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Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History
The man whom Terry Eagleton has called "Britain's most brilliant Marxist intellectual", Perry Anderson, longtime editor of New Left Review, is perhaps the English-speaking world's most influential proponent of Marxism. This book is the first comprehensive study of his work.
Gregory Elliott gives a dramatic view of the emergence of New Left theory in response to the degeneration of social democracy in the West and Communism in the East. As he traces the evolution of Anderson's thought - arguably the most brilliantly original and ambitiously wide-ranging body of Marxist historical revision produced in a generation - Elliott also sketches the collective career of New Left Review, itself one of the most influential international journals of the postwar period.
Drawing on a wealth of material, Elliott identifies the enduring influence on Anderson of such figures as Isaac Deutscher and Antonio Gramsci. He also provides a detailed exposition and critique of Anderson's writings on politics and culture - whether English exceptionalism or European Marxism, Louis Althusser or E. P. Thompson, Gramsci or Francis Fukayama, the fate of Communism or the future of capitalism.
This first full reconstruction of Anderson's distinguished career provides an overview of the evolution of the British New Left since 1956 and reveals a great deal about the vicissitudes of Marxist theory and political practice in the era of post-Stalinist Communism. Elliott ultimately argues that, notwithstanding significant discontinuities in his intellectual development, Anderson remains a critically engaged thinker of the intransigent Left -- a contemporary historian whose commitment to the long view renders him anindispensable commentator on our times.
Gregory Elliott gives a dramatic view of the emergence of New Left theory in response to the degeneration of social democracy in the West and Communism in the East. As he traces the evolution of Anderson's thought - arguably the most brilliantly original and ambitiously wide-ranging body of Marxist historical revision produced in a generation - Elliott also sketches the collective career of New Left Review, itself one of the most influential international journals of the postwar period.
Drawing on a wealth of material, Elliott identifies the enduring influence on Anderson of such figures as Isaac Deutscher and Antonio Gramsci. He also provides a detailed exposition and critique of Anderson's writings on politics and culture - whether English exceptionalism or European Marxism, Louis Althusser or E. P. Thompson, Gramsci or Francis Fukayama, the fate of Communism or the future of capitalism.
This first full reconstruction of Anderson's distinguished career provides an overview of the evolution of the British New Left since 1956 and reveals a great deal about the vicissitudes of Marxist theory and political practice in the era of post-Stalinist Communism. Elliott ultimately argues that, notwithstanding significant discontinuities in his intellectual development, Anderson remains a critically engaged thinker of the intransigent Left -- a contemporary historian whose commitment to the long view renders him anindispensable commentator on our times.
- GenresHistory
368 pages, Hardcover
First published November 15, 1998
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February 1, 2020I do not believe that the listless and manipulated semi-liberty of today will be humanity's last historical word... Things will eventually get much worse or much better. - Perry Anderson, personal correspondence, 1988
A rather dry intellectual biography of my intellectual hero. Not much in the way of personal revelation here (the heart of the magus remains opaque as ever), but the book does illuminate a subterranean current to the oeuvre: Perry Anderson really did believe in revolution when he was younger. If, like me, you know him mainly mainly from his writing after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, this comes as a bit of a surprise. I always though of Anderson as being Marxist because only Marxism provided the necessary resources for a cold, total, and merciless critique of the present. Now it seems there was also a positive aspect to it. I'm inclined to think the key to his whole life's project may be in the lesser known essay "Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalinism," in which Anderson adumbrates a position that is untenable and all-but-unavowable, yet impossible to entirely dismiss.
April 9, 2015
An internal critique. Elliott measures Anderson against his own prior incarnations, against the constraints of the Marxist inheritance, and against his contemporaries in the movement.
It is a useful reminder that Anderson fell prey to certain characteristic illusions of the Far Left—Khrushchevism, Third Worldism, Wilsonism, Studentism, Guevarism, Maoism—before settling at last, after the end of the socialist experiment, on world-historical pessimism.
The book ends just before "Renewals", the essay Anderson wrote for the new New Left Review in 2000. The book has not missed much. The pace of its subject's ideological revisions has slowed. Anderson has not moved since 1988.
It's a good reminder to pick up Anderson's older as well as his newer work. I read "The Origins of the Present Crisis" and "Components of the National Culture", reprinted in his English Questions. I should read "Problems of Socialist Strategy" and "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci". Perhaps you should too.
Fairly good. Perhaps too idealist a book for me. There is precious little materialism here; much thought, little fact. Elliott has Anderson's stylistic tics (French, Italian, and uncommonly difficult Latinisms) but none of his bracing clarity. Better read more Anderson than more Elliott.
It is a useful reminder that Anderson fell prey to certain characteristic illusions of the Far Left—Khrushchevism, Third Worldism, Wilsonism, Studentism, Guevarism, Maoism—before settling at last, after the end of the socialist experiment, on world-historical pessimism.
The book ends just before "Renewals", the essay Anderson wrote for the new New Left Review in 2000. The book has not missed much. The pace of its subject's ideological revisions has slowed. Anderson has not moved since 1988.
It's a good reminder to pick up Anderson's older as well as his newer work. I read "The Origins of the Present Crisis" and "Components of the National Culture", reprinted in his English Questions. I should read "Problems of Socialist Strategy" and "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci". Perhaps you should too.
Fairly good. Perhaps too idealist a book for me. There is precious little materialism here; much thought, little fact. Elliott has Anderson's stylistic tics (French, Italian, and uncommonly difficult Latinisms) but none of his bracing clarity. Better read more Anderson than more Elliott.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews