Dogmatic cataloguing of sources replaced real historical interpretation

Evidence

A so-called “sociology of the philosophy of praxis” should stand in the same relation to the philosophy itself as Bernheim’s book does to historicism in general. In other words it should be a systematic exposition of practical canons of research and interpretation of history—and politics; a collection of immediate criteria, of critical precautions, etc., a philology of history and politics as they are conceived by the philosophy of praxis. It would also, in certain ways, be useful to prepare a critique of a number of tendencies within the philosophy of praxis, tendencies which because of their sheer crudeness would probably prove among the most widespread. This would take the same form as the critique that modern historicism has made of the old historical method and old-fashioned philology, which have led to the growth of naive forms of dogmatism and replaced interpretations and historical construction with external description and the cataloguing of unevaluated sources put together often in a disordered and incoherent way. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1478

Categorization

• XREF: This critique of naive, external-description philology connects to Foucault’s genealogical method and how Islamophobia scholarship treats ‘source cataloguing’ as a substitute for analytic interpretation. — connects to: Cataloguing behaviors is insufficient; deciphering them requires a proper method; Complete enumeration of periodical-reported events can substitute for representative sampling — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 312