin demonstrates with his own history of
Cultural Studies, historians were central to the formation of the
field as both a political and disciplinary movement.4 Edward
Thompson and Perry Anderson, surely, but many other Marxist
445
oriented historians were instrumental in giving Cultural Studies its

political trajectory and formative practices. History, in other words,
is central to Cultural Studies. On other hand, also central was
questioning the validity of disciplinary based epistemology and its
resultant methods and methodology. Thompson and Christopher
Hill, among others, were pressing back on the discipline of history
for its failure to present history as it was lived. Their work was
focused precisely on the political goals Morris insinuates namely,
the goal of challenging the dominant, hegemonic reactionary cultural politics and the academic disciplines that helped inform them.
This required using materials and looking at individuals who had
previously been overlooked or as Thompson put it in The Making
of the English Working Class, the blind alleys, the lost causes, and
the losers themselves [that are] forgotten.5 Politics and methodology, in other words, went hand in hand.
While Steedman admits that Cultural Studies has a history, she
doesnt seem to consider the many people working in the field who
were historians. When Carol Steedman asks, What does cultural
studies want with history? the implication is that Cultural Studies
scholars were insufficiently trained in historical methods6 so
much so that they would be unable to recognize the basic historical
proposition that history is the most impermanent of all written
forms.7
In other words, hers was not an innocent question. She makes
this inquiry from within the context of the struggle over the relationship between history and theory especially from within the
discipline of history, but these debates also animated the early
critics and thinkers of the New Left in Britain in the nascent
intellectual movement leading into Cultural Studies.8 The phrasing of her question suggests there is no way for Cultural Studies
to interact with the discipline of history and it would be better
for the students of Britain if they werent left with history taught
by interdisciplinary ragamuffins. She may as well ask what Cultural Studies wants with economics or geography or literature or
communication or sociology or any of the other disciplines that
intersect with (or could possibly intersect with) Cultural Studies.
By it, she meant not to actually ask about the use of history in
Cultural Studies, but to speculate on how it would misuse history
in ways historians would abhor or simply fail to teach students
the proper historical methodology. In short, Steedman asked this
question not as a spur to reflexive academic practice (which is
how Morris generously interpreted it): she asked it, instead as a
besieged disciplinary historian who could hardly imagine what
use the interdisciplinary barbarians would make of her once honorable profession.
446
On one level, I see this as Steedman protecting her turf. Like

Thompson in Poverty of Theory, she is saying there is one kind of
legitimate history and only those trained as historians are capable
of practicing it. As I outline below, I obviously think there should be
some basic understanding of these methods, but outside of mere
speculation she can really only offer one reason that Cultural
Studies would have a problem with history: that history is the
most impermanent of all written forms. The problem she sees with
this is that Cultural Studies will not engage in history per se, but
will rely only on secondary sweeps through time where they take
other historians work and use it as a building block for their
theories or narratives of the past. Since any one of these building
blocks might later prove to be inaccurate or incorrect, it might then
invalidate the project based upon it an eventuality that, evidently,
only a historian would be able to recognize.
This is surely an important concern, but it is not unique to
history. The dominant understanding of a concept or category will
often shift according to new disciplinary norms or practices
whether in history, economics, sociology, and so on. This is something that would affect anyone not just cultural studies students
and teachers relying on that historical knowledge. And in the case
of history, it would be especially possible that works of broad
historical developments, structures, and movements such as
those of Ferdinand Braudel or Eric Hobsbawm would be more
likely to fall victim to this error. Does this mean we should never
attempt this or that it can only be attempted by a specialized few,
credentialed as historians (or economists, sociologists, etc.)?
In Perry Andersons forward to Passages from Antiquity into Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, works of just such a
secondary sweep, he writes that he is aware of the fallibility of his
enterprise, but sees it as useful even necessary nonetheless:
Historians themselves, of course, have occasion to produce works of comparison or
synthesis without always necessarily having intimate acquaintance with the full
range of evidence across the field concerned, although their judgment is likely to be
tempered by their command of their specialism. In itself, the effort to describe or
understand very broad historical structures needs no undue apology or justification:
without it, specific and local researches fall short of their own potential significance.
But it is nevertheless true that no interpretations are so fallible as those which rely
on conclusions reached elsewhere as their elementary units of evidence: for they
remain constantly open to investigation by new discoveries or revisions of further
primary investigation.9
Cultural Studies is or should be concerned with describing

cultural context and cultural formations in some way. This will
often require utilizing the work of other scholars just as it would
447
if we were working in economics or even, more contentiously,

physics. It may be risky, but that shouldnt prevent the attempt, so
long as, like Anderson, we understand the limits.
On this count, isnt mutability of knowledge also one of the
keystones of Cultural Studies and the division of history from
whence it came? As an individual, Perry Anderson who succeeded
Stuart Hall as editor of The New Left Review, a journal that was the
joint creation of Hall and E. P. Thompson fifty years ago is
indicative of both the interest in describing broad historical and
social structures as well as the importance of being open to altering
them over time. When Thompson, a historian, wanted to object to
Raymond Williams historical work in The Long Revolution, it was
done in the pages of The New Left Review. These critiques helped
Williams to make his own thinking more precise.10
Culture and our cultural understanding of history is part of
a process. Steedman posits her discipline as somehow being the
only one capable of participating in this process or at least asks
cultural studies scholars to offer her a defense of their participation. Where does this leave us: we not only cannot do history
unless we are historians, but we cannot look at the object of
history (or an object as it is constituted through history) except as
historians. Since this object intersects with virtually every object
wed want to investigate, it is difficult to see how we could operate
as a discipline except, perhaps, if we simply became history.
The same problem, of course, plagues our interaction with all
other disciplines.
This returns us to the dialectic between politics and methodology
at work. As Anderson puts it, What is generally accepted by
historians of one generation can still be disproved by the research of
the next. This is true, but it is also true of virtually every other
academic discipline. On the other hand, many forms of disciplinary
consensus are aligned precisely around the maintenance of the
status quo an insight that is also a central tenet of Cultural
Studies. Psychology practitioners often chide our reliance on the
metaphysics of Freud or Lacan who have little credibility in the
discipline dominated by narrowly-focused empirical studies and
the DSM; the dominant school of neoclassical economics in the U.S.
is suspicious of anyone who finds validity in the Marxian labor
theory of value (though here Marx himself was just expanding on the
work of their patron saint, Adam Smith); mainstream communication studies has little patience for the concept of ideology; and until
Thompson and American historians like Howard Zinn began their
rescue operations, Historys objects of study were often and only
great white men, Whiggishly pulling the rest of us toward the
teleological perfection of the status quo: in each case, there is often
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something political afoot in the decision to occlude one kind of

knowledge, to find it an un-rigorous category or unworkable idea.
In other words, disciplinary shifts in consensus dont only
happen because of apolitical, rigorous disciplinary methodology.
And more to the point of Morris intervention, there are plenty of
people misusing history for political reasons in contemporary
culture: doing battle with them may require performing rescue
operations like that of Thompson or relying on inexplicably
occluded ideas and analyses: to say that it can only be the historian
who can do this would be an unworkable demand if all available
historians seem to be lining up on what might be the wrong side of
history. In other words, while students should certainly be aware of
where History comes from, and how it is done, it is also very
important to help them see how it (and all other disciplinary
knowledges) are produced, circulated, and used. On this level, the
moat Steedman lays around her castle is unacceptable, even if it is
mostly done by insinuation. Politics is too important to be completely trumped by disciplinary-endorsed methodology. And, in
many cases, politics itself is already implicit in the methodologies
chosen: the question is whether they are explicit or not.
That said, I fully agree with the principle of disciplinary respect
and awareness that can be found in the more gracious level of
Morriss response to Steedman. In so far as Cultural Studies interacts with history or any other disciplinary knowledge we must,
of necessity, engage with that discipline on its own terms. This is
necessary for two reasons, both of which are related to the external
validity of Cultural Studies as an institutionalized disciplinary
framework in its own right.
Before I move to those two reasons, however, Ill amplify and
clarify this last statement: for anyone who hasnt been paying
attention, Cultural Studies is an institutionalized disciplinary
framework in its own right. If any debates within the field have been
resolved by history (the march of time, not the discipline) it is this
one: we can continue to debate the way theory impacts our understanding of the empirical world, but we can no longer deny that
Cultural Studies exists and has existed in institutionalized setting.
Existing in such a setting, as Birminghams CCCS recently discovered, requires some externally identifiable demonstration of the
internal processes of disciplinary validation.
To refuse to do this is not to debate whether Cultural Studies is
institutionalized, but whether it will continue to be institutionalized.
From this position, seeing the codification of methods or
knowledges, as [running] against some of the main features of
cultural studies tradition11 (to cite CCCS director Richard
Johnson) might itself seem like a kind of suicide. I dont see it as
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dramatic as all that: I think it much more devastating to have a set

of common assumptions that, despite guiding and informing
research undertaken on an international scale for several decades,
remain implicit. This is far more problematic for me than the
pitfalls of negotiating what the explicit methodology should be.
Being explicit about Cultural Studies methodology is not just a sign
of our maturity as a discipline, but demonstrates our consistency
with one of the most basic principles of the tradition to which
Johnson refers: namely, that of making frameworks of knowledge
transparent.
Central to this grown-up version of Cultural Studies is an understanding of its place in relation to other disciplines. This is the
context in which I claim, in so far as Cultural Studies interacts with
history or any other disciplinary knowledge we must engage with
that discipline on its own terms. I will term the two reasons for this
the (cautionary) Sokal lesson and the (productive) Marx demonstration. The first reason is quite pithy and admittedly reductive:12
basically, if we want to be taken seriously as a discipline, we
shouldnt make errors of completely misrepresenting other disciplinary knowledges in ways that, after the fact, make us look
foolish. Aside from the actual details of the Sokals deception and
its publication, or how we should understand it, the actors
involved, or their motivations, I think we can speculate that, had
the editors at Social Text known more about the disciplinary knowledge in question (physics), they might have axed the article before
it was published.
This is not just an epistemological concern, but a political one: for
our work to be relevant to a larger public, we should be careful to
only make defensible claims about said disciplines. This may seem
to contradict my earlier statement that politics should be able to
trump methodology, but I see it as the reverse of that principle: if
we arent careful, inattention to methodology is very bad for our
disciplines political efficacy and institutional legitimacy.
The second reason is more elaborate and deals more directly with
the methodology I suggest Cultural Studies should adopt as an
interdisciplinary discipline. For those who havent yet accepted the
fact of Cultural Studies as a discipline, I point out yet another
feature: the expanding market in Methods and Methodological texts
for Cultural Studies courses and practitioners. In addition to the
books that came out in the 90s like the Paul du Gay, et. al.
collection on the Sony Walkman the 00s have brought a slew of
others.13 I suppose, in looking at these publications, one could
hypothesize a plot by Sage Publications to make a profit and
simultaneously sap the discipline of its counter-disciplinary
strength, but I think it is more a reflection of the progress of the field.
450
Reviewing them all would be distracting, but I will take up the two
that are the most methodological that of Johnson, et. al. and
Saukko and note two methodological components I find both
present and lacking. One is their rather meager treatment of the
importance of exploring concepts and theory. Ill return to this
below. Another is more connected to this second reason for Cultural Studies own need to understand the methods of other disciplines: namely, when you understand other disciplines, you can
more productively critique their epistemological grounding.
Both Saukko and Johnson discuss the importance of
interdisciplinarity, but it is not clear in either case how this would
work except according to the most fundamental disciplines already
incorporated into practice of Cultural Studies. Each posits that a
Cultural Studies project/practitioner should have some engagement with ethnography or audience studies and textual kinds of
studies both of which are informed (and help to inform) a
poststructuralist reflexivity on the polyvocality of texts and multiplicity of audience reactions. These are framed as having to negotiate with what Saukko calls the contextualist validity of
historical, spatial, and political economic analysis.14 These are
fairly typical divisions, but in most cases there is something more
to consider. Almost every object whether it is a more conceptual
or concrete object will be constituted culturally by a range of other
discourses. And often the most pertinent of these will be disciplinary discourses psychology, economics, international relations,
and so on. Therefore it will be essential to any particular project
that we engage with other scholars who are working under different
disciplinary assumptions. Johnson, et. al. mention this briefly in
terms of Mapping the Field, a practice they say was central to
early CCCS:
Mapping the field was a kind of laying out of theoretical frameworks or approaches
around a particular topic approaches to ideology, say, or views of art and politics.
As theories are themselves cultural objects, mapping was doing cultural studies, not
merely preparing for it.15
The practice as I understand it, regards looking at theoretical

paradigms that have typically constituted the object as such.
So in the case of intellectual property, the topic of my dissertation
and (hopefully) forthcoming book, it was necessary for me to look at
political theory, economics, communication and media studies as
well as law and legal studies.16 The reason for this was twofold: one
was an extension of the political point Morris brings up about
history. The object, as it was defined and understood, had been
constituted through these discourses many of them specific to
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disciplines with specific and quite different methodological assumptions. Within the popular conversation, it was people from
within these disciplines (especially lawyers and economists) that
were often called upon to offer their expertise about how this object
does and/or should function and signify often with no sense that
the object itself was a construction or that there were competing
disciplinary definitions and methodologies. So to understand the
object as such it was necessary to understand the disciplinary
knowledges that helped produce it. In other words, again, the
political, epistemological goal of being able to question the validity
of disciplinary knowledges methods and methodologies which had
shaped the way the object of inquiry is understood in the popular
conversation is only possible with an understanding of how those
knowledges operate.
We should, therefore, include as a basic step in our methodology
the serious engagement with whatever disciplinary or theoretical
paradigms are most likely to have aided in the dominant, hegemonic construction of our object of study. I work with undergraduate students at the moment, so our ability to engage fully in this
necessary work is limited; but as these students progress, it
becomes ever more necessary to read beyond our often narrow
theoretical and disciplinary confines to do what Marx does to
economics for whatever disciplines have directly engaged in constituting our object.17 This means examining and taking seriously
its protocols, its categories, and the history of its development
as an accepted form of knowledge. It is only on this basis that
we can truly begin to critique that form of knowledge, not, as
can often be the case, the shortcut to this through empty
poststructuralist platitudes: to give Steedman (who I admit has
acted as a sort of straw woman in the above polemic) some credit,
this poststructuralist defense is a reflexive, if not dominant,
tendency within the field.
Interacting with these disciplinary knowledges, understanding
their methods, helps not only better comprehending the cultural
meaning of object, it also enables us to see the more fundamental
assumptions informing each disciplinary perspective. In my own
research into legal studies, I found that the assumption of sovereignty prevailed, such that there was assumed to be a single set of
laws governing each territory, almost as a natural fact; in economics, the natural right to property was somehow rooted in its appropriation through labor. These became important pivot points for the
development of my analysis and argument, and they were not
concentrated on critiquing or slandering these disciplines. Aside
from the work within those disciplines that is already critical (and
often critically informed by cultural studies or cultural studies like
452
work)18 reading the work of these mainstream disciplines also gave

me essential, constitutive insights about the object. This interdisciplinary research process resonates with a description made
elsewhere by Richard Johnson about Marxs own method of disciplinary inquiry.
Marxs materialism has important implications for method. If his limited rationalism
implies attention to specific forms of thinking, his materialism means that all forms
of human consciousness constitute a resource for more adequate knowledge. His
intellectual critiques are always vigorous and sometimes savage, but they have
another main characteristic: they always rescue something, albeit transformed, from
what is critiqued. [. . . .] [These disciplinary] thinkers express something of the real,
willy-nilly; hence the importance of critique as the realist interrogation of categories.
This kind of critique is both formal and historical: it digs out assumptions and
contradictions, but also the historical content of ideas, the situations they actually
express.19
This rescue and the resources it provides are what I mean by

calling this the productive reason for understanding other disciplinary methodologies. I attribute this to Marx not because he is the
necessary progenitor of this meta-method, but because, within the
cultural studies tradition, it is often attributed to him.
The carbuncled elephant in the room in talking about Cultural
Studies, methodology and history is of course the Old Man himself.
Early cultural studies practitioners were far less shy about the
connection. Cultural Studies recently published a long neglected
essay in which Stuart Halls synthesizes Marxs understanding of
method from his discussions of economics in the 1857 Introduction
to the Grundrisse.20 It is an effective outline (though less concrete
than Johnsons Reading for the Best Marx above.) But more on
this in a moment: first a summary of where we are.
I began with a key tension in Cultural Studies disciplinary intentions and interrelations: the stated political stance of Morris that
history is a key field of cultural definition and debate, and the
interest in methodology that was the topic of the paper to which
Morris was responding. I said that there are several reasons that
Steedmans position should be questioned and, consequently, that
we should think critically about demands for disciplinary authority
and purity. First, her reticence was based on two things that
cultural studies (emerging from history) placed at the center of its
project: one the importance of constructing broad descriptions of
cultural and social history and two the necessity of reflexivity about
the status of knowledge in general and disciplinary knowledge in
particular. And, second, her reticence appears to be inspired by a
defense of disciplinary territory a defense that we should consider
in the paradigm of all such defenses, many of which are political
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attempts to stifle broad critical inquiry into the very mutability of

the disciplinary knowledges she describes. In other words, she is
reticent for a reason that cultural studies is (or should be) very able
to assuage, and, anyway, the basis of this reticence cant be
accepted as such without the caveat that cultural studies sees all
such knowledges as politically and culturally constituted and
therefore open for discussion. The politics of knowledge preclude
strict deference to disciplines as such.
On the other hand, I said that there are many reasons to read
Steedman very generously. The engagement with disciplines and
disciplinary knowledge is, in the end, critical to our being able to
actually discuss their being culturally (and historically) constituted
making methodological conversations the dialectical other to the
political necessity Morris outlines. I said, therefore, that engaging
deeply and directly with other disciplines was crucial to our enterprise and should therefore be included as a methodological prescription for all cultural studies projects (not just those dealing with
history). Finally, in addition to aiding in our political efficacy and
development as a discipline, engagement with other disciplines is
often very productive and aids in our own understanding of the
object itself. To reap the full benefits of being interdisciplinary, we
have to be able to look beyond the disciplines of our antecedents in
the field of cultural studies, that is, beyond literary and film studies,
sociology, history and political economy and so on. I gave an example
of how this might work from my own project on intellectual property
rights, where looking through the object through the lenses of legal
studies, economics and history helped me better understand both
the object and the assumptions these disciplines made about it.
Most importantly for the next section, I finally mentioned Marx.
In the next section I will pick up a thread abandoned above in
several places the role of theory and concepts in Cultural Studies
methodology and connect this with what I see as a workable way
of thinking about the way we use history. I will do this by discussing the way Richard Johnson resolves the argument between
Althusser, Anderson, and Thompson on the relationship between
history and theory, and the conclusion Johnson reaches about
Marxs own historical methodology. In the finally section, I will
briefly demonstrate how I employed this in my own work on intellectual property and how I see this methodology somewhat resolving the tension animating this essay.
Method: History, Abstraction, and Marx Oh my!
The latter part of the Johnson quote above shows my hand on the
next point about method. Namely, my interest in advocating for a
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particular Marxian method of engaging with history which, as

Johnson puts it, is a kind of circuit: a movement from the concrete
to the abstract and back again from the abstract to the concrete.21
To make this case, Ill be reading points from the Johnson account,
but also connecting these to the larger argument in English
Marxism22 about theory versus empiricism in historical analysis. I
have no intention of reviewing this entire debate (Anderson and
Thompson both wrote books on the subject and countless others
have interceded) but I would like to highlight some of the major
concerns in that older debate in order to connect them to the
current debates over intellectual property and offer an example of
how Johnsons methodological principles are quite useful for
doing history (Steedman) and intervening in conversations about
defining what matters (Morris).
First, a reflexive moment: like Perry Anderson, I am not a historian. I have read the texts in question, but their historical
context (and hence a good portion of their meaning) has been
provided for me by innumerable accounts over the years. Many
such accounts have been given by Johnson and Hall in their
various accounts of work at the CCCS, but the most comprehensive is that of Dennis Dworkin, who has used those tools of a
historian Anderson cites above to animate the conversations I have
only read decades after the fact.23 Dworkin begins from a much
earlier period, however; by beginning with Andersons article
Origins of the Present Crisis, I am punctuating the conversation
in a particular way. Much more back story could be given about
the Popular Front in Britain in the 1930s and 40s and the work of
what Dworkin terms the Marxist historians group people such as
E. P. Thompson, but before him Rodney Hilton and others. Important details and important procedures and modes of argument
come from this earlier work. However, Andersons article (and to an
extent Tom Nairns work) open a new front in this argument. They
set the stage for the first iteration of the abstraction vs. empiricism theory vs. practice in the English Marxism of Britain in
the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Many commentators such as Stuart Hall in his article on Two
Paradigms in Cultural Studies24 associate this debate with E. P.
Thompson and Althusser alone. But that debate is highly abstract
and theoretical on both sides. The more empirical version of it
began with Anderson and Thompson.25 To sum up for those who
just arrived: in 1964, Anderson wrote an article titled Origins of
the Present Crisis. He doesnt spell out exactly what he means by
crisis, but it is basically a diagnosis of what had kept Britain from
ever completing, the unfinished work of 1640 and 1832 i.e. the
social revolutions of these periods.26
455
In making his diagnosis, he (implicitly) starts from a model of

what bourgeois revolution looked like. This model recommended
that the way a transition to capitalism typically happens is that an
increasingly urban bourgeoisie fights against a landed aristocracy
for political freedoms based on enlightenment values; the revolution is aided by free and enserfed lower classes putting pressure on
the system; and its eventual success is reliant on those lower class
agents believing strongly in the enlightenment values that inspired
the revolution. The revolution frees them from all their political
enslavement to the landed aristocracy, but they are thereafter only
able to provide for themselves by working for the new, urban
bourgeoisie. The resultant capitalist system then incorporates a
basic contradiction: it is reliant on those workers for its basic
functioning (i.e. the extraction of surplus value); but this social
relationship flies in the face of the notion of true freedom. Over
time, as these workers discover their collective productive powers
and, realizing this narrative of the enlightenment has yet to be fully
realized, they demand a completion of this earlier revolution, by
force if necessary (history tells us it will likely be necessary.)
Though it may be more teleological than Anderson intended, the
dialectic of history resolving these basic contradictions is meant to
eventually drive society towards communism.
The question, for Anderson, is why Britain had ended up so
stagnant, i.e. the present crisis. Using this (implicit) model, he
went back to search for its origins in English history. This meant
returning to Englands tumultuous revolutions of the 17th century
from the first revolution, to the Commonwealth of Oliver
Cromwell, to the counter revolution and eventually to the Glorious
Revolution of 1688.27 In looking at this revolution, he finds several
major problems, the two most decisive being that its class composition was all wrong it mostly took place between two segments
of a landowning class, neither of which were direct crystallizations
of opposed economic interests and the terms on which the
revolution were fought were not based in enlightenment ideals, but
between competing versions of religious ideology.28 Thus while it
was a supremely capitalist revolution [. . . .] it left almost the entire
social structure intact. Likewise, Because of its primitive, preEnlightenment character, the ideology of the Revolution founded no
significant tradition, and left no major after-effects. Never was a
major revolutionary ideology neutralized and absorbed so completely. Politically, Puritanism was a useless passion.29 This legacy
of the political, economic structures and ideological superstructures changed little, Anderson argues, and understanding this
helps to explain the ruling powers and ideas in the British society
circa 1964. In effect, it is the failure of England to have a properly
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revolutionary revolution the failure of concrete history to perform

according to an abstract model that explains the origins of the
present crisis.
The events of the story from here onward are too elaborate to
recount at this level of detail and to do so would be a distraction.
The takeaway, however, is that E. P. Thompson wrote his longest
essay to up to that point in his career (50 pages) as a rejoinder to
what became known as the Anderson-Nairn thesis.30 His basic
complaint was that Anderson and Nairn had failed as historians
precisely because they had adopted a theoretical model of what a
revolution should look like, one most closely resembling the French
Revolution, but which had never in fact existed. This model had led
them to overlook or misinterpret many of the empirical events and
developments in British history simply because the latter didnt fit
into the former.
While Thompson is unequivocally critical of Anderson and Nairn
(particularly in their assessment of the role of the working class in
these events) his position on the role of theory and models in the
practice of (empirical) history is more ambivalent. Despite being
concerned with enforcing a strict, empirical characterization of the
historians role (one similar to Steedmans), he still must admit
that,
History does not become history until there is a model: at the moment at which the
most elementary notion of causation, process, or cultural patterning, intrudes, then
some model is assumed. It may well be better that this should be made explicit. But
the moment at which a model is made explicit it begins to petrify into axioms.31
His main complaint in the essay is that Anderson and Nairn are
guilty of axiomatically interpreting the empirical events letting
their model lead them to focus on certain things rather than others.
Yet he also objects to the model remaining undisclosed.32 So it
would seem that the problem is less about the model per se than
the implicit or explicit status of the model. Thompson elaborates on
this in his later speculations on the value of models in history:
Must we dispense with any model? If we do so, we cease to be historians, or we
become the slaves of some model scarcely known to ourselves in some inaccessible
area of prejudice. The question is, rather, how is it proper to employ a model? There
is no simple answer. Even in the moment of employing it the historian must be able
to regard his model with a radical scepticism, and to maintain an openness of
response to evidence for which it has no categories. At the best-which we can see at
times in the letters of Darwin or Marx-we must expect a delicate equilibrium between
the synthesizing and the empiric modes, a quarrel between the model and actuality.
This is the creative quarrel at the heart of cognition. Without this dialectic, intellectual growth cannot take place.
457
This is a far more careful statement of the role theory and models
in the methodologies of historians. He suggests creating models
that synthesize the data of history into events is crucial to the
practice of history as such and implies that it is an inevitable part
of this process, whether the practitioner makes it explicit or not.
Better that it should be explicit so that we can at least examine it.
Finally, there is a suggestion typical of the model of history that
Johnson suggests (i.e. the dialectic between abstract and concrete
and back): a delicate equilibrium between the synthesizing and the
empiric modes, a quarrel between the model and actuality.
Despite the looming conflict, it is striking here is how similar this
statement is to the essence of Althussers admittedly more brusque
portrayal of what is necessary in thinking about history (or any
disciplinary knowledge.)33 Althusser was certainly making a much
more polarizing statement about history and its relation to theory
and abstraction.34 Yet there is a sense in which Thompson is
basically rehashing precisely the same argument in Poverty of
Theory as he engages in with Anderson and Nairn only without
this frank admission that, if historians are going to be honest about
their process, they have to admit there are some hypotheses they
are simply unable to imagine investigating.
As a confirmation of this, when evaluating the debate between
Anderson-Nairn and Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood defends
Thompson against Anderson, but does so with an explicit model
of history that is implicitly based on a set of categories and
abstract theories developed most recently and most coherently by
Althusser.35 Namely, Althusser claims that Marxs major theoretical innovation was to describe capitalism as a mode of production
always already operating in concert with other modes of production within any given social formation.36 Within any given social
formation (that is in a real concrete situation) there will be one of
these modes of production that is dominant and its necessities
will, to a certain extent, be determinant in the last instance of all
other cultural, political and social concerns. To be able to properly describe this in empirical situations, one has to have a clear
understanding of what separates capitalism as a mode of production from other such modes of production: in other words one has
to have a clear abstraction of the concept of a mode of production
a concept which, elsewhere, Althusser declares as Marxs paradigmatic discovery.37
Though she originally does this in relation to her political theory,
Wood outlines her own theory of capitalism as a mode of production
in an article in 1981. Capitalism, she says, is distinguished not by
its economic elements per se, but how its political apparatus
appears to be separate from the economic.38 Feudal society consti 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
458
tuted property explicitly through the state: lords had their property
because the king gave it to them; the lords compulsion of serfs was,
therefore, obviously and explicitly a result of the states intervention. In the capitalist mode of production, the state was supposed
to be there to merely protect property, but in doing so it effectively
compelled those who didnt own property to work for those who did
merely by protecting the negative rights of property holders.39 Yet
this compulsion was made invisible since, de jure, the economic
unfreedom they faced was no longer a positive result of the political
mandate that they should work for the property holder.
When this was doubled with the process of enclosure and expropriation of the commons, the negative rights protected by the liberal
state effectively became a class-based set of prerogatives enforcing
a particular mode of production. Wood doesnt describe the economic contours of this system in detail here, but later adds the
imperative to profit as a general systemic requirement under the
aegis of improvement a concept she and her historian co-author
(Neal Wood) attribute to John Locke, whom they say uses this
imperative to justify the enclosures and expropriations at the origin
of the system itself.40
Woods is a complex system of concepts and abstractions centered around a loosly defined model of pure capitalism or what
Althusser would have identified as a mode of production. She uses
this model to defend Thompson against Anderson, and to explain
why the English revolution was, in fact, one of the purest capitalist
revolutions precisely because of the role the state played in British
society before its advent. She argues that the model Nairn and
Anderson utilize is a conflation of both English and French Revolutions: the English was a capitalist revolution; the French, bourgeois.41 The irony, in other words, is that Wood ultimately uses
something approaching Althussers methodological system of
abstraction and conceptualization (though in far more basic terms
and language) in order to defend Thompson (a stalwart critic of
Althusser on specifically methodological grounds) against Anderson (who was both an advocate of this method and, as editor of the
New Left Review, was pivotal to introducing Althussers works to
English-language readers in its pages and publishing imprint, New
Left Books, now called Verso.)
I will return briefly to Woods arguments in the next section: the
point to emphasize presently is that the methodological concern for
the discipline of Cultural Studies never was or never should have
been the presence or absence of theoretical abstraction in historical scholarship: it was whether this theory was implicit or
explicit. Further, the questions of abstraction, categories, and theoretical elaboration are about Cultural Studies per se only in so far
459
as they were about Cultural Studies as a discipline inflected by its

association with the New Left and, hence, a contentious set of
readings around Marx.
Althusser was influential precisely because he helped to frame
these ideas in a way that gave voice to many of the concerns
Cultural Studies was raising about the politics of epistemology in
relation to the production of disciplinary knowledges. Althusser
certainly aimed much of his critique of disciplinary knowledge at
actually existing historians (though historians which mostly existed
in France and the USSR fifteen or so years before Thompson is
writing), but the early sections of Reading Capital are mostly aimed
at economics the discipline at which, aside from philosophy, Marx
aims most of his own critique. At stake is the tension between
abstract theorization and the practice of empirical historical methodologies of the kind that Steedman describes. But as the above
quote illustrates, even Thompson seems to concede the line
between them is hardly so stark if we carefully articulate what we
mean by abstraction. As his own defenders use of theory and
abstraction illustrates, it is a term with varied meanings.
In his essay trying mediate between the camps of Althusser (or at
least his followers) and Thompson in the early 1980s, Johnson uses
a most topical method: those of historiography.42 Instead of trying
to pile another layer of theory or rhetoric on top of the already
acrimonious debate, Johnson decides to go back and read Marx
not as Althusser reads him or reads Capital but as a historian
might. A historian, in this case, with an explicit aim: to investigate
the role that abstraction plays in Marxs own descriptions of his
method. The materials he chooses, beyond the major texts usually
found in discussions of Marxs methods the 1857 introduction to
the Grundrisse, Capital, and various introductions and postfaces to
Capital are Marxs correspondences. These letters, it turns out,
produce a useful outline of what Marx meant by abstraction and
how he saw it working in his own historical method.
Johnsons essay is useful in that it highlights one of the key
practices of actually existing cultural studies: the use of theories
and concepts to help analyze and present analysis. It is rather
curious that this isnt a central methodological tenet of the field.
Even Barkers book, subtitled theory and practice, ignores the
mechanics of how theories can be used or their role in analysis. In
Saukko and Couldry, it plays an implicit role, but there is little
instruction about how students should or could engage with
theories or evaluate other scholars engagement with them.
Unsurprisingly, it is only Johnson, et. al. who include a chapter on
the role of theory in analysis. Yet even this is bracketed in some way
from the rest of the text. Since each of their subsequent chapters on
460
methods ultimately employs some theory of the relation of culture

to history, space, text or audience, it would be useful to make it a
more explicit process.
A Cultural Studies scholar would rarely study space as a concept
on its own without some previously elaborated conceptual apparatus (such as that of Harvey or Le Febvre). Most of the work in major
journals not just in Cultural Studies related fields, but in most
fields involves employing and testing theoretical paradigms on
some level. This seems to be a more common practice than the full
engagement of every point on what Johnson, et. al. calls the circuit
of culture. Whether it is investigating a set of concepts from Foucault or Butler or the development of an entirely new conceptual
problematic based on a hybrid model, the process of elaborating,
employing, and assessing conceptual abstractions is likely a much
more important exercise in the practice of cultural studies than, for
instance, being hypothetically concerned with how one can include
an ethnographic element in any given study. In other words, it is
already a common practice, but rarely is it discussed as a methodological imperative. Like the interdisciplinarity discussed above,
this engagement with theory should be a fundamental reflex.
On this count, it is often abstract categories that provide the most
useful site for researching history. For instance, Thompson chides
Anderson and Nairn for their inconsistent analysis of the category
of class in their own work a category that he is somewhat
reluctant to discuss as a category per se in Making, but which still
informs his entire enterprise. Johnsons reading of Marxs method
provides not only a useful outline for how abstraction can function
in Cultural Studies analysis, but in History as well. This is especially the case when history is being used politically (as Morris
discusses).
The Historians News Network, for instance, recently had a panel
of historians discuss the concept of liberal facism, a completely
a-historical category that is the abstract construction of political
pundit Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg, a TV and magazine commentator, has no training as a historian, but his work has become a
touchstone for the nascent Tea Party movement in the USA. It is
only by addressing this process of abstraction as such by centering their historical critique on his construction of, in Johnsons
words below, this chaotic abstraction that they are able to present
their arguments in a coherent fashion.
Johnson says Marx describes his own method/process in one of
the many forwards he wrote to Capital Vol. I. The key moments of
this process: research, historical analysis, structural analysis, presentation, and validation. Abstraction is instrumental to all points,
but especially to the historical and structural analysis and, in a
461
different way, to the presentation of the argument.43 Johnson

answers the debate about the status of abstraction in historical
methodology by comparing it to viewing the parts of a cell under a
microscope: the other parts remain and the ultimate goal is to
understand how they work in concert. Since this is not possible
with social processes, it can only be done in thought:
The force of abstraction is a process of abstracting from the real concrete, from
complicated social and historical processes in their totality, which remain, however,
the ultimate object of study. Abstraction is a temporary simplification of the social
world in order to render it intelligible. It involves dropping some elements of a
situation in order to concentrate, for the moment, on others. It is not reductive,
because each set of determinations is abstracted in turn and then, as it were,
recomposed. [. . . .] What matters is not the fact of abstraction (which happens
anyway as the medium of thinking) but a self-consciousness of this process and the
choice of the form of categories and their derivation. On the other side, inadequate or
ideological categories are wrong not because they are abstract but because they
are abstract in the wrong way or form.44
The goal of abstraction is not to limit the perspective or to narrow

the focus of the study, but to more carefully understand how each
individual element is operating so that they can better be understood as part of the same totality. In this sense, the Whig history
Thompson decries (which likely employs all the trappings of careful
historiographic methodology since it is some of the first history to
do so) as inadequate precisely because it abstracts from its material
according to a single teleological narrative of what is important. But
because this sacred abstraction remains unexamined as a part of
the research and presentation process, it can reify those elements
in some transhistorical way.
When we see abstraction as a basic part of the process of studying history (or any other disciplinary based object), the question is
less whether we are using a process of abstraction, but whether we
know that we are. Likewise, if theoretical categories already
express historical conditions (only more abstractly than concrete
history) this distance [between theory and historical re-creation]
vanishes or narrows. We are doing history all the time, only in
more or less abstract ways.45
Doing a Cultural Studies historiography of Intellectual
Property Rights
I propose to do history by thinking through the different problems
of abstraction Johnson says Marx outlines here. I will bracket for
the moment the problems of the levels of abstraction as an issue in
the reconstitution of these categories within the presentation
phase46 and focus solely on the way the categories of property and
462
intellectual property are constituted in the historical accounts

of their creation in the mid-17th century. In Johnsons account,
there are three main species of problems Marx identifies with his
opponents process of abstractions: Chaotic abstractions, sacred
abstractions, and thin abstractions.47 I will try to demonstrate the
meaning of each of these in my description of how these problems
appear in the accounts Ive evaluated in developing my own theory
of what is at stake in this debate.
The debate in question is the contemporary debate over Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). In my longer research on this subject48,
I term the sides of this debate the maximalist and the balanced
copyright contingencies.49 The maximalist position is that of the
institutions like the RIAA and the MPAA: it says that IPR should be
treated as any other kind of property and protected by the liberal
state to the maximum degree possible. The balanced position,
which I find best represented by Lawrence Lessig, says that there is
something unique about IPR that makes it necessary to have a
balanced view of it in relation to property law more generally.
Lessigs position owes a lot to fellow legal theorist James Boyle, who
is slightly more radical than him.50 Other scholars advocating this
balanced position make important points about the category of IPR,
but in most cases the historical element of their work reflects many
of the same flaws of abstraction I describe below.
In short, the scholars advocating the balanced position are forced
to defend their portion of the field by consecrating John Lockes
theory of property as a valid explanation of the way property has, in
fact, operated in the history of Anglo-American law.51 This leads
them to abstract from the history of the 17th century using chaotic,
sacred, and thin abstractions and to use these categories to
explain why their proposal is more correct than that of maximalists
and anyone to the left of the balanced position. I argue that they are
unable to recognize the reified culture of property that they
presume as legitimate and the way the presumptions of that
outlook preclude them from being able to sustain the distinctions
they offer between these historical categories. Mine is, therefore, a
political intervention using a particular historical methodology
whose validity I base on Johnsons defense of it above.
On the other hand, like Anderson, my own research into this
history is based on other peoples accounts especially those of
historians Neal Wood, Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker, Peter
Linebaugh, and Lyman Ray Patterson. I do rely on some primary
texts in the Levellers debates at Putney, but I would be lying if I
didnt admit that my own reading of those texts was always already
informed by the analysis offered by these other historians as well as
political theorists like C. B. MacPherson and Ellen Wood.52 My main
463
defense here is that many of these are either well-established

accounts or the critiques I have read of them from within the
discipline have failed to produce a consensus discrediting them as
such. My goal in reading was to see the way the category of property
(and then intellectual property) operated, both in the 17th century
and today.
In comparing the way this category operates in the present
debate to how it actually functioned in the 17th century and today,
I found that all three of the problems Johnson discusses are
present. First of all, the fact that Locke is presented as the progenitor of the idea of property is a sort of sacred abstraction. The
latter is basically a way of taking at face value the ideological
description of these categories and their operation as actually
explaining the history in question. Johnson cites German Ideology
as a primary example of Marxs critique of this practice of historical
abstraction: it is to derive historical explanations from the political
ideologies of the time.
Philosophers abstract further from political ideologies and represent these categories
themselves as the principle movements of real history [. . . .] The beginnings of such
a process can be seen in histories which center on the ideas and historical authorship of great men; its intermediate stage in histories of ideas inattentive to the
social content of thinking.53
The sacred abstractions in the case of Locke misunderstand the

operating principles of liberal democracy that is, taking them at
face value and therefore misunderstanding the true nature of the
social content of [this] thinking. Balanced copyright critics
glance backwards at the origins of copyright is blinkered by their
presumption that Lockes defense of the liberal state was
somehow a primarily political declaration, which only marginally
discussed economics and property. However, they find in his
defense of property a useful illustration of the maximalist position
and therefore argue for a strict division between real and intellectual property. In terms of property, they see Lockes defense
legitimate; in terms of intellectual property, however, they see the
problems as mostly relating to, on the one hand, the materiality
of IPR, and, on the other, to the problem protecting IPR presents
to the practice of free speech.54 In doing so, it misunderstands the
social content of Lockes thinking, which I will describe more
fully below.
This distinction between real and intellectual property presents abstractions which are both chaotic and thin. They are
each chaotic in that they contain great internal complexity and
determinations: None of these is properly distinguished and
analyzed (let alone understood dialectically).55 In this case, it
464
misunderstands both the nature of the social relations and

the immediate history that preceded the definition of property
proffered at the time. More importantly, in the context of
this misunderstanding, these abstractions fail to allow these commentators to see the way the common origins of property and
intellectual property (i.e. the first copyrights) were both the result
of the same historical project. In presuming that the main issues
of intellectual property today were similar to those that adhered
in the 17th century (namely political free speech and economic
monopoly as such) the history offered uses irrational or ideologically thin or simple abstractions. As Johnson puts it, simple
abstractions are rational when they really correspond to general
transhistorical features: they are ideological when they stand in
for detailed historical distinctions.56
In my longer project I attempt to return these abstract categories
to their historical interconnectedness in the 17th century and try
to see what simple abstraction we could make to compare this
category to its operation today. To summarize these findings (and
attempt a presentation of them) I point out that the category of IPR
operates in a very distinct way in the 17th century: namely that the
issue of stifling free speech (especially in the copyright policies
passed in the 1660s) was not about protecting an economic interest
directly or simply, as it might be presumed, protecting the Church
of England from ideological competition. As the Levellers (many of
whom were also pirate publishers) and other movements documented by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down
demonstrate, copyright at this point was meant to stifle speech
that was directly challenging both the legitimacy of the state and
the legitimacy of the novel economic model it had been imposing throughout the early part of the century namely one that
was undertaking primitive accumulation of a dramatic kind.
Linebaugh and Rediker describe the vast state-sponsored projects
of enclosing various kinds of commons and removing the ability of
the population to provide for themselves without submitting to
various forms of wage labor.57 As economist Michael Perelman
points out, this is the very definition of primitive accumulation and
it necessitates transforming the state into a more purely capitalist
one (in the terms Wood uses) with its dramatic separation of the
political from the economic though I would add, through the
cultural, as that is the social force the hegemonic order had
already perfected for centuries: with the Protestant challenge to the
religious legitimation of their powers, rulers were forced to find a
new legitimating narrative.58 Just as Constantine arrived at the
idea of becoming a Christian to preserve his rule, these rulers of
absolutist capitalism found an anchor in an enlightenment goal of
465
a different sort. Exactly what that goal was remains a source of

contention, but Ellen Wood claims,
The characteristic ideology that set England apart from other European cultures
was above all the ideology of improvement: not the Enlightenment idea of the
improvement of humanity but the improvement of property, the ethic and indeed
the science of profit, the commitment to increasing the productivity of labor, the
production of exchange value, and the practice of enclosure and dispossession.
[. . . .] If we want to look for the roots of a destructive modernity the ideology, say,
of technocentrism and ecological degredation we might start by looking at the
project of improvement, the subordination of all human values to productivity and
profit, rather than in the enlightenment.59
Indeed a good deal of the protest that broke out in this moment
was at least partially pitched at the illegitimate imposition of this
model or, more accurately, the continuation of feudalism by other
means. The reaction against this, as Anderson points out above,
was stated largely in terms of protestant religions: the egalitarian
ideas of the Levellers were derived from the only ideology available
at the time, that of Christianity. However, this challenge to Christianity was of a different sort than that faced by the rest of Europe.
The early separation of England from the Catholic church amplified
the implications of the Protestant challenge. As Hill points out, the
importation of the German Anabaptist movement was a direct
threat to the sovereignty of the king: its followers claimed they
shouldnt baptize children at birth because it should be a choice
meaning they wouldnt be necessarily subject to the church or, by
extension, the state.60 Were this movement to catch on, there would
be pockets of Protestants (alongside the pockets of Catholics, or
papists) who would not be subject to any jurisdiction but those
that they agreed to a difficult proposition for an absolutist state in
the process of remaking itself. To these political claims were added
the economic demands of the Levellers and Diggers, who were
rightly confused by the persistence of the economic feudal hierarchy despite the nominally democratic polity. The latter, used the
Protestant challenge to feudal authority that the law, like God,
was no respecter of persons, i.e. no one should be special to
argue for a broader democracy, unhindered by the present property
restrictions. And, while I have yet to be able to internalize the nearly
contemporaneous Westphalian agreements61, the continued international power of the Papal order loomed just across the Channel.
This makes the cheeky rendition of the Guy Fawkes character of
V for Vendetta and its more recent appropriation by the Internet
hacktivist group Anonymous a curious set of significations. The
real referent of those signifiers is an act of religious insurgency in
the early 1600, one of the first attempts at mass terrorism in
466
modern history. The Catholic martyrs of the gunpowder plot mark,

if nothing else, a signal of the rather frail foundation the Early
Modern Parliament was sitting on at the time, both internally and
externally. The repression of papists was allegedly necessary a
claim possibly more accurate than the current defenses of Muslim
repression in the U.S.A. because they represented not only the
internal threat discussed further below; the gunpowder plot, whatever its facts, allegedly involved agents of what we might call the
international, imperial force of the Catholic church, highlighting
the dominant external threat of the time.
This account may appear a more anarchic abstraction than conventional history will allow, drawing as it does from a variety of
underutilized radical historical resources; but there is a case to be
made for the pieces fitting together this way. It is anarchic, but as
any political theorists worth her salt will tell you anarchic is not
analogous to not chaotic. It implies an attention to order and
determinations; a conscious, rigorous, collaborative, dialectical
practice with no strict hierarchy given in advance.
I find this account more compelling than the thin, simple, irrational, chaotic abstraction of the English origins of copyright often
proudly announced to lie at the basis of current debates over
Intellectual Property Rights in Western culture and society. Copyright wasnt just an economic monopoly; it wasnt just about religion or free speech or culture. It was all of those things, but much
more. Stifling the speech of the radical, communalist Christianity of
the moment with Intellectual Property Rights was not simply the
activity of a misguided or insufficiently liberal absolutist state: it
was the action of a state guided, as Ireton at Putney, with an eye to
property.62 In other words, protecting IPR at that point was a way of
protecting property.
In so far as there is a common element today to how it functioned
then, it is this. When contemporary commentators discuss the
problem of copyright limiting speech or creativity, there is no sense
of what the current speech would protest: at their base, Lessig,
Benkler and other advocates of balanced copyright affirm as
unchangeable the liberal understanding of property that these
earlier movements were protesting. This is not a rational comparison in terms of the abstract category of IPR, but it is the only one
that can be stretched across the historical divide. On the other
hand, by trying to return this chaotic abstraction to its historical
context, I have at least provided a sounder ground for the comparison (or an argument for one.)
A more stable connection is possible between the category of
property as Locke describes it, and that of IPR today. This is not to
affirm the maximalist position, but to return that position to the
467
full social content of Lockes ideas. Contrary to the sacred

abstractions of those who cite Locke, the labor theory of property in
actual history was less of a philosophical doctrine than one of
strategic political positioning. It was meant to justify the monarchys rule by parliament (as opposed to Filmers God given right)
but at the same time contest the idea that parliamentary rule would
undermine the continued enclosure of the commons and the existence of private property.63
According to Filmer (and as David McNally points out the religiously inspired Levellers)64 the fact that God had given all land in
common meant that removing it from that common (via private
property yet without the divine right of kings) would require the
consent of all of humanity. Filmer intended the good, landholding
elite to conclude this democracy thing was a bad idea: better to
have an absolutist king and be able to keep your estate. The
Levellers (and especially the Diggers) simply thought this meant
democracy might be economic as well as political. As McNally
contends, Locke then had to thread the needle through the populist
sympathy for economic democracy and Filmers haven of absolutism. And Locke himself wasnt sure he would be able to make this
argument and live to tell about it. Though he penned The Second
Tretise on Government much earlier (around 1682) it didnt
appeared after the restoration of the King in Parliament in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688: and even then, he published it anonymously. It never appeared under his name in his lifetime.
Still, Lockes natural law defense fit well in this context as a
justification of both parliamentary rule and private property. In
place of its monarchical and religious ideological suturing in the
feudal era, and with an eye to the limited merchantilist democracy
that befit and benefited him, Locke said that property could be
justified by a natural law which said that, if you improved said
property by appropriated it with your labor, you had a natural right
to it. Improved here had a very specific meaning in the context and
Ellen Wood, cited above, argues that it ultimately justified not only
the ownership of property by capitalist farmers hoping to reap a
profit (i.e. to improve their yield) but it also justified the enclosure
of commons and the expropriation of people who were insufficiently
improving the property they owned (including those lands of the
expanding British Empire.)65
Further, the only legitimate job of the state was to protect this
property (however it had been acquired). In political terms, this
liberal definition of the state hardens into what Chantel Mouffe
calls The Democratic Paradox, whereby there is formal democracy
but it is delimited by never being able to alter the liberal proscriptions on property.66 In terms of the actual economic property rela 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
468
tions this justifies, the dominant liberal economics reverses the

Lockean natural law whereby ownership is justified by creative
appropriation: now creative appropriation (i.e. innovation, etc.) only
occurs under a liberally proscribed state, which protects private
property accordingly.
When balanced copyright critics like Lessig make the distinction
between real and intellectual property, it is based in some part
on a combination of their deep affinity with the democratic paradox
and the reification of its liberal principles of economics.67 The latter
operates as a primary point of comparison between real and intellectual property: if we want to preserve the arts and sciences, there
must be some IPR otherwise how would we motivate people to be
creative and innovative? In other words, it overlooks the fact that
Locke began with the notion that humans are, by nature, interested
in appropriating their cultural and material world with their labor
not to mention the fact of many innovations and acts of human
creativity occurring in the thousands of years before capitalism
appeared or in other parts of the world or US society where this is
not the case.68 By seeing IPR as primarily related to the rights of free
speech, they further cement the reified liberal culture of property
that is central to their understanding and that of the maximalists.
I finally draw the connection between these different types of
property in these different phases of history by pointing out that
they operate in a homologous way according to the dominant mode
of production. In Lockes time, the category of property, properly
developed, was meant to cement the economic model based on a
large, capitalist class of landowners served by free wage laborers
and tenants. As both Neal and Ellen Wood argue, this is the origin
of capitalism as a mode of production and Lockes defense of
property based as it is on the necessity of improvement.69
Property in the fullness of its social meaning therefore justified
not only the liberal state, but its imperial expropriation and internal primitive accumulation for the purposes of establishing more
completely the nascent capitalist mode of production and the relations of production they would require. In the present day, the
dominant economic mode of production (at least according to the
ideologists of US globalization) is that of the information
economy.70 This refers not only to the industries that are most
often mentioned as being concerned with copyrights i.e. the
entertainment and software industries that animate most of Lessig
and other balanced copyright proponents but also those concerned with patents (pharmaceuticals and agribusiness especially,
as well as any business that relies on a global supply chain, and
hence the protection of their brand identity, patented designs, and
trade secrets according to the international regime of TRIPS.) The
469
neoliberal state that TRIPS presumes (through its linkage to WTO

prohibitions on tarrifs or other forms of state protection of domestic
industries or financial markets) is charged with upholding this
mode of production and the international division of power and
labor that it produces.71
Therefore, IPR operates, as an abstract category with a particular
relation to the dominant mode of production, in virtually the same
way as property did in Lockes time. And it is only through a
historiographic method that adopts this kind of anarchic abstraction of its object and categorical exploration of secondary (rigorously historical) sources that such a comparison could be possible.
I have only scratched the surface of this longer historical account
and I admit that the current manuscript version of it has not
integrated Johnsons Reading for the best Marx concepts consistently. It will be a necessary revision as I expand it.
I hope that this longer account will help to show not only the
value of historiography in cultural studies and the value of taking
seriously questions of historical methodology, but also that it will
resolve the current tension in their relation to the dominant disciplines. By proving that, by doing this methodology, Cultural
Studies can make the necessary political interventions that Morris
hoped we could. In other words, I hope that this demonstration,
and my longer historical and conceptual elaboration of The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights might in some
small part help to define what matters in the debate over their
expansion in scope and implementation on a global scale. I would
argue that is the public goal that should ultimately inspire any
study of History worthy of its name. Or, to put it another way, my
answer to Carol Steedman c. 1992 would be that, as vital as they
are to our overall understanding, History is too important to be left
completely to historians.
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Notes
1
Carolyn Steedman, Culture, Cultural Studies, and the Historians,

in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula
Treichler (NY, NY: Routledge, 1992).
2
Ibid., 622.
3
There was much conversation about this, but one of the lightning
rods for this meme surrounded a book by Amity Shlaes supposedly chronicling (in a careful historical methodology) the way that the New Deal was
ineffective at reversing unemployment. The book was released in 2007, but
she was tireless in promoting her thesis as a way of countering any extreme
form of stimulus on the part of the Obama administration. As a columnist
for Bloombergs wire service, and in the pages of the New York Times and
the Washington D.C. broadsheet Politico, as well as in many television
forums Charlie Rose, The Daily Show as well as various cable news
programs, especially on FOX News she had a multitude of forums
through which to present this history. Her position was first to criticize
FDR and then Keynes for the policy of counter-cyclical government spending. It hinged on her reading of the historical record and many commentators weighed in on the issue historian Eric Rauchway on his blog Edge
of the American West and Nobel economist Paul Krugman in his column
and blog with the New York Times criticized the thesis while ex-NYC mayor
and one time GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani opining that Obama
should read Shlaes account before taking measures similar to Roosevelt. In
other words, history became a serious space where we define what
matters, as well as what gets done. Patricia Cohen, New Deal Revisionism: Theories Collide, The New York Times, April 4, 2009; Matthew Dallek,
Revisionists Blind View of New Deal, POLITICO.com, 2009, [cited Feb. 22,
2010], http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18806.html; Diana
Furchtgott-Roth, The Economic Fight of the Year (Forbes.com, 2008 [cited
Feb. 22 2010]); available from http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/03/newdeal-debate-oped-cx_df_1203furchtgottroth.html; Eric Rauchway, Stop
Lying About Roosevelts Record, in The Edge of the American West (2008);
Rudy Giulianis Take on Closing Guantanamo Bay Hannity
Foxnews.Com, in Hannity (FOX News, 2009); Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten
Man: A New History of the Great Depression, 1st ed. (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2007); Amity Shlaes, An Invitation to Debate
the New Deal, POLITICO.com, Feb. 18, 2009, [cited Feb. 22, 2010], http://
www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18965.html; Andrew B. Wilson,
Opinion: Five Myths About the Great Depression, wsj.com, Nov. 4, 2008.
4
Dennis L. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the
New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
5
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1st Vintage
ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 12.
473
Steedman, Culture, Cultural Studies, and the Historians.

I speak more to this point below in relation to the project of larger
macro-historical works like that of Anderson, Braudel, and Hobsbawm
work that would be impossible if we followed her proscriptions but just on
a basic level of considering the dominance within cultural studies of the
poststructuralist beliefs of mutability of texts and truth, it seems rather
strange that Steedman would accuse Cultural Studies of this.
8
In this sense, Steedman is actually following somewhat in Thompsons footsteps, at least in so far as he makes an appeal for a specific kind
of disciplinary authority in Poverty of Theory. In his case, it is a defensive
appeal, mounted against what he sees as the threat of Althusserian theory.
E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors, New ed.
(London: Merlin Press, 1995). While I tend to agree with McLennon in
thinking that Thompsons is a very inconsistent defense/definition, he is a
bit more rigorous than Steedman in his methodological proscriptions.
Gregor McLennon, E. P. Thompson and the Discipline of Historical
Context, in Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics, ed.
Richard Johnson, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982).
9
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London:
Verso, 1996), 89.
10
Steedman singles out Williams as a prime example of where his kind
of work can go wrong because he was unaware of a line of historical
thinking that came long after he wrote The Long Revolution. It is worth
noting that Williams of all people would probably have been the first to
allow for new information to alter his judgment and narrative. Had he been
alive when she made her critique, Im sure he could have commented on
this. On the other hand, had he not written his meta-study, she never
would have been interested in correcting it: there would be no conversation
to have about it. Which is preferable?
11
Richard Johnson, What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?, Social Text,
no. 6 (1987): 38.
12
With all due respect to Bruce Robbins et al. who edited Social Text at
the time.
13
To name a few, Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice,
3rd ed. (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2008); Nick Couldry,
Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000); Paul Du Gay, Doing Cultural Studies:
The Story of the Sony Walkman, Culture, Media and Identities (London;
Thousand Oaks Calif.: Sage, in association with The Open University,
1997); Richard Johnson, The Practice of Cultural Studies (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2004); Paula Saukko, Doing Research in Cultural Studies : An Introduction to Classical and New Methodological
Approaches, Introducing Qualitative Methods (London; Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: SAGE, 2003).
14
Its worth noting here that, in an interesting turn, Cauldry basically
refuses the need to think about this contextualist validity. While admitting
that it should be considered on some level, he lands up recommending that
people look at culture from inside that is, as a sort of thick description of
the individual person within the culture which can be abstracted somehow
and projected outward as a representative sample of what the culture is
actually like. It is an interesting turn because the scholar he cites as
evidence this can work and whose methodology we should emulate is
7

474
Carol Steedman in Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman : A

Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986).
15
Richard Johnson, The Practice of Cultural Studies (London; Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2004), 31.
16
Sean Johnson Andrews, The Cultural Production of Intellectual
Property Rights (George Mason University, 2009).
17
I take this to be the point of Stuart Halls explication of Marxs method
in Stuart Hall, Marxs Notes on Method: A Reading of the 1857 Introduction, ibid.17, no. 2 (2003).
18
A key text for thinking about intellectual property, for instance, is
Rosemary Coombes Cultural Studies inflected book Rosemary J. Coombe,
The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and
the Law, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998).
19
Richard Johnson, Reading for the Best Marx: History-Writing and
Historical Abstraction, in Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and
Politics, ed. Richard Johnson, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), 177.
20
Hall, Marxs Notes on Method.
21
Johnson, Reading for the Best Marx: History-Writing and Historical
Abstraction, 155. I prefer this older, more direct analysis to his more
recent, retrospective article on the subject. Richard Johnson, Historical
Returns: Transdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies and History, European
Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2001). The latter attempt to use
Gadamer rather than Marx is also less useful in the terms posited since
much of the question of abstraction in relation to Cultural Studies and
History, as Im covering it below, is really a question about the particular
reading of Marxs historical method.
22
Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: NLB and
Verso Edition, 1980).
23
Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left,
and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Dworkin relies on archives of papers
and letters as well as interviews with many of the major actors in this
history, including Stuart Hall.
24
Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, in What Is Cultural
Studies?, ed. John Storey (London: Arnold, 1996).
25
For ease of description I focus only on the arguments of Anderson and
Thompson and bracket those of Tom Nairn. I do this in part because, like
Althusser, Nairn is a sort of silent partner in this debate, with Anderson
writing many more times about it.
26
Perry Anderson, Origins of the Present Crisis, New Left Review I, no.
23 (1964): 53.
27
Anderson actually traces the tendencies he finds here throughout
British history, up to the present day, but for present purposes Ill focus on
this moment of his argument alone.
28
The ideological terms in which the struggle was conducted were
largely religious, and hence still more dissociated from economic aspirations than political idioms normally are. Anderson, Origins of the Present
Crisis, 28.
29
Ibid., 30.
30
E. P. Thompson, The Peculiarities of the English, The Socialist
Register 1965, no. 2 (1965).
31
Ibid., 34950.

475
32
Ibid., 312. The undisclosed here refers to an undisclosed model
of Other Countries, whose typological symmetry offers a reproach to
British exceptionalism. Later he specifies what Other Countries he refers
to, saying The Anderson-Nairn model clearly approximates most closely
to the French experience, or to a particular interpretation of that experience. For Andersons part, he countered saying that, yes, in fact they
were using a theory (or model), but it was not the one Thompson
specified:
Thompson has, in fact, radically misinterpreted the drift of our
work, for one good reason: he lacks the theoretical compass to locate it.
For what is so astonishing is that he is blindly castigating us for economic reductionism when it is plain as day that the whole bias of our
work is just the opposite.
Perry Anderson, Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism, New Left
Review I, no. 35 (1966): 30.
33
I refer here especially to the early discussion of Marxs critique of
classical economists in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading
Capital (London,: Nlb, 1970).
34
In this regard, it is important to note two historical facts: one is that
Althusser had made his own arguments about history and historians in the
context of 1960s France. He was involved in an internecine ideological
struggle between different factions of the French Communist Party (PCF),
the Communist International, and the ideological apparatuses of the Soviet
Union. And two, though Thompson focuses his ire on Althusser, much of
his reason for doing so is not because Althusser in any way attacked him
as a historian, but because Althussers ideas had gained credibility in the
intellectual circles of British Marxism, including but not limited to those
affiliated with The New Left Review and the CCCS. I confess that both of
these contexts remain somewhat inscrutable for me and it becomes very
difficult to navigate the real political purpose behind each of their interventions. Thus though I may be able to understand the theoretical implications of each to a certain extent, I cant completely, in Johnsons words,
map the field between the points of this later argument.
35
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical
Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991).
36
Others include Hall, who obviously means to riff off of Althusser and
Poulantzas, who explicitly relies upon Althusser in describing his own
theory of the state. Hall, Marxs Notes on Method.; Nicos Poulantzas,
Political Power and Social Classes, Canadian ed. (London: NLB, 1976).
37
Louis Althusser, Preface to Capital Volume One, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
38
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism, New Left Review 127, no. May/June (1981).
39
As I outline in my dissertation, while this line of reasoning finds its
direct lineage from Marx particularly in his sections on Primitive Accumulation the political and legal theory involved in this description of
capitalism were thoroughly developed by progressive legal theorists in the
US in the early 20th century. Wood doesnt cite them, but their ideas are
quite similar. For more, cf. Barbara Fried, The Progressive Assault on
Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
40
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New
York, NY: Verso, 2002); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London;

476
New York: Verso, 2003); Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
41
Wood, Pristine Culture; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism. Bourgeois
in this statement refers specifically to the urban citizens and merchants.
Central to both Ellen and Neal Woods description of the English civil war
is the idea that it was not fought between a retrograde set of landowners,
but on behalf of nascent capitalist landowners looking to protect their
interests. Neal Wood first made this argument in the early 1980s and
both found confirmation of this assessment in the work of historian
Robert Brenner, whose thesis about English exceptionalism remains controversial. Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism. Robert Brenner,
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial
Europe, Past and Present 70, no. Feb (1976); Robert Brenner, The
Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, Past and Present 97, no. Nov
(1982).
42
Abstraction.
43
For instance, the abstractions Marx develops in The Grundrisse are
more a part of his research and analysis while the abstractions of Capital
are of the moment of presentation.
44
Abstraction, 162.
45
Ibid., 165.
46
Johnson says, Even if categories are historical, rooted in historical
inquiry and abstracted thence, there are still problems about levels. How
do we move from relatively abstract historical accounts to the detailed
reconstitution of something like the complexity of the real historical world,
past and present? If the historical (or unhistorical) character of the categories is a problem for the process of inquiry, levels of abstraction is a
problem concerning the process of presentation. It is a question of how
more abstract categories can be presented and be put to work in more
complex accounts, demonstrating their explanatory power. ibid., 166.
Although it does some violence to Marxs own recommendation which
says that the presentation is an important part of the method and helps the
researcher themselves understand the object better I would argue that
the accounts I am reading fail to meet the demands of the phrases following
the first if in the paragraph above. For a complete account of these later
stages and the implications for Marxs historical method, I recommend
surveying Johnsons article in full.
47
Johnson gleans these from what seem to be innumerable modifiers
Marx uses to describe other scholars thinking and research processes.
48
Andrews, The Cultural Production of Intellectual Property Rights;
ibid.
49
I leave out at the anarchist side of the debate (such as that of Richard
Stallman) because it typically does not rely on a historical argument for its
grounding: in so far as it does, however, many of the narratives it provides
mirror either the sacred abstractions of the balanced copyright movement,
or are a simple extension of the argument for anarchism in other quarters.
Much of this perspective informs my own inquiry on the subject and the
pressure from Stallman is much of what makes Lessig balanced but for
the moment I bracket them.
50
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage, 2001); Lawrence Lessig, Free

477
Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture
and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Lawrence Lessig,
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, 1st UK
paperback ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008). James Boyle,
Shamans, Software, & Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information
Society (Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 1996); James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, Law and
Contemporary Problems 66, no. 33 (2003); James Boyle, The Public Domain:
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008).
51
The latter tradition is important on a global scale since the assumptions of US laws about IPR are increasingly written into.
52
Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1968). Wood, Pristine Culture; Wood, The Origin of
Capitalism; Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition:
Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 15091688 (Washington Square,
N.Y: New York University Press, 1997); Wood, John Locke and Agrarian
Capitalism. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); C. B. MacPherson,
The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Buford Rediker, The Many-Headed
Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Christopher Hill, The World
Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New
York: Penguin Press, 1972); Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution,
16031714, The Norton Library History of England (New York: Norton,
1982).
53
Abstraction. 170.
54
See especially, Lessig, Free Culture.
55
Abstraction, 167.
56
Ibid., 172.
57
Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.
58
Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political
Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2000).
59
Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 189.
60
Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution.
61
The Peace of Westphalia was minted a few months later, ending the 30
Years War that was ravaging the rest of Europe. For an unusual interpretation of what this means, drawing on Justin Rosenbergs historical
method of International Relations, cf. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648:
Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations
(London: Verso, 2003). Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A
Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London; New York:
Verso, 1994).
62
David McNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First Whigs, History of Political Thought 10, no.
1 (1989).
63
Peter Laslett, Introduction, in Two Treatises of Government, ed.
Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

478
64
McNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in
the Thought of the First Whigs.
65
Wood, Pristine Culture; Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; Wood and
Wood, Trumpet of Sedition.
66
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London; New York: Verso,
2000).
67
As I point out in the longer document, Lessigs linkage to this lineage
is much more direct. Before he turned his attention to copyright, he was
working in the legal tradition of Law and Economics, where his clerking for
Judges Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia minted his consciousness. He
may well be a liberal, but it is clear that their conservative mindset serves
as the audience for most of his rhetoric. He unreflectively assumes a
baseline of right-wing authority in matters of argument, drawing a line
around things he knows they will find abhorrent and focusing on the tiny
area of the Venn Diagram he believes they might be made to agree. For
some of Lessigs earlier work, cf. Lawrence Lessig, The Regulation of Social
Meaning, The University of Chicago Law Review 62, no. 3 (1995); Lawrence
Lessig, Social Meaning and Social Norms, University of Pennsylvania Law
Review 144, no. 5 (1996); Lawrence Lessig, The New Chicago School, The
Journal of Legal Studies 27, no. 2 (1998); Lawrence Lessig, When Should
There Not Be Property Rights? Coases First Question, Regulation 27, no.
3 (2004). This last one, an argument against IPR in the CATO Institute
journal Regulation has to be the clearest example of this ideological slant.
Of course, he is not alone: more spirited, bearded guru of internet coproduction, Yochai Benkler, has similar tendencies. Cf. Yochai Benkler,
Coases Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm, The Yale Law
Journal 112, no. 3 (2002).
68
Lessigs most recent book makes the sharing economy of creative
labor one of the two economies; but for him it can only function because
there is the capitalist economy to which it runs parallel. Lessig, Remix.
69
Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism.
70
A variety of boosters can be credited with this, but one touchstone
must always be Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A
Venture in Social Forecasting, Special anniversary ed. (New York: Basic
Books, 1999).
71
Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who
Owns the Knowledge Economy? (New York: New Press, 2003). Its worth
noting that James Boyle is far richer in his understanding of these connections. His first book on intellectual property rights is a masterpiece of
gathering the different strands of this issue and attempting to weave them
into a cloth. Boyle, Shamans, Software, & Spleens.


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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No.

What We Should Want with History:

2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

What We Should Want with History

interdisciplinary degree courses than to those doing history in the

In saying this, she inadvertently confirms Steedmans skepticism

Sean Johnson Andrews

What We Should Want with History

oriented historians were instrumental in giving Cultural Studies its

Sean Johnson Andrews

On one level, I see this as Steedman protecting her turf. Like

Cultural Studies is or should be concerned with describing

What We Should Want with History

if we were working in economics or even, more contentiously,

Sean Johnson Andrews

something political afoot in the decision to occlude one kind of

What We Should Want with History

dramatic as all that: I think it much more devastating to have a set

Sean Johnson Andrews

The practice as I understand it, regards looking at theoretical

What We Should Want with History

Sean Johnson Andrews

work)18 reading the work of these mainstream disciplines also gave

This rescue and the resources it provides are what I mean by

What We Should Want with History

attempts to stifle broad critical inquiry into the very mutability of

Sean Johnson Andrews

particular Marxian method of engaging with history which, as

What We Should Want with History

In making his diagnosis, he (implicitly) starts from a model of

Sean Johnson Andrews

revolutionary revolution the failure of concrete history to perform

What We Should Want with History

Sean Johnson Andrews

What We Should Want with History

as they were about Cultural Studies as a discipline inflected by its

Sean Johnson Andrews

methods ultimately employs some theory of the relation of culture

What We Should Want with History

different way, to the presentation of the argument.43 Johnson

The goal of abstraction is not to limit the perspective or to narrow

Sean Johnson Andrews

intellectual property are constituted in the historical accounts

What We Should Want with History

defense here is that many of these are either well-established

The sacred abstractions in the case of Locke misunderstand the

Sean Johnson Andrews

misunderstands both the nature of the social relations and

What We Should Want with History

a different sort. Exactly what that goal was remains a source of

Sean Johnson Andrews

modern history. The Catholic martyrs of the gunpowder plot mark,

What We Should Want with History

full social content of Lockes ideas. Contrary to the sacred

Sean Johnson Andrews

tions this justifies, the dominant liberal economics reverses the

What We Should Want with History

neoliberal state that TRIPS presumes (through its linkage to WTO

Sean Johnson Andrews

Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social

2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

What We Should Want with History

2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd