Two books by Perry Anderson: English Questions and A Zone of Engagement

...Its problems stemmed, not from a lack of class consciousness, but from an excess...

...His survey convinces him that his earlier analysis, though sometimes overdrawn, was fundamentally correct: what makes Britain unique is its combination of a ruling class rooted in earlier capitalist formations (land and trade rather than manufacturing) and a working class weighed down by its own traditions...

...The Labour establishment continues to refuse any serious commitment to either electoral reform or a written constitution...

...Anderson's Marxism is one in which few contingencies are allowed...

...It chooses its leaders in a rotten borough form and benefits from a system of disproportional representation...

...Writing before the 1992 defeat of the Labour party, Anderson anticipates the party's problems...

...At the same time, one simply has to ask what advantages there are to preserving a framework when it increasingly becomes difficult to stretch the events taking place in the world to fit it...

...the neglected ideas of Antoine-Augustin Cournot, who inspired Raymond Aron...

...Anderson responds by examining the social and political structure of Britain in the late 1980s...

...Marxism is superior to bourgeois theory because the latter, lacking this theoretical scope borrowed from the hard sciences, can only throw up its hands in bewilderment when events turn out other than expected...

...The publication of two collections of his essays in the aftermath, not only of the collapse of communism but also the electoral defeats of European social democracy, thus becomes a test case for Marxism itself...

...The women's movement is a significant force for change...

...It is an axiom that collections of essays, no matter how good each one, generally make for bad books...

...The continuity that exists between Anderson's earlier and more recent writings lies in his belief that one can understand history and culture through the application of systematic theory...

...But rather than blame the situation on the fact that voters seem unwilling to vote for socialism, he develops an application of his own systematic theory to account for the left's paralysis...

...Anderson admits the flaws of his earlier work, blaming himself for "overstatement in critique which was also accompanied by overconfidence of cure...

...A Zone of Engagement ends with an essay on the ends of history inspired by Francis Fukuyama's article and book...

...What gives Anderson's historical essays their power is the sense they convey that whatever happened had to happen...

...There are times when both kinds of theory are necessary...

...Thompson—humanistic writers who stressed the particularities of time and place...

...Isaiah Berlin is most illustrative of this tension...

...One could also read these two books as an unintentional farewell to the reformist Marxist tradition, except that Anderson will simply not go so far as to say good-bye...

...Even sociology, whose absence was lamented in 536 • DISSENT 1968, was recognized as a powerful British discipline by 1990...

...This is decidedly not the case with Perry Anderson, although not for the reasons one might expect...

...the red brick universities are filled with oppositional humanists and social scientists who now have their turn to "inculcate" and "instill" their ideas into the minds of the students...

...Both metaphorical and systematic theories are part of the human condition...

...There is always something to be learned from the ways in which Anderson confronts other writers or specific historical experiences...

...The latter, after all, were trying to account for "The Peculiarities of the English," to use Thompson's phrase...

...What makes these essays into important books is something else: the effort to justify Marxism as a theory and socialism as a political project...

...Our job is to figure out what those revolutions mean for our deepest beliefs...

...Similarly, British academic culture in the years since 1968 has proven less than reactionary and intransigent...

...Even his most recent essays, which deal with events that no one could have foreseen, convey this self-confidence...

...The question is whether we will be able to recognize that the major revolutionary developments of our time took place, at least in part, against the rule of the left...

...Anderson understands that the "end of history" thesis is really a story about the end of socialism...

...Everything must have its place, every event its explanation...

...Thompson had criticized Anderson's (and Tom Nairn's) picture of a hegemonic ruling class, just as a generation of labor historians argued that the working class was not particularly stagnant...

...Systematic theory is only one kind of theory, and its superiority to others has to be demonstrated, not assumed...

...In a typical tour de force, Anderson demonstrates that Kant meant something quite different by the term "the crooked timber of humanity" than Berlin suggests...

...Yet not all these writers were systematic theorizers, and the limits of Anderson's own approach are most visible when he confronts thinkers with different objectives...

...One way to address this question is to ask precisely which historical evidence "strongly vindicates" Anderson's approach in contrast to that of Thompson or Williams...

...one must be a pluralist, not only in what one says, but in how one says it...

...Anderson encourages us to read his earlier essays as the historical documents they surely are, which alone justifies their republication...

...By 1992 Anderson is willing to agree that there is no recognizable agent to bring about a socialist transformation: "The potential extension of social interests in an alternative to capitalism has been accompanied by a reduction in the social capacities to fight for one...

...Hence Britain had a Labour party, not a Socialist party, as if to suggest that the interests of workers took precedence over a universal ideal...

...Once again, however, Anderson's critique is limited by his determination to turn everyone else into a systematic theorist...

...Anderson writes as if he were right when confessing that he was wrong...

...his theory "lacks .. . any specification of property regime or constitutional structure," which meant that there existed "no conceptual barrier to stop Kojeve from switching the end of his story from socialism to capitalism, without major adjustment...

...Yet Anderson's self-critique is a limited one...

...Each essay is good...

...turns around Berlin's famous distinction between the fox and the hedgehog and applies it critically to Berlin himself...

...Each essay is remarkable for its learning, its careful reading of texts in many languages, and its combination of appreciation and critique...

...Against them, Anderson invoked then unknown figures such as Antonio Gramsci and (a little later) Louis Althusser, as well as a vocabulary that stood in sharp contrast to more familiar writers: "Capitalist hegemony bears crucially on the working class in a specific, historically determined way in Britain...

...Writing four years later, Anderson, in "The Components of National Culture," attacked "the reactionary culture inculcated in universities and colleges, which it is one of the functions of British higher education to instill in students...

...But Anderson reaches much further, treating us to the concept of posthistoire associated with Lutz Niethammer...

...A Zone of Engagement consists of Anderson's generally sympathetic treatment of writers as diverse as Marshall Berman, Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Isaiah Berlin, Roberto Unger, Carlo Ginsberg, and Fernand Braudel...

...Not only is the British state backward, so is the Labour party...

...Fukuyama, we learn, is only one of a series of writers to have advanced the "end of history" theme...

...The Origins of the Present Crisis" first appeared in 1964...

...The culture of the British working class was so thick that it could not be universalized...

...and, finally, a nuanced and very appreciative reading of Fukuyama himself...

...Marx and Engels were so 538 • DISSENT focused on the working class, he writes, that they "never took real cognizance of the actual political revolutions of their time that inaugurated a new epoch in the life of capital, preoccupied as they were with the prospects for another kind of revolution, one that would usher in the rule of labor but which did not in fact materialize...

...Kojeve is subject to the same charge leveled against Berlin...

...The central argument was that the British working class developed too early...

...In my judgment," he writes in "The Figures of Descent" (1987), "the historical evidence that has accumulated over the twenty years since Edward Thompson debated with us strongly vindicates the thrust of our initial intuitions, once these are more firmly situated at the levels of particularization they require...

...But for all the brilliance, Anderson's main charge against Berlin is that "he has not shown much interest in the juridical framework for the safeguarding of negative liberty," as if Berlin, like Hayek or Rawls, were a systematic philosopher...

...To the degree that American intellectuals were aware of British thought at that time, they most likely knew of historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams, and E.P...

...He asks whether there is a realistic basis for a socialist project and concludes that "the answer is deeply ambiguous...

...Instead he tries to find new reasons for the failure of the left...

...he was trying to make his own contribution to British culture even while lamenting its state...

...T]he history of a social class or a political movement," he writes, "cannot be dissolved into a sheer sequence of discontinuous conjectures without losing its object altogether...

...Anderson in this book combines two widely discussed essays he wrote in the 1960s—one an effort to explain the paralysis of British politics within a Marxist historiography, the other a breathtaking survey of British intellectual life—with three similar efforts written in the late 1980s...

...Anderson offers what can be understood as an intellectual diary, a daily record keeping of reactions to some of the leading ideas and events of his time...

...Only, the theme is capitalism, not Marxism, for the Tory party, no less than Labour, has seen fit to try to integrate Britain into the rest of Europe, particularities or none...

...an original interpretation of Jurgen Habermas as an end of history theorist...

...But surely events since 1989 suggest that a poet of freedom may have more to offer the world than a historical schematicist...

...Indeed, the academic left triumphed in a way the labor movement never did...

...One thing should be clear at the start: Perry Anderson is as determined to make Marxism work as he is committed to a classic socialist political project...

...He is at his best when locating writers he admires in context and comparing them to each other in surprising ways...

...the important roles played by Henri de Man and Arnold Gehlen...

...Berlin is a poet of freedom, not a constitutional theorist...

...In a brief introduction to A Zone of Engagement, Anderson recounts how a 1976 essay of his on Antonio Gramsci led his friend Franco Moretti to tell him that he had written a "farewell in grand style to the revolutionary Marxist tradition...

...These essays are not experiments in introspection but exercises, however complex, in tinkering...

...Unfortunately, Anderson's accounts deal more firmly with ideas than with events...

...Indeed, the evidence suggests that if the British state and parties were more democratic, the left would be in even worse electoral shape...

...Shifting back and forth from art history to psychoanalysis and philosophy, Anderson concentrated mostly on sociology, arguing that Britain lacked a Durkheim and a Weber because it lacked a socialist challenge from the working class...

...If it could resolve the tensions between North and South, "socialism would not so much be succeeded by another movement, as redeemed in its own right as a program for a more equal and livable world...

...and questions Berlin's interpretations of Tolstoy, Herzen, Herder, Vico, and Mill...

...And it is the time that makes these books so important, for although the last twenty-five years have not produced great nineteenthcentury intellectual figures—Anderson sees Isaac Deutscher as the last of that form—they have produced great events...

...The result was "an absent center" in British culture, which created a "chloroforming effect" on the life of the mind in a way similar to what Bagehot called the "dignified" parts of the British constitution created political stagnation...

...These essays, dazzling as they may have been, were considerably off the mark in their predictive power...

...And for this reason he cannot accept it...

...Habermas, who does have a systematic theory, is criticized because Anderson believes that, like Hegel, Habermas is content to see universal reason in the society of his time and place...

...This essay was a tour d'horizon of the British academic scene, devoted to showing how immigration from Austria (Wittgenstein, Gombrich, Klein), Poland (Malinowski, Namier, Deutscher), and Russia (Berlin) shaped a "white" intellectual culture in contrast to the more "red" immigration that affected academic life in the Americas...

...In particular, the structure of English Questions is designed to test the relevance of earlier efforts at Marxist synthesis to recent events in the world...

...Whatever the specific argument, Anderson was also demonstrating that academic debates matter...

...Yet he still sees hope...

...Like everything Anderson writes, FALL • 1992 • 537 this essay is extraordinary in its range...

...the exchange of letters between Kojeve and Leo Strauss on the concept...

...Not only has he moved closer to the position he once criticized, he also has done so precisely at the point when the British case may indeed be seen as a variant of a universal theme...

...By 1987, however, Anderson is calling for firmer "particularizations," as if greater refinement of the data of British experience will still permit the right application of a theory that tries to link class, the state, and the economy into a system...

...One has to credit any writer willing to allow republication of his thoughts from the 1960s...

...o Marxist writing in English is more brilliant and learned than Perry Anderson...

...Most of his readers knew that the idea came from Hegel, and some were aware of the importance of Alexandre Kojeve...

...contrasts Berlin disadvantageously to Max Weber...

...Anderson's essay accepted that Britain was exceptional in Marxist terms, but also offered an ingenious way of preserving Marxist theory...

...In the shortest, and in many ways the most interesting, of his essays in English Questions, Anderson points out that the Marxist tradition has never sufficiently understood the nature of bourgeois revolutions...

...He is not as strong when he tries to account for what is taking place in the world around him...

...These books are worth reading just to see Anderson's mind at work...

...Anderson's hopes have moved from socialism in the grand tradition to advocacy for constitutionalism, yet it is by no means clear that even the latter, reformist as it may be, would offer much hope for the Labour party...

...Anderson looks forward to "a new international agenda for social reconstruction...

...Liberalism recovered its energy and so therefore can socialism...

...It is an unfair criticism...

...Capitalism, for one, cannot stop environmental destruction...

...The labor movement, Anderson argued in 1964, faced a great opportunity, but 1964 may, in retrospect, have been the high point of the labor movement in the postwar period...

...Writers of Anderson's generation—and mine—also began by looking for socialism...

...Anderson's initial critique was determined to show that although Britain, like any society, had its peculiarities, these could still be explained with the terms of a more systematic and universal theory of history...

...If someone this smart cannot make Marxism work, perhaps no one can...