English Questions

by Perry Anderson

Examines British society in the sixties, and the changes wrought by the next two decades.

A set of reflections on British society and culture, this volume falls into two principal parts. The first consists of a pair of essays published in New Left Review in the sixties; “Origins of the Present Crisis,” which suggested a general schema for the analysis of class and power in modern Britain and their relation to its decline; and “Components of the National Culture,” which looked at the pattern of intellectual disciplines associated with the post-war political consensus. One premise of these accounts was a conception of bourgeois revolution, whose critique is sketched in a short intermezzo from the mid seventies.

The second part contains two essays published in the late eighties which review the conjectures of the original texts in the light of developments—political and intellectual—of the subsequent decades. “The Figures of Descent” reconsiders the problem of national decline; “A Culture in Contraflow” traces some of the intellectual reversals of the recent period. The book concludes with a survey of the political conjuncture after the fall of Thatcher, which considers the prospects of the Labour Party within the context of the wider changes that have reshaped European social democracy in these years.

Genres: British Literature, Politics, History, Essays, Philosophy, Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1992

About the author

Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.

He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_An...

Reviews

[Brecht Rogissart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes 6 different essays Anderson wrote between 1964 and 1991, all revolving around the peculiarities of British capitalism and its impact on the British economy, society, and intellectual life. In a very typical Anderson-style of writing, his essays are long (some longer than 100 pages), you’re often unsure what his core argument is, and where he’s heading with his detailed descriptions, but along the way you pick up a lot of new insights. I also realised that his writing became more difficult (yes, you went to private school, no need to brag about it) as he became older: his earlier essays are surprisingly easy to read. Some of the essays did not interest me much, but there are three I would recommend.

First, the “origins of the present crisis”, written in 1964. This is the original article that elegantly summarised the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis that British capitalism was so peculiar because of the early development of capitalism in Britain. Because of this early development, the pre-capitalist elements could easily integrate within British capitalism, resulting in landed gentry retaining a large influence, commercial and financial capital holding sufficient power over industrial capital, a state-structure that didn’t need “modernising” (and thus looked increasingly “ancient” as other countries modernised), and no strong opposition between feudal classes and capitalist classes, explaining the ‘missing’ bourgeois’ revolution in Britain. According to Anderson, for Britain “the ‘law’ of uneven development has produced one of its dialectical reversals, with a vengeance. Today Brittain appears an archaic society, trapped in past successes, now for the first time aware of its lassitude, but as yet unable to overcome it.” It might be a bit of a stretch to argue that the early development of Britain caused such a drag on British development: one would think that if things are really that ‘sluggish’, at some point a breakthrough would be forced, either by labour or capital. He would need to argue why this ‘drag’ was also relatively “successful”, as in: why things didn’t detoriate that much to a point where change was needed. Although he is aware of this counterargument, he didn’t spend sufficient energy in trying to explain why all historical actors where stuck in consent. Still I’m definitely convinced that his overall argument holds ground until today and that a similar approach to Dutch capitalism (why was it for so long “stuck” in its merchant past of the 17th-18th century?) or Belgian capitalism (why has Wallonia, developed on 19th century industry and decaying since 1945, still not been able to overcome the “vengeance” of history?) would clarify things there.

Second, and my personal favourite, his short essay “the notion of bourgeois revolution”, written in 1976. In this essay, he develops some tools for historians that want to analyse the ‘bourgeois revolution’. From the observation that most Marxist historians have not been able to stand up to the test of non-Marxist scrutiny for their descriptions of specific bourgeois histories, Anderson basically answers: stop looking!! There will be no ‘pure’ bourgeois revolution to be found in history, or in his more eloquent words: “Here the exception was the rule – every one was a bastard birth”. By giving four “overdeterminations” of bourgeois revolution (happy to read Anderson was a bit of a Althusserian babyboy), he argues that the political translation of capitalist transition was always muddy. First, both feudalism and capitalism are systems of production based on private property, which meant organic bonds between nobility and bourgeoisie was always possible. Second, both feudalism and capitalism create their own subordinate classes (tied peasants and propertyless wage-earners) who also always forced themselves in the political, which meant a pure battle of nobility against capitalists never happened. Third, the capitalist class itself is always numerically small (contrast to nobility and working class), which meant it always needed to form political bonds with other classes (petty bourgeoisie, nobility etc.). Fourth, capitalism needs a nation-state to stabilise social relations, which always create national/international conflict too, and this mingles in the historical context as well. Really mind-opening for me. He also gives other great insights (why didn’t Marx and Engels care about studying bourgeois revolutions?), but I’ll leave it to that. It’s only 15 pages, read it!! And compare with Poulantzas’ 10 pages chapter on the British, French, and German bourgeois revolution (From the book “Political Power and Social Classes”). You’ll see that an Althusserian approach is really helpful for historical debates like this.

Third, “The Light of Europe”, written in 1991. In this essay he reproaches his original thesis and gives an overview of the debate it has sparked. Helpful classification of the different arguments, and he’s really good at 1) accepting criticisms, 2) adopting his point of view, 3) defending his core-arguments despite the criticisms. In addition, he focuses more on the post 1945 developments of capitalism and social democracy in Europe. By making comparisons with Belgium, Sweden, Italy, France, Greece etc., he succeeds in both stressing the peculiarity of British capitalism and the trajectories of British Labour consequently, while also making helpful generalisations for European historians. His basic point is that Social Democracy was born in Northern Europe (roughly Belgium, Germany, Britain) because of their strong industrialisation in the nineteenth century, and that this also explains 1) their strong grip on the reformist state after 1945, and 2) their lack of alternatives once that political economy faded in the ‘70s. He truly makes astonishing conclusions in 1991 about the prospects of Third Way Labour before it even happened.

[David M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perry Anderson is a leftist who's life work has been a meditation on failure. Those who'd mistake his high intellectual standards for a kind of Leninist elitism are missing the point. Lenin spoke of the vanguard as a strategy for seizing power; as such it was a shocking success. Anderson identifies instead with a Marxism that failed - western Marxism; see Considerations on Western Marxism.

For over half a century now he's maintained a well-nigh impossible position, uncompromisingly left-wing and just as emphatically not a populist. To many he may appear to be an absurd figure, a charge he occasionally brings on himself (for instance, in the latest issue of the New Left Review, he has a lengthy piece devoted to - not Brexit, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, but... the legacy of Antonio Gramsci).

Still, myself a vulgar plebeian, I have to say I appreciate his refusal to ever dumb things down. Moreover, the really important thing about his elitism is that its target is always other elites. Early on in this collection he provides a salutary example. If you're going to criticize your nation's culture, no sense in scoring cheap shots against the supposed stupidity of the masses. Perry Anderson wastes no time, taking aim right at the heights of English culture in his harsh criticism of Wittgenstein and the school he founded at Oxford.

(There's something thrillingly transgressive about an intellectual attack on Wittgenstein)

As an essayist Anderson is at his best when writing either restrained but devastating polemic, or else sorrowful appreciation. Unfortunately he has another mode which is much less attractive. The price of being so erudite - nay, omniscient - is that a kind of aimlessness can ensue. A later essay in this book, "A Culture in Contraflow," takes the form of a long intellectual survey of developments in various academic disciplines in Britain in the past few decades. Anderson does not appear to have strong feelings about many of the authors he writes about, and so at times the essay feels depressingly close to a textbook entry.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book delivers more than the promise of the title. The questions addressed by Perry Anderson in this magnificent collection help explain why liberalism has gone into eclipse everywhere in the modern West, Japan and South America too, how the economies of the advanced capitalist countries went into decline in the 1960s, and the purported rescue of those economies by neoliberalism, starting with Thatcher in 1979. A fascinating side-issue explored by Anderson is the impact all these developments had on the intellectuals of the West, resulting in a right-ward shift in thinking from philosophy to economics, political science and history. Anderson made his bones on the British New Left with his early Sixties essay "Roots the Present Crisis", reprinted here. The economic model that had dominated in Britain since the end of World War II, a welfare state financed by taxes drawn from a booming economy, had come to a standstill. The failed technological revolution promised by Harold Wilson and Labour failed to revive a failing economy, and the Conservative governments of McMillan and Edward "Ted" Heath did no better. Meanwhile, De Gaulle had vetoed Britain's entry into the Common Market. The political system broke down as Labourites and Tories traded office with no net results. (Remember the Beatles' taunt, "Taxman Mr. Wilson, Taxman Mr.Heath"?) Britain had lost the Empire while being unwelcome in Europe. This crack-up scenario was not unique to the British Isles. In the Seventies America underwent a similar period of economic stagnation, national decline and loss of government legitimacy and the "British disease" of economic chaos had spread to France and West Germany. If Britain proved the bellwether to these developments it was because given her long history of integrating the working classes, women, and after 1960, minority populations from the Commonwealth she should have been more resilient. Why that was not the case is the subject of another Anderson polemic, "A Culture in Counterflow". Why did this crisis not run in favor of the left? On this point Anderson cites what he calls "the White emigration" of intellectuals to Britain starting after the First World War. Isaiah Berlin in political philosophy, originally from Lithuania by way of Moscow, Friedrich Von Hayek in economics, Karl Popper in the philosophy of history, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (an apolitical philosopher, in itself a political statement during these years) from the former Austrian Empire, among many others, all helped forge a conservative consensus of university dons and public intellectuals, a term seldom used in Britain, that moved the British intelligentsia to the right. The home boys, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Paul Johnson, a leftist turned rightist, the acerbic Henry Fairlie and other luminaries contributed their share. Bertrand Russell, the Webbs Beatrice and Sydney, and the post World War II Bernard Shaw, by then in his 90s, were museum pieces. Out of this crucible of economic chaos and leftist impotency, from Oxford to Fleet Street, arose a savage neoliberal backlash. By the time Mrs. Thatcher took office British trade unions had already gone into steep decline in power and membership, Labour was politically bankrupt and the intellectuals had started fleeing to America for university jobs. ENGLISH QUESTIONS is a brilliant X-Ray of how liberalism lost its hegemony in Europe and why so far no rival ideology has come to challenge Thatcherism and Reaganism.