News that Gary Becker and Richard Posner will start their own blog comes via Crooked Timber, via Eugene Volokh.
As a comment puts it, "Well if Becker’s doing it, [blogging] must be rational."
Well, maybe ... Becker's opportunity costs must be a little higher than mine since I'm sure he commands quite the speaking fee. On the other hand, if Becker at age 74 feels blogging will be worth the investment of his time, it must surely be rational to spend the time on it at 29, right?
But what I really want to get to is the bigger question: why don't historians blog [much]?.
Check out the blog roll at Crooked Timber, which must be a good sample of blogs by academics. And you get lots of lawyers, political scientists, philosophers, and economists ... Not many historians.
To be sure Juan Cole is pretty prominent these days, which just goes to show that you can labor away in relative obscurity on a topic for decades, and then they declare war on the country you study. As an historian of America I hope that never happens to me!
The rest of the historians blogrolled at Crooked Timber contain a strange preponderance of medievalists. This is somewhat unfortunate as I was going to argue that the reason historians don't blog [much] is that history is a discipline that venerates knowledge of specific facts, rather than reasoning from theory that allows you to comment on subjects you don't know much about.
And medievalists, studying things far removed from today's world, seem to be the par exemplar of history's concern with the particular and far-removed. In any case, this seems to be the exception proving [testing] the rule. Few of the medievalist bloggers use their training to comment on current events.
It's a pity -- we could have used some medievalist document analyst types during that whole Dan Rather/CBS/National Guard messiness.
One of the foremost bloggers out there, Josh Marshall trained as an historian, but his knowledge of 17th century Connecticut politics is not on display often. More's the pity -- thePequot war probably has valuable lessons for the crazy capers in Iraq.
Posted by robe0419 at November 29, 2004 3:43 PM