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I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview, with what we might call party politics. History is always political because you can’t document every event that occurred during a given time; you’ll inevitably choose certain events over others. That very selection reflects a political stance, whether you realize it or not. Moreover, the subject itself is inherently political—for example, if you’re writing about music history, why focus on European composers rather than on whatever Chinese music existed at the time?

There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings.

An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)

You are talking about the potential of political bias.

Actual political history itself can have political biases.

An apolitical history can also have political biases.

The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who.

I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.

Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political.

History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.

> Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political.

Aristotle said politics is the study of how communities can achieve “the good life” through governance and organization. He said we are political animals (zoon politikon) who naturally form communities, such as the polis (city-state), to achieve common goals and virtue.

The idea that any human action is political cannot be attributed to Aristotle. It is also a silly and amateur assertion — to breathe is not political, to think is not political, to eat is not political, etc.

Well, that depends on what you eat. Do you eat meat, or are you vegan?

Breathing is a physical action, so there isn’t much to debate there. However, even some physical actions—like using the bathroom—can have political or cultural dimensions. For instance, why do you use a toilet instead of a bidet, as is common in parts of Europe or South America? That choice is shaped by cultural and economic factors that influence your behavior.

> For instance, why do you use a toilet instead of a bidet,

Because my bathroom is too small to house a bidet.

Also, a bidet and toilet don’t serve the same purpose so your example is a false choice.

> Well, that depends on what you eat. Do you eat meat, or are you vegan?

The choice of what to eat can reflect or engage with political and social systems, but it isn’t a political act. It is a personal act. And “to eat” is also not a political act.

Japan solved the problem under the constraints of no room for a bidet. You can put a Japanese style shower toilet seat on almost any toilet. Mainly the size of the bowl (front-to-back dimension) has to be suitable so that the front loop of the seat sits aligned with the porcelain.

Thank you. I'm well aware of the innovation in bidet and toilet technologies to assist in more hygienic defecation routines and the different environmental impact such as less toilet paper, different energy considerations, plastics, water usage, etc.

is your bathroom too small because you don't make enough money for a larger bathroom? is it because of government regulations regarding habitations? why are you living in that location? what circumstances led you to make that decision? ie, even the size of your bathroom has its own politics in the sense that it contains a history of decision making and power dynamics.

I just farted; is that political?

Note that absolutely nobody is around.

It depends, would you still have farted if someone else were around?

Yes, but very, very quietly. So that would obviously be political.

humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political

Do you have a direct quote for that? For me, this seems like more than a mere misunderstanding of Aristoteles' work. In Politics book 1, he already explicitly distinguishes between "oikonomike" (the household) and "politike" (the city state) as being two different spheres of engagement. So the claim that any human action is by itself political is just plain false, as actions can either be political or domestic. I struggle to think of any work where he classified mundane acts such as eating as belonging to either category, it seems out of character to me.

Secondly, in Ethics Aristotle stated that he considered politics as a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself: the goal of man is to lead a morally virtuous life, and the goal of the community is to enable and enhance the moral character of its citizens. Therefore, the virtuous man engages in politics to increase the virtue of his entire community, in order to breed more virtuous men. He was also quite clear that public education was required (Politics, book 8) to mold the young into successful statesmen. Both of these seems at odds with your assertion that "humans are political beings" by default.

>An apolitical history can also have political biases.

seems contradictory. If you lived on earth, there is no "apolitical lens" to look in. You can only try to grab a truly comprehensive view by finding and studying multiple lenses.

>The biases aren't what make political history political

If you lived in a country, or need a public press to post your findings, or are simply hidden in exposure based on some private company with their own biases, I'd say all those are connected to the political.

"Politics permeates everything" just seems to be like overeducated foolery.

What is the test you are using to detect politics, and what is the evidence that it universally detects politics in everything?

And if it detects politics in everything, how do you know the test works? Counterfactuality is lacking. There has to be some calibrating example of something in which the test finds no politics.

If someone documents a natural disaster like a Volcano engulfing an entire city, that's not political in any way, that's just recording facts that any historian regardless of their political views would record.

There have been N volcano eruptions over the history of mankind, why you are taking focus on one and not the other is the political part.

The choice of which cities they document and what they cite is definitely political. For example, what city do you think of with that description? It's probably Pompeii and not Herculaneum, let alone Cuicuilco, Vestmannaeyjar, or NA 860.

So, what was the political motivation of Pliny the Elder to document the Vesuvian eruption that destroyed Pompeii, as opposed to e.g. the numerous eruptions of Krakatoa?

Not OP but I think you’re confusing “politics” with “bias”.

History is biased, I don’t think anyone would debate that, but bias isn’t necessarily political. There’s lots of reasons for people to think some item or story is worth preserving, and most of them aren’t about politics.

The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.

>The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.

Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.

>the academic study of government and the state.

That's all it is. unless you are truly independent and in the wild, it's hard to say anyone isn't influenced by politics. Hence, biases. Bias in this lens is a byproduct of your environment, managed by politics.

Bias is often just a product of human cognition: i.e. one of the cognitive biases. Your environment is political, so your cognitive biases are tinged with politics.

It's also just as simple as experiences. even if we could remove all bias, we don't know what we don't know. aspects like language barriers don't help either in terms of properly sharing such histories either.

That's just stretching the meaning of the word "political" so broad that it ceases to have meaning at all. For an act to be political, it needs to engage with the environment with an intention to change or entrench it. If you include in your definition actions that are the result of a certain political climate, you have simply nullified the word.

> Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.

You keep making a point that no one is bringing up. Not only I don’t believe that, as a non-US citizen living in Europe I don’t even care about your two parties.

But there’s quite a stretch between “humans are biased” and “what you think about how society should work influences absolutely everything you do”.

As a silly example, I have quite a collection of music. I keep physical copies of the ones I think are more important to me. If a future archeologist were to find them, they’d get a biased picture of what people listen.

But my taste in music has nothing to do with my beliefs about politics. There’s artists there with every type of conviction, from different eras, from different countries,..

“Everything is political” is a great slogan for activists to get people to do what you want them to do, but like all slogans it’s not actually true.

> I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview,

“Political” refers to things related to the governance, policies, or affairs of a country, organization, or group. Usually involves the structure of power, decision-making, and public administration, and debates or actions concerning laws, rights, or societal issues.

Having a worldview is not a political act.

Having a worldview is a political act. In fact, even having a sense of right and wrong is political. My point is that humans are inherently political beings: we don’t live in a vacuum, and our values, life choices, and even our language arise from a particular social system. Everything we do is political.

Your perspective seems limited to the more common or everyday meaning of “political,” and I understand that; however, in social studies, “political” usually has a much broader scope.

> In fact, even having a sense of right and wrong is political.

You’re confusing politics with ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies moral principles and values, focusing on what is right, wrong, good, or bad in human behavior.

Ethics focuses on morality, while politics addresses power and governance, though they often overlap in discussions of justice and societal well-being.

> Having a worldview is a political act.

Having a worldview is not inherently a political act, but it can become political when that worldview influences or interacts with societal structures, policies, or governance. A worldview shapes how you see justice, power, and societal organization, which may align with or challenge political systems or ideologies.

Just the fact that you dress up is a political act, you are accepting and reproducing that being naked is wrong, or at least you do it because you can't do it otherwise due to social punishment. Or you go naked, and that's also a political stance. If you live in a society, everything you do is political.

And that's ok, there isn't anything wrong with that.

>Having a worldview is not inherently a political act

yes it is, because that world view doesn't come up to your head in the vaccum, is result of all social interactions you had in your life and every thing you saw etc, and from that you are creating a political posture. You may not take any action and be completely silent about it the rest of your life (doubtful) but even not talking about it is a political act.

> Having a worldview is a political act.

Are you in the USA? This is just something they promulgate in the educational system, along with the idea that there is always room for another opinion that is just as valid, even after domain experts have reached consensus using rational evidence.

So you’re saying that… their worldview is a result of politics.

Yes, the the doctrine that no human thought or action is politics-free, is itself politically motivated, and the worldview which subscribes to it is political. It's a doctrine which suits the narratives of all sorts of political activists. Slogans like "if you're not with us you're against us" belong to this doctrine. Every thought you have is political, and so if you're thinking something that doesn't align with our politics, it must be different politics. Different politics is bad and against us.

The doctrine is just something someone made up. It is not justified by rational evidence of any kind.

Right, right. Meanwhile, your worldview is both rational and objective; not influenced by politics of any sort. Very convenient!

You are mixing up things: I criticized a worldview and a doctrine, but what is wrong with the doctrine isn't that it claims "every worldview is political", but that "all human thought and action is political".

If it were the former, it would be uncontroversial. I don't disagree with the claim that worldviews are political. The concept of a world view is a set of perspectives and opinions which encompass the human sphere of existence, which has a big political content. (The ideas contained in a worldview are not all political; a worldview needs facts, too, like salt being sodium and chloride, which isn't something voted on in a parliament.)

So, yes, while my worldview necessarily encompasses political topics, I also have thoughts that are rational and unrelated to politics. Or possibly even to a worldview.

That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics.

They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.

It's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.

History is written by the victors, though. And no one is omniscient. It's a bit hard to say "just the progression of discoveries" as if every voice is equal.

And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.

The “victor” here is the technology which allowed you to survive into adulthood and fed you inexpensively and clothed you and supports the infrastructure for this forum which lets us have this discussion in the first place. The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy, the conditions which unleashed it held back by their own stubborn insistence.

that's a pretty bizarre angle. we're overlooking centuries of abuse because "it made my life easier"?

My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country.

>The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy

and the biases of the winners, yes.

You are both the winner and the loser here. The right to vote is immaterial if the underlying conditions don't change, or change regardless of how you want them to. The silicon valley tech companies bought this most recent election, they donated the most money to both parties, and would fill up the cabinets of the president with their allies regardless who won, you were just voting on the flavor. But this is not a "bad" thing, insofar as it accelerates the pace of technological development, which creates both great wealth and great alienation and leads to increasing turmoil and civil unrest. But that is on account of "politics" itself, which legitimates the regime of industrial leaders and not industry itself, the tech founders and not the technology.

The conditions of possibility of that extraodinary technical development are political. cf Marx, Capital vol 1

The conditions may be, but the development itself isn't, and the prior work which that development references and depends on likewise isn't (and had political conditions of its own quite possibly unrelated to the present ones).

It is still shrouded by the spectre of the political

Even if so, that's a different claim from the content being political.

its not not-political

Sure, like Earl Gray tea is tinged by what you're listening to. It tastes a bit different if you have Beethoven on versus Miles Davis. Therefore, although tea obviously isn't musical, it's not non-musical, either.

Both the music and the tea are produced by and through market capitalism which depends on a particular configuration of the state to operate efficiently, ie politically. Its just the case that the most efficient configuration is also the one beyond politics.

I guess you could write a pure technological history that just says what was invented and how it works, but that would be awfully dry and rather uninformative. As soon as you start discussing who did it and why, you’re in the realm of politics, even if not the presidents-and-kings sort of politics.

This site is a perfect example. It presents itself as a technical forum where politics is occasionally tolerated but never the focus. And yet you could probably write an entire book about the politics behind the name of the site itself, never mind its history, rules, culture, and means of support.

You're in the realm of politics, but politics is still not the front-and-centre focus of your story. You're not telling a political history; but you need to reference politics in order to explain the timeline, or situations of when one of several equally good solutions "won" and such. It is still a history of the technology and not political history.

Attribution in science is one of these areas where people are led to believe that is apolitical.

But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy.

An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.

Or how women’s contribution to sciences were continually overlooked and sometimes purposefully hidden, going along with the social/political status of women.

History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.

You two point out something important: a history that appears apolitical on the surface can have a social/cultural/economic/political bias in it (whether conscious or not) by omission or emphasis.

As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them".

Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.

> Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.

It sounds like you are talking about intent rather than politics - you example does, however, seem to be made with intent.

I think they’re just not used to thinking about historical study. Even in science, do you focus on the Great Men like Einstein and Newton, or do you choose an Annales approach like Connections? Neither is wrong, but there are right and left overtones to these approaches. The way you assign causes is not always clear; even events themselves are socially constructed. History is a map to the past, but the map is not the territory.

Why do you assume that table was named differently in other parts of the world? I lived on the west side of that curtain, and I was also taught it was called Mendeleev's Table.

You may say the history of some niche topic isn't political, but it is and I am pretty sure most historians would agree. E.g. if you look at technological inventions you just have to look how that history treated prior or parallel inventions by people who were seen as lesser by those who wrote the history books, that means women, people of non-european cultural and ethnic decent.

Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to.

Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails.

Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.

Which of these histories do not reflect any ideology, any regimes, any political settings, are expressed in a universal language, &c.?

>No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories.

No, history of any kind is always political.

Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.

History is written by the survivors and descendants. Not all those who are vanquished are so completely eradicated that they don't have descendants; and even in those unfortunate cases, someone unrelated to them will dig up and reconstruct their story as best as possible, and tell it to the world. Some of the loudest voices are from the descendants of those who had been trampled.

Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.

>Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory?

Sure, feel free to research how much resistance (no pun intended) there was over the mass adoption of transistors. the years of meetings and debates, the propoganda and fear tactics against transistors, the subjective claims over quality and safety of vacuum tubes.

This wasn't just some iterative upgrade like an RTX 2080 to a 3080.

A transistor and tube don't know anything about politics though.

You can't hold a referendum to eliminate the Early effect from a transistor, or Miller capacitance from a tube stage.

We can give an accurate and informative technical history of electronic parts, while completely avoiding discussions of mass adoption struggles, and vendors spreading FUD and whatever other fluff. If you add some that to the story it's still primarily a technological story and not political.

Just the concept of "history" depends on a shared objective reality, which is under attack in 2024 more than any other time.