How can philosophers change history if they can’t read it?

A guest post by Richard B.

Palaeography matters. Not a statement you might readily hear from leftists. But he ability to read old handwriting is the very basis of history itself. Take Marx. The Manifesto, the German Ideology and Das Kapital all rely on an understanding of how Feudal society became a bourgeois society. Which means reading things written before the invention of the printing press. So reading the vast majority of things written before 1460 requires palaeographical skills. And, actually, often things written after 1460 – take, for example, Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. Engels must have had a terrible time deciphering old Karl’s awful awful handwriting.

"Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern"

The proposed axing of the Chair in Palaeogrphay at King’s College London, and the dismantling of the palaeography course there, comes alongside an increasing attack not just on education, but on the humanities in particular. The rhetoric we increasingly see is about business investment, and particularly in technology and science.

What this equates to is that universities should raise money by selling the products of their intellectual labour to drug conglomerates and arms manufacturers – plus some other lovely institutions like agro-business, oil companies and the financial sector. At the same time the state is making cuts in the arts and humanities. This doesn’t just mean sculpture and painting – it means anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy. In other words, all the places where new ideas come from.

The current attack on our education system – which would, of course, be even worse under a Tory regime – isn’t just about public services. It’s about an attack on our ability to think ourselves out of the mess of our current world, its climate, its wars.

The argument which the government (aka Mandelson) is that we need more business investment, in line with an American model. But in actuality the UK state currently spends half the amount on higher education as the USA – and nonetheless still maintains some of the best universities in the world. Just think what we could do with more state investment in line with the USA, but without the intervening business attachments.

If we can’t read our manuscripts (and KCL is centre which trains people internationally to do this), then we lose one of our most valuable resources to both understand the past and imagine a future.