“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

Russell Jacoby writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that Freud, Marx, and Hegel are gone from their original disciplines and being generally forgotten, left to other disciplines’ selective adoption of their writings and ideas. The most interesting aspect of all this is Jacoby’s suggestion that it is precisely their concern with history and the past that is leading them to be ejected from disciplines seeking to escape the gravity of history. And he summarizes,

Driven out of their original domains because they are too ungainly or too out of date, Hegel, Marx, and Freud succumb to an academic makeover. In the mall of education, they gain an afterlife as boutique thinkers.

Should I be worried that these are three of my favorite thinkers?

[Update] I just finished reading a piece by Steven Pile in Loretta Lees‘ Emancipatory City that asks how we should handle the ghosts of the dead. His conclusion:

We cannot ignore the dead, otherwise we may never learn from them, nor will we honour them. But nor can we endlessly and melancholically return to the dead: lest we become unhealthily attached to them, lest we become entrapped in the relentless, drowning flow of history….We must liberate ourselves from the dead, but we must do so without simply denying the life of the dead: both their dreams and their nightmares. We must allow the dead to liberate us, but we must do so in ways that do not tie us to their long-gone dreams and their nightmaters. The dead, as much as the living, must become part of a revolutionised history that is full of the flow of life. [224]