LSAT 82, RC Passage 4, Grand Theories, LSATHacks

Paragraph Summaries

1. 19th century Europe had lots of grand intellectual theories such as Freudianism or Marxism. Freudianism believed all human social interaction, culture and politics is explained by universal psychological factors. Marxists thought universal economic factors explained things. These theories are generally determinist: they think that history happens because of natural laws.
2. It used to be hard to challenge the grand theories, as they were extremely influential. But as time passed, future events falsified the theories. They seemed true at the time, but did not predict the future. Also sometimes theories were hurt by being associated with bad political regimes.
3. First half para 3: People like determinism though. It’s simple. We don’t believe in the simplicity anymore, but we long for it, and feel intellectually uncomfortable.
4. Second half para: The discomfort might be good. It might force us to look at various individual causes, and make theories including the unique and unrepeatable events that make up reality. We might have laws that constrain instead of necessitate. We could then arrange events into a story. We could have historical explanation without determinism.

Analysis

This is a rather abstract passage. Unusually for an RC passage, it actually has hard vocabulary not defined in the passage itself. This is good practice for reading a passage structurally even when you don’t know all of the words. I’ve put an extended analysis a the end of the most complicated and important sentence in the passage. In it, I hope to show you how to figure out the author’s meaning even when you don’t know the meaning of the words.

But first, let’s discuss the passage itself. Skip to the bottom if you want to see the sentence analysis (the sentence from the middle of paragraph 3, discussing contingency)

This passage introduces grand theories of history. These were 19th century theories that argued everything worked according to universal laws.

Freudianism and Marxism were examples. You don’t need to know anything about them except these three things:

1. They thought human society had universal laws (psychological, economic)
2. They thought we could predict the future with these laws
3. The theories were made in the 19th century. The theories seemed to predict the past fairly well
4. However, the theories did not predict future events well, and were tarnished by associations with political regimes as well. So now people do’t believe in these theories

Predicting the past is the least obvious point. Basically, if you are making a theory, you’d be dumb to make a theory that didn’t predict past events. For example, suppose I made a theory in 2019 that says “In the 21st century, Democrats win every election in even years”.

That’s obviously dumb, as democrats obviously didn’t win the 2016 or 2004 elections. You can’t make a theory that disagrees with the past!

But suppose I make a theory that says: In the 21st century, Democrats win every time they nominate someone whose name starts with B.

Well, it fits the data so far: Barack Obama won his election. At the time of writing, Joseph Biden or Bernie Sanders might win the nomination and the presidency. My theory, seen from 2019, is looking pretty predictive so far.

See how it works? As long as you make a theory that fits the past, you can make a story out of any data. Marxism and Freudianism made convincing stories in the 19th century that fit the data in the past. So at the time, these two theories seemed extremely convincing as they had explanations for past events.

The problem? The theories failed to predict the future. It turns out that humans don’t behave according to universal laws. Likewise, I expect my “Democrats with a B in their name” theory to have terrible predictive power, even though so far it predicts the past. Victory or defeat in elections has nothing to do with letters of the alphabet. So my theory has no predictive power.

Now on to the third paragraph. Having proven determinism can’t predict the future, the author says we nonetheless long for it. It gives a comforting certainty.

The author thinks this longing will be helpful. It may convince us to switch to his theory, based on contingency. What is contingency? Something unpredictable in the future.

So….we can have a theory of history based on stuff being unexplainable. It really just means talking about events. So we can talk about stuff like: “Barack Obama couldn’t have been elected if Bush wasn’t president. People got tired of the Republicans under Bush, so they wanted a Democrat”.

So, Obama’s election was contingent on Bush’s performance (i.e. not predictable 100% until events happened), and we can make a narrative explaining how one thing lead to the other. And we could have such an explanation while being aware that events can’t be predicted.

This is….honestly pretty weak as a historical theory. It just sort of feels like common sense? But the questions don’t really analyze this theory or require you to understand it. The author has dressed up a simple idea in complicated language. The passage is really just testing if you can read through this paragraph and get the gist of what the author likes and dislikes, and how they have structured things. The questions generally ask stuff about determinism, or about what the author would agree with i.e. knowing that the author thinks the stuff in the second half of paragraph 3 is good.

Sentence Analysis: understanding stuff you don’t understand

That said, let’s analyze a key sentence a bit. You only need to read this if you had no clue what contingency meant and didn’t understand paragraph 3 very well. I’m going to show you how to use structural words to understand it even if you didn’t get the specifics.

For instance, look at the sentence in the middle of paragraph 3, that starts with “But perhaps this discomfort is no bad thing….”. This is a long sentence, and I’ll break it down part by part.

This is also maybe the hardest sentence in the passage, and the key to understanding the author’s purpose. Let’s examine it in depth. First of all, what is “this discomfort”?

It was the discomfort from the previous sentence. We no longer believe in determinist theories, but we find them intellectually comfortable. So, we feel discomfort from not having deterministic theories. Therefore, we want something just as comfortable to replace them with.

So the author is saying “It is not bad that we are uncomfortable and want a replacement theory”.

Also note that I bolded the structural words I quoted. “But perhaps” shows contrast. “Is no bad thing” are author’s opinion words. They show judgement.

Next, “for it might finally persuade us”. These are all easy words. “For” is a structural words showing that the earlier bit is not a bad thing because it might persuade us.

The “finally” is another author opinion word. The author thinks this persuasion is good. That’s why they’re glad it’s finally happening.

Persuade us to what? “To relinquish the vain hope for inevitability”. ➞ Whatever this means, it’s bad, because it’s something the author is glad we’re finally giving up.

(It means we can’t use historical laws to predict the future with certainty, and we will finally give up on that).

“And hence restore us” ➞ Author’s opinion. Restoring something is good, so what follows is good

“To….historical contingency, particularity, and novelty….” ➞ What the heck does this mean? Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the author thinks giving up on determinism will restore us to these things, and the author thinks these are good things.

So, we can break this sentence down into parts:

1. It isn’t bad we’re uncomfortable to give up grand theories of history
2. Because it might convince us
3. To finally do a good thing:
4. and switch to contingency etc.

You don’t need to know what contingency is. You just need to be able to read the structural words and figure out that it is part of the author’s own theory of history: we are moving towards it and it is a good thing.

(The actual meaning of contingency, particularity, etc is: this change will bring us back to actually figuring out how the events of history work, rather than relying on grand theories)

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