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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to highlight the following sentence:

[Thomas] reads everything. Not just the latest scholarship across innumerable topics, but also theorists – whether Marx and Engels, Gramsci or Bourdieu.

Zounds! Don't tell me he reads Lenin and Kropotkin as well!

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Well, it is the Guardian. You don't read it expecting balance.

Well yeah, it's unusual enough to be worth mentioning that a historian is interested in social theory. As an example of the stuff they read that you might not expect.

While we're off-topic, I need to look this tidbit a little bit more:

> Romans had not been truly civilised – because they didn’t know about gloves

What's wrong with that?

Well, it's not exactly everything, is it?

All four named authors were communists. In attempting to demonstrate diversity, they accidentally demonstrated the opposite.

It would be like bragging about the diversity of people that you listen to today, and then listing Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. Yes, that's a lot of work by a bunch of different people, but you're not really getting exposed to the full range of thought in our culture.

It also doesn't fit in with even 'covering the high novelty/obscure ones' like if he listed say Georgists, and Mercantalists, and Cameralists.

He has wide, eclectic musical tastes too -- country and western.

“Everything from A to C.”

More seriously, reading these writers is really basic stuff for any humanities graduate curriculum...and the book under review is authored by a well-known Oxford don.

For what it’s worth not a lot of Marxists themselves have read Marx, and a guy like Gramsci wasn’t that popular outside of Italy and a few select circles until not that long ago. It baffles me though why people still spend time reading Bourdieu, he reminds me of “champagne socialism”.

I wasn't aware of the term "champagne socialism", thanks for sharing that.

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