“I think that the anti-theory shift is linked to the vicissitudes of the ideological context. After the offi cial end of the Cold War, the political movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been discarded and their theoretical efforts dismissed as failed historical experiments. The ‘new’ ideology of the free market economy has steamrolled all oppositions, in spite of massive protest from many sectors of society, imposing anti-intellectualism as a salient feature of our times. This is especially hard on the Humanities because it penalizes subtlety of analysis by paying undue allegiance to ‘common sense’ – the tyranny of doxa – and to economic profi t – the banality of self-interest. In this context, ‘theory’ has lost status and is often dismissed as a form of fantasy or narcissistic self-indulgence. Consequently, a shallow version of neo-empiricism – which is often nothing more than data-mining – has become the methodological norm in Humanities research.”
Autor, professor e pesquisador
