Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which

Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride and Prejudice or Baudelaire’s poetry. The entire content of literary study is not “general rules for life” but careful attention to aspects of the empirical world through things that appear in its history and conditions, which are ever changing and thus require constant re-evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is prone to violent convulsions.