The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

I'm not sure whether to parse this as (anti-liberalism) and (Marxism) or as (anti-liberalism) and (anti-Marxism). But in case you meant the latter, Marxism is explicitly anti-liberal in the sense that he rejected the philosophical position that was called liberalism. And this vehement rejection has persisted through his followers. It's also anti-liberal in most broader senses.

> afaik Marx was and to some extent is (the ideas are from a long time ago) taken seriously as a serious theorist.

He's not taken seriously in philosophy or economics. There are some serious scholars who give him credit for contributions to early social science, although I think those scholars generally give him credit for ideas that were published and debated well before him and which he didn't really improve or advance.

Primarily he's taken seriously as an influential person in history, like Jesus, Buddha, Stalin, or Hitler. He was essentially a peripheral polemicist at the time of his death. The Soviets basically deified him because they needed something like a state religion, and they're responsible for whatever reputation he has today. But remember the Soviets were very big on propaganda, not so big on accuracy, and a lot of what people think they know about Marx is seen through the filter of authoritarian propaganda. Similarly a lot of what we know about Jesus passed through the filter of the Roman Empire and their desire to use him as the basis of an imperial religion. We're in a better shape with Marx, though, because we have many his writings (minus a significant amount of his correspondence which he and others destroyed).

There are, of course, economists and philosophers who consider themselves Marxists and who take him seriously. Often they're appointed to departments outside the main econ or philosophy department. For example, it wouldn't be unusual for a Marxist philosophy to be appointed to a German department or a history department.

My interest grew when I had the realization that you can easily spot "gaps" in history, if you just start asking "Why?"

Example: This country invaded that country. Why?

History is full of cause and effect. The fastest way to figure out where you're not getting the whole story is if there's not a "Why?" or the reason simply doesn't make sense.

I enjoy US history, but I've learned to gravitate towards topics that simply don't get discussed much in the "highlights", with the highlights being the American Revolution and WWII. Just for example, the War of 1812, French and Indian War aren't talked about much but are pretty interesting. Learning about the Cold War by reading Skunkworks was really cool. There's a book called The Code Book that is a great read and covers a lot of "history of encryption" during wartime that I really enjoyed.

On the Biblical side of things, I went down a rabbit hole trying to track the migration of the Jewish Tribe of Dan from Cyprus and their influence on Greek/Roman mythology. Just really interesting stuff to me so I even blogged about it.

https://www.readnotmisled.org/p/was-herculesjewish-biblical-...

> Are you an historian?

I published some work in undergrad but stopped afterward (much to the chagrin of my professors.) I still keep up with historian circles, folks who either are academic historians or participate in the general community.

> I know people will often use a digital scan, a reliable transcription, etc., and not necessarily the original - but then isn't that based on the assumption that it's a reliable representation of the original?

Veracity of a source is a very, very complicated topic in historical research. Sometimes documents are authoritative. For example, the American Declaration of Independence is a well-preserved document that has been commented on millions of times at this point and has many, many copies. We can be very sure that the Declaration of Independence exists and says what it says. This isn't the case for a lot of historical documents.

Until use of the printing press became widespread in a culture, distributing copies of documents was laborious. Usually a scribe would have to read the original and copy it. Writing media from this time (paper, parchment, tablets, etc) were also usually expensive. Each document was usually considered an individual work of art and so even if a scribe was copying a document, we had no idea whether the scribe editorialized the work, forgot to copy some of the work, or otherwise modified its original intent. That means that while we may find a document with a title in our modern era, we don't know if that document was the authoritative original or even if the contemporary readers actually consumed the version of the document we have in our possession or a different edition.

Then there's the question of veracity of the claims of the document itself. A lot of surveys and statistics from historical writings are false. There are usually numerous cultural and political reasons for this (maybe the culture didn't count women as people, maybe the culture only counted landholders, maybe the author didn't see a certain tribe in the area as people to be counted, etc.) and so even when we're reasonably confident of when a document was authored and by whom it's hard to be certain of the veracity of its claims.