New theory requires new history that resurrects suppressed events

Evidence

The work was conceived as primarily a theoretical discourse. This may come as a bit of a surprise to some readers because for the most part I purposely eschewed theoretical language. Instead, I believed it necessary to refer the exposition of the argument to historical materials. Certainly this minimized the risk of reductionist abstraction. Most importantly though, it served the purpose of resurrecting events that have systematically been made to vanish from our intellectual consciousness. The work required a certain destructuring of American and Western historiography. For the realization of new theory we require new history. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1426

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A methodological maxim — theory must be built from recovered history rather than abstraction — with wide application beyond Black studies.
• XREF: connects to: Historians should rescue losers of history from posterity’s condescension. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1752; Designing a credible alternative system requires a path-dependent counterfactual history. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 702