Perry Anderson

One of the undercurrents in this excellent collection is a lingering suspicion that we may in fact be at the end of history — not at the end of events, but at the end of events that can meaningfully change the liberal capitalist configuration we find ourselves in. It emerges first in his deflationary take on Marshall Berman toward the beginning of the book. (Whether you prefer Anderson or Berman, who wrote a forceful and moving response, probably depends more on mood than on any show more argumentative merit.) Continuations are found in his discussions of Braudel, Bobbio and Berlin, until Anderson's pessimism reaches an apotheosis in his monograph-length treatment of Fukuyama and co. (German Idealists, Cournot, Kojéve), whom he more or less finds in the right, even as he flags certain incoherences in the use of Platonic source material.

I'm not even sure it would be right to say that Anderson was prescient when he wrote here, in the mid-nineties, that "the central case against capitalism today is ecological crisis and social polarization," and the called-for response is a planned economy on a global scale. Surely plenty of people back then saw where our collective irresponsibility was leading us. But his predictions of, for example, increased migration out of the Global South and a corresponding militarism around the borders of the wealthier parts of the world seem awfully close to what we've started to see in the last 15 years.

At the very end, Anderson gives us a sketch of four possible futures for the socialist movement — "oblivion, transvaluation, mutation, redemption" or "Jesuit, Leveller, Jacobin, Liberal" in a different deck. A hint of vigor in the labor movement of the last few years — more in service and logistics than production, perhaps — and the rhetoric of the Green New Deal suggests that social-democratic politics have a toehold in the U.S., at least. BLM-related protests are their own phenomenon, capturing popular sentiment but with little, or ineffective, organizational infrastructure to show for it. In some sense, all of Anderson's possible futures still seem like live possibilities.

Internationally and domestically, though, continued backsliding almost seems more likely than anything else (Trumpism, Bolsonaro, despite his recent defeat, Putin), and it would be useful to remember Anderson's warning elsewhere in the book: "If a parliamentary road to socialism has yet to be seen, Italian and German experience between the wars is a reminder that there is a parliamentary road to fascism." show less

I believe I bought this when it came out in 1992, read Part One and found it heavy going, put it to one side and only picked it up recently (a quarter of a century later) to complete it. The book and my reading it of are both exercises in the long duration.

All but one of the six essays of variable length were published in the longstanding Marxist intellectual journal New Left Review which I greatly admire. Part Two is very much better than Part One and that may have a lot to do with when show more each was written rather than read.

The two essays and the talk in Part One are the musings of one of our leading Marxist intellectuals and cover the period from 1964 to 1976. The author admits that he has removed 'some of the bombast and excess of the period to render them more readable."

Part Two is material from 1987 onwards and it shows a great deal more maturity and disciplined self-editing that provides something more than a snapshot of the Marxist scholasticism of the period before the fall of the Soviet Union (which entity by the way is barely mentioned).

Anderson is not exactly a lively writer. He writes in an academic Latinate style that rather plods from thesis to thesis but that does not mean the Second Part is not worth reading or is a particularly abstruse read. Quite the contrary. It just requires patience.

But let me try to recall the earlier Anderson, and my reminder skim-read, to say only that you will like it if you like Generation of '68's Marxist theory but not much if you do not.

However, his contribution to an understanding of elite English culture is captured (usefully I think) in his closely argued demonstration in the long second essay that the bulk of innovative intellectual life in the country, conservative in tone, owed itself not to English thinkers but to emigres.

In field after field, from philosophy to psychoanalytics (taken more seriously perhaps then than now), he shows that English intellectual life has often been shaped by middle Europeans such as Wittgenstein, Malinowski, Namier, Popper, Berlin, Gombrich, Eysenck, Klein and Deutscher.

Of course there are many native liberal thinkers (Keynes, Leach and Leavis spring to mind and are covered) but it is remarkable how so many Central and East Europeans, mostly Jewish, became more English than the English and solidified our conservative brand of liberalism before the 1960s.

From today's perspective, we can see Anderson not drawing negative conclusions about 'migration' but seeing this lazy and unchallenged appropriation of these intellectuals by the elite as a marriage of convenience, cover for intellectually lazy class still embedded in an imperial past.

Our emigres had something to sell based on their experience of really existing communisms and fascisms in their homeland and the English upper middle classes were willing purchasers. It was a classic liberal contract.

But this was 1968, amidst the ferment of a baby boomer revolution, so a degree of tweaking the nose of Daddy is to be expected. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating account of an aspect of British culture too often taken for granted, certainly answering any lingering claims of elite antisemitism.

However, it is not entirely clear why he is saying all this - is it to trigger us into questioning the old fogies or is it to stir some greater sense of Englishness in our intellectual life or is to critique them from a Marxist class perspective? Probably the last and the target is not them but their masters.

I became too tired to care by the end because he refuses to take a cogent stand. It is criticism but it is not a programme of work. Analysis, while useful, should always be part of some path to action, to experiment, to trial and error. He is, here, being the intellectual's intellectual.

Nevertheless, the 1968 reviews of the liberal-conservative and anti-Marxist intellectual life of the elite are more than useful to cultural historians. They provide a base line for similar and less doctrinaire reviews of intellectual life in the 1980s in Part Two.

The reason the book remains in my library is, to my surprise, as a reference work because Anderson then goes through the same review of the various sectors of English intellectual life, demonstrating a remarkable range but in a way that now seems much more balanced and fair and less polemical.

The more rigid determination to bore us with historical materialism has gone to be replaced with much detail and fine judgement. If Part One gave us a flavour of intellectual life in post-war Britain, Part Two seems to educate us fully in the thought of its Thatcherite equivalent.

Where his Marxism comes in useful is in the skilled analysis ["A Culture in Contraflow"] of the conditions in which intellectuals operated in his time and the increased importance of relations with American universities and (though less so at this time) with European thought.

Again he covers many sectors - sociology, aesthetics, philosophy, economics, history and feminism - and in each he is widely read and fair-minded. He makes clear his own views on a subject but without forcing those views on you with a bludgeon, acting just as a good teacher should.

It is accompanied by two very good essays that deal with wider political conditions - the first is a tour de force of Marxist analysis of Britain in the world over the last three centuries which I found very persuasive and stimulating.

The second looks at Britain 'in the present' (1990) from the same Marxist perspective but in the context of the development of European socialism over the last hundred years. Again, a superb and persuasive analysis although his prognosticians on the future now seem less so.

When describing current and past reality, Marxism remains a powerful and possibly the best tool for understanding what happened and why. However, when proposing lines of action for and predictions of the future, it has an uncanny ability to get things very wrong.

Why is this? I have puzzled long and hard and come to the conclusion that we are dealing with the problem of the intellectual which, in relation to politics, matches the problem of the psychopath in relation to the development of a decent social policy.

The intellectual can develop frameworks for assessing and judging all available data which is, by its very nature, past and present (interestingly the title of the premier Marxist-inspired historical journal in England) but it cannot cope with situations where there is no data (the future).

There may be dreams of intellectuals knowing all future things, exemplified by Asimov's psycho-history, but it is an absurd dream because the next thing that happens in life is not humanly predictable from the things that have happened.

The future lies in lots of little things being done by billions of actors and they only look as if they follow iron laws when looked at in retrospect ... although human behaviour is always constrained by much of the historical materialism that Marx rightly identified as at the core of history.

In other words we might retrospectively trace out the logic of historical materialism but historical materialism can work its way through history in a remarkable number of variations because humans consistently refuse to operate as all-knowing cogs in a deterministic machine.

Thus it is that the best Marxist theoreticians are essential tools for anyone wanting to understand the world they wish to change but that they should drop them immediately as advisers if they actually want to change the world in any way that wants to follow their values.

Ah, Lenin, you say! He changed the world! Well, yes, he was a fine Marxist theoretician and a man of action but I would submit that he was a man of action not because of his Marxism but in spite of it. And, of course, what he created turned out to be far from knowable, inevitable or sustainable.

Maybe the old emigres like Berlin had it right that intellect had to be at the service of values and the only regrettable thing is that the values of the old boys were the values of the class-ridden university common room interlinked with the elite world of Whitehall and the City.

So, do we have a dialectic here? Marxist analysis and values that reflect something other than those of the elite (perhaps populist values) and the combination of them giving us the base line, the synthesis, for feasible action based on a will to action. It is worth a thought.

Anyway, you may find these essays out of date and a bit heavy-going but I would not give up on them. Read Part One if you are interested in intellectual history and read Part Two for a sound grounding in the world that led to Blair and Cameron and so to Brexit.

Both parts have added value as reference works to dip into later for clues to further reading and so further study. And the methodology might also inspire us to stand back and look at the last quarter century with a similar analytical eye to understand why we are where we are now.

I doubt if there will be a Part Three - that is, the same grounded analysis of intellectual life in the 2010s but it would be good to have it for comparison. It might be a rather depressing read with the current demotic irrationalism, ideological activism and no platforming as the cultural norm. show less

Well, it's not exactly what the title claims. But the first two chapters are good, short summaries of the rise of the terms and ideas around 'postmodernism.' The third is an appreciation and summary of Fredric Jameson's work. The fourth is a survey of responses to his work, and Anderson's own slightly random thoughts on these matters.

The first three chapters are great, the fourth a bit aimless. But if you want a good history of these ideas, and/or a good introduction to Jameson, this is show more your book. show less

Solid, ish, clear, but also mired in its own time-period in ways that Anderson himself recognized when he returned to the text. It's useful as something to cite if you want to write about these people; it's useful as a way to think about why intelligent people would want to hold on to Marx despite the use made of him by 'Marxists;' it's not at all useful if you want to understand the thought of the people Anderson discusses, since the clarity comes at the price of accuracy.