I've read those two monographs by Hugh Urban now, and I find it interesting that
he is so dependent on his
sociology-of-knowledge intellectual starting point that he has to distance
himself from marxism to avoid being
identified with it. The tell-tale sign of the sociological base is the concern
with social status as the litmus
test fior the nature of 'knowledge', i.e., 'knowledge' is not true or false per
se, but is emblematic of a
certain social status, to which it acts as passport.
Of course, this is not untrue, but by itself it is misleading - consider his
treatment of Willermoz, which
manages to state that W's Masonic 'knowledge' simultaneously:
(1) connected him to the aristocratic pre-revolutionary elite
(2) was nearly destroyed by the revolution
(3) provided a vehicle for aristocrats to perpetuate their social status in the
post-revolutionary world
(4) raised W himself to an anomalously high status given his social origins
(5) was emblematic of the actually reactionary nature of French Freemasonry
but rejects the Catholic view that
(a) Freemasonry was a vehicle for the rising bourgeoisie and the Jews to network
AGAINST feudalism
(b) Freemasonry systematically attacked religious education
(c) Freemasonry networked internationally to reduce one feudal or imperial state
after another
(d) the actual content of Freemasonic teaching was anti-Christian
(e) those aristocrats who did support Freemasonry in their OWN countries (as
opposed to those who used it as a
subversive stalking-horse in OTHER countries) were either junior scions without
power in the status quo, or were
self-deluded eccentrics (like 'Philippe Egalite') and were usually destroyed by
the later stages of the
revolution anyway.
In the same way that he one-sidedly, or indeed wrongly, presents Freemasonry in
France as a prop of the
post-revolution aristocacy, he also presents Bangali Tantra as a prop for the
post-classical Brahman elite, but
I cannot evaluate his accuracy here.
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