On jargon and humanities scholarship
By Every important, highly technical endeavor has highly technical jargon that’s pretty impenetrable from the outside, but I’ve noticed for some reason only the humanities seem to get flak for it. Nobody gets pissed off when MD’s or engineers or physicists speak to each other in their private professional language, but a philosopher starts dropping words like “hermeneutic” or “epistemology” and suddenly lips curl and the sneering begins, usually accompanied with the implication that the people using them there made up words and fancy book larnin’ are big old frauds.
So I’m usually prepared to accept and defend “jargon” until specifically proven otherwise.
He’s got a point, and there is a double standard at work. However!
He’s replying to an example–engineers talking shop about trains–that’s an example where jargon has clear intragroup communication advantages, to be weighed against the limitations it imposes on communication with those outside of the group. The community in question has little incentive or need to communicate effectively with those outside the group–they’re just talking shop. Historians obviously have a different calculus here; there are good reasons to wish for better communication with those outside the group. (Individual historians may just want to sell books, but there are also good civic reasons to wish for historians in general to communicate effectively to a broader audience.) But it’s worse, I think, in some humanities-oriented fields, where there’s significant career pressure to come up with something *really profound* to say, and jargon provides a tempting shortcut, as well as a shibboleth for who identifying true insiders who properly belongs in the conservation. (An important part of my own graduate training in political theory involved being told in no uncertain terms to try again, stating my claims and arguments more clearly and directly, with less jargon. On some happy occasions, the result was much clearer thinking and better prose. On less happy occasions, I was forced to abandon the original claim on the grounds that it turned out to not mean much of anything at all.)
The particular example Foner uses here–replacing the specialized, ‘insider’ language of “bourgeois revolution” with the more accessible “capitalist revolution”–turns the claim into a specific one, about the particular consequences of the civil war, rather than one that tied the claim up in the verbiage of Marxist theories of revolution. “Is the Civil War a bourgeois revolution in Marx’s sense?” is perhaps an interesting question for a certain kind of person (of which I am one), but it’s as likely to be a distraction from giving a clear account of the relevant history here, with little added value for most potential readers. Whether that was the intention or not, referring to it as a bourgeois revolution rather than a capitalist one narrows the audience in two ways–first, to those familiar with the specialized terminology, and second, to those inclined to view history in more or less Marxist terms. There’s no notable or obvious analytic advantage to the choice, so the narrowing of the audience is really all it’s accomplishing.
History is different, of course, but I think a crucial part of good work in my own field of political theory involves vigilance against the temptation to lean too heavily on jargon. Some of the best and most sophisticated work in political theory is perfectly accessible to most intelligent and careful readers (the linked article, among the most influential in political theory in the last 20 years, can be taught to college freshmen with little or no background with relative ease.) We can’t always achieve that goal, but much of the time our lack of writing skill, not the sheer complexity or profundity of our ideas, is to blame. This isn’t always the case, of course, and some of the anti-jargonism really is just anti-intellectualism–but by no means all of it, and Foner’s example offers a good example of the kind of situation in which avoiding jargon widens the potential audience at virtually no cost.
TL/DR: Jargon can provide specificity and precision, but it also serves other, less admirable purposes, including gatekeeping, signaling, and obfuscation. Being vigilant about what particular uses of jargon are doing in particular cases is an important part of doing historical and other forms of humanities scholarship well, and shouldn’t be lumped in with general anti-intellectualism.