Gregory Elliott: Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (Minnesota, 1998)
Perry Anderson: The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso, 1998)
The lives of Karl Marx and Perry Anderson run parallel to one another over their first thirty-five years or so to degree that is both striking and curious. They were born one hundred and twenty years apart, in 1818 and 1938. Both men were intellectually precocious, their revolutionary socialist literary careers blossoming during the 1840s and the 1960s, remarkable decades which they helped to define for posterity through some of their most creative work, whether the 1844 Manuscripts or the 1964 essay on "The Origins of the Present Crisis", and during which they developed their unique writing styles, marked by rhetorical inversions and a very large vocabulary. Both exhibited a talent for polemic with rivals on the Left; both were editors of significant radical publications -- the Rheinische Zeitung and the New Left Review -- and both had access to sufficient capital from bourgeois friends or family to sustain their political and literary projects. The world around them then exploded in revolt, in 1848 and 1968, years in which each produced his most distinctive call to arms with the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the essay on "The Components of the National Culture". Both men's hopes rose and fell with the course of revolutionary events; both then responded to defeat by embarking on much bigger intellectual projects than they had hitherto attempted, projects which remained unfinished: Marx began the economic studies that would culminate in the 1867 first volume of Capital; Anderson began a projected four-volume study of European history, two volumes of which were published in 1974 as Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State.
Perry Anderson, of course, is not a figure of world-historical importance, and to that extent the comparison is a flattering one. If from the 1850s and 1970s the biographical parallels break down, we can yet be impressed by two further similarities. Neither scholar enjoyed a conventional university career, though both shook up the way people think about things far more than most academics. (Marx left academic life after getting his Ph.D. for a study of Epicurean philosophy when it was clear that his political activities would bar him from a university appointment; Anderson left Oxford without a bachelor's degree and spent thirty years outside academia, only to return in the 1990s as Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles). Finally, neither writer fits comfortably into the categories we habitually use to carve up the intellectual world: is Marx a philosopher or an economist? Is Anderson principally a Marxist historian or a Marxist theorist?
Along with E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson remains one of the giants of the British New Left, the name we give to the political radicalism that blossomed in the wake of the militarism of 1956 when the Russians crushed the Hungarian reform movement and the British and French launched their misguided expedition to Suez. Its achievements were impressive: if its political efforts like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament often failed, the New Left nevertheless succeeded in transforming swathes of British intellectual life. The academic discipline we now call Cultural Studies was almost entirely created by New Left intellectuals like Williams, Hall and Richard Hoggart; while Thompson's Making of the English Working Class inspired a generation of radical historians to turn to the writing of "history from below". Thanks in large part to the efforts and influence of the New Left over the longer term, British universities are less conservative places than they were in the 1960s; the academic culture of parochial insularity and anti-theoretical empiricism has been greatly diminished; as have the obstacles in the way of people with even moderately radical opinions getting decent teaching jobs. The New Left can be legitimately criticised on a number of fronts, but we all remain gratefully in its debt.
Perry Anderson's odd career forms an important part of this heroic narrative. Editor of the New Left Review for twenty years from 1962 (when he took control of the floundering journal after offering personally to pay off its considerable debts), he presided over a major programme of making European Marxism accessible to Anglophone readers. The New Left Review not only disseminated the ideas of Althusser, Habermas, Lukács, Adorno, above all Antonio Gramsci, and sponsored the translation of many of these writers into English for the first time through collaborations with Penguin Books and its own label, Verso. It also embarked on the ambitious attempt of trying to write a new history of England informed by these continental traditions -- the famous "Nairn-Anderson theses" which were so aggressively contested by E. P. Thompson in his 1965 Socialist Register article, "The Peculiarities of the English". Often (and sometimes justifiably) mocked for élitism, pretensions and obscurantism, Perry Anderson and the NLR Editorial Board set out to be the intellectual vanguard of the socialist revolution in 1960s Britain.
Philosopher or economist? Theorist or historian? Friedrich Engels answered a version of this question in his graveside oration of March 1883, when he proclaimed that Marx was foremost a Revolutionist. In trying to categorise Perry Anderson we are here on somewhat safer ground, for it seems clear that he is no longer the revolutionary that he was once, although when he sloughed off this identity is actually quite hard to gauge. Apart from the history books of the 1970s, Anderson's preferred genre is the essay, devoted to the work of another theorist, often submerging the author's own political voice beneath layers of complex interpretation. The NLR's internal operations are themselves notoriously secretive. And unlike many of the leaders of the (Old? Former? Once-and-Future?) New Left, Anderson does not give interviews or say much in public about himself, which makes it exceptionally tricky to reconstruct the detailed twists and turns of his particular political odyssey.
The seeds of reformism may have been sown early. In 1974, for example, Anderson's Lineages presented itself as a contribution to Marxian historical materialism, yet it was rightly hailed in early reviews as an exemplary piece of Weberian comparative macrosociology. One perceptive reader, Franco Moretti, detected revisionist straws in the wind in Anderson's contemporaneous study, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci", and wrote in a letter that he had written "a farewell in fitting style to the revolutionary Marxist tradition". Yet these mid-1970s works were followed by Anderson's most obviously Bolshevik phase; the Considerations on Western Marxism, for example, defended the political and economic "Classical" tradition of Lenin and Trotsky against the aesthetic and cultural "Western" Marxist tradition of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. Clearly there had been some kind of change of political orientation from the later 1980s and afterwards, however, when Anderson became a founder signatory of Charter 88 (organised by ex-NLR colleague Anthony Barnett), a writer for the London Review of Books (in which he has published major essays on European politics), and even a contributor to the IPPR seminar that issued in the Labour modernisers' tome edited by David Miliband, Reinventing the Left. The politics remain unambiguously socialist; but the New Anderson has a much more relaxed posture towards the reformists around him than ever used to be the case.
Perhaps linked to the problem of tracking and explaining Anderson's shifting political position is the strange feeling that is induced in reading his earlier and later essays side by side. After the extraordinary energy of the essays and polemics of the 1960s, it is quite remarkable to turn to the much calmer pieces from of the 1980s and 1990s (collected, especially, in the volume entitled A Zone of Engagement), when Anderson engaged constructively with liberal philosophers Norberto Bobbio, Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls -- in descending order of sympathy -- and wrote with sensitivity and insight about conservative intellectuals, including Andreas Hillgruber, the German historian whose Zweierlei untergang was one of Habermas's polemical targets during the Historikerstreit (the bitter 1980s quarrel among German intellectuals about the historiography of Nazi Germany), and Francis Fukuyama, whose "End of History" thesis is usually dismissed on the Left as a crass and ideological apology for neoliberalism. A changing literary temperament should not, of course, be confused with a fundamental shift of political commitment, but in Anderson's case it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the two are intertwined.
It is in this context that Gregory Elliott's new book is especially welcome. Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (fittingly, the phrase is Trotsky's) is the first booklength study of his work, and Elliott, who calls himself an "independent Marxist", is well-suited to writing it, having ploughed the fields of both history and theory with an earlier book on the decline of British Labourism and an edited volume on the legacies of Louis Althusser. Elliott has researched assiduously, investigated obscure and identified pseudonymous Andersonian writings (including "Richard Merton's" 1960s pop music criticism that upheld the Rolling Stones over the Beatles!), and drawn on internal and unpublished New Left Review documents to construct a detailed narrative, not at all of the Life, which remains shadowy, but certainly of the Work, and of its underpinning politics.
Two points in particular emerge with surprising force. The first is the way in which the flip side of the deliberately-cultivated high intellectualism of the 1960s NLR under Anderson's editorship was what we might call an endemic faddism. The journal enthused successively and excessively over the new Wilson government in 1964, the Italian Communist Party, Krushchevite revisionism, Third World "Guevarism", the students' movement of 1968 and, finally, the Chinese Communist Party under Mao at the close of the decade. In an internal NLR self-criticism, the "Decennial Report" of 1975, these overenthusiasms were noted with the shrewd and damning comment that "the lack of any close or binding relationship to political practice... [had] allowed the review to elude responsibility for its own errors, in a way that no periodical linked to an organizational form could do". The diagnosis of this problem might in part help to explain why Anderson's political positions from the mid-1970s onwards remain so hard to pin down accurately.
The second is the degree to which the politics of the NLR -- the journal of a movement which, after all, emerged out of a critique of Stalinism -- were closely tied to the fate of the Soviet Union. The NLR constitution adopted in the early 1980s reiterated that "the political tradition in which NLR situates itself essentially starts this century from the Bolshevik Revolution", which is fair enough, but went on to insist that the "post-revolutionary states... represent a historic progress over the capitalist or pre-capitalist societies that preceded them...", and noted that "the review will defend them as such against every variety of capitalist attack". Despite his extensive criticism of the actually-existing socialist regimes, Elliott suggests that Anderson's politics were significantly structured around the bipolar postwar world, and leant towards critical support for the Soviet bloc. While social democrat reformists and Trotskyist revolutionaries were relatively untroubled by the revolutions of 1989, Elliott believes that Anderson's politics were more profoundly unsettled, and that this epochal date is more important in the evolution of his political opinions than we might have previously thought.
Elliott also gives a detailed account of what the essays in A Zone of Engagement and English Questions suggest, which is that a more positive spur to Anderson's political thinking was provided by the neo-Weberian British sociology of the 1980s. While fellow Leftists were becoming interested in poststructuralist responses to what was increasingly called "the crisis of Marxism", Anderson's enduring commitment to historical materialism -- always the core of his Marxism, with both words given due emphasis -- made him far less impressed with these new approaches. Instead, he became intrigued by the projects of scholars like Michael Mann, Anthony Giddens, W. G. Runciman and others, bourgeois historical sociologists who were working on a grand scale, thinking with and against older Marxist theories of political development to produce their own versions of historical materialism. These theories avoided economic reductionism and they were certainly not Hegelian in character or inspiration, but then Anderson's Marxism had always been less Hegelian than most -- which conceivably owed to the residue of his 1960s interest in Althusser -- and was never presented as a crude mechanistic determinism of the kind popular during the Second International period (1889-1914). Just as the "analytical Marxism" of the 1980s provided a bridge across which a cohort of Marx scholars would pass over in order to reach the left bank of Rawlsian liberalism, ignoring the boundaries that supposedly segregated "Marxist" from "bourgeois" social science, the Anglo-Weberians clearly helped to facilitate Anderson's passage away from the political orthodoxies of the far Left.
A slew of virtues of the latter-day Anderson are on display in his own recent book on The Origins of Postmodernity. In this short work, Anderson offers a much-needed historical survey that ranges over last sixty years, tracing the earliest attempts to theorise this strange concept, and one which has had such an impact on contemporary culture. If one of the original elements of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is his insistence that modern nationalism originates in colonial Spanish America, younger brother Perry follows suit when he locates the origin of the notion of the post-modern in interwar Latin America, in the writings of Federico de Onís, who coined the term in order "to describe a conservative reflux within modernism itself". (Indeed, Anderson has always been attentive to the impact of the periphery on the centre: Elliott reminds us that he accurately predicted a decade before the event that the Portuguese revolution would be triggered by a crisis in the colonies).
The idea of postmodernism became less unusual when it was spread in the literary criticism of Ibab Habib Hassan and the architectural writings of Charles Jencks in the 1970s. And Anderson incisively discusses the adoption of the concept by the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard (about whose Postmodern Condition he is scathing) and Jürgen Habermas (who on this point fails to impress Anderson much). In particular, Anderson notes the lack of any substantial historical dimension to these early analyses of the postmodern, which is odd given that both thinkers came from Marxist backgrounds. In all four of these early treatments, Anderson emphasises the extent to which the ideas that were called postmodern all contributed to an anti-leftist politics: Hassan and Jencks were both anti-socialist writers and celebrated what they described; the only "metanarrative" that mattered for Lyotard was the Communist one; and Habermas used the concept of the postmodern to identify new emerging strains of neo-conservativism.
The heart of this book, however, is a celebration of the theoretical achievement of Frederic Jameson, who is taken to have presented the most exciting, encompassing and illuminating theorisation of postmodernism. Indeed, the book began life as an introduction to a volume of Jameson's essays, The Cultural Turn, before it outgrew its confines. In particular, Anderson analyses the argument of his lecture at the Guggenheim Museum (reprinted in New Left Review 146, in 1984) when his theory of postmodernism as, of course, the cultural logic of late capitalism was presented for the first time. Anderson's claims for Jameson's achievement are not small. We saw above how Anderson's own 1970s volume of Considerations on Western Marxism juxtaposed the traditions of Classical and Western Marxism. Here he argues that Jameson has managed reintegrate these aesthetic-cultural and historical-economic currents of Marxism to a substantial degree, bringing Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel's analysis of the late capitalist mode of production to bear on the contemporary fields of cultural production. If postmodernism had once been "a concept whose visionary origins were all but completely effaced in usages complicit with the established order", it had now been "wrested away by a prodigious display of theoretical intelligence and energy for the cause of the revolutionary Left".
What Jameson managed to do, in Anderson's view, was fivefold. First, to secure the "anchorage of postmodernity in objective alternations of the economic order of capital itself", dating from the crises of the early 1970s. Second, to connect the postmodern prioritisation of space over time to "the loss of any active sense of history, either as hope or memory" in the wake of the political defeats of the Left in the years since 1968. Third, Jameson vastly expanded the range of the concept beyond the confines of architecture, philosophy and literature, to -- especially -- film, graphic design and many other spheres. This in turn was linked to a "dedifferentiation of cultural spheres" that itself accompanied the newly-intensified concern for generic interdisciplinary "Theory" in the academy. Fourth, he began the all-important work of concrete class analysis, mapping developments in contemporary culture onto the transformed class society, with its new "brittle yuppie layer", a multiplication of social identities, the disappearance of an organised social agent for progressive change, and the deepening of the culture-transforming global marketplace. Finally, breaking with the earlier theorists, Jameson refused either to celebrate or condemn what he had described: "mere excoriation was no more fruitful than adhesion", comments Anderson. As in the case of the French Revolution, as with an earthquake, moralism is not an appropriate response.
Having delineated Jameson's seminal contribution in heroic terms, the final chapter presents a fast-moving, kaleidoscopic, sometimes heavy-going trip through contemporary culture, a swoop through the postmodern landscape that repeatedly lights upon good things. I especially enjoyed one classic Andersonian passage, in which he juxtaposes the modernism/postmodernism succession to the Renaissance/Reformation, drawing out a series of intriguing historical parallels before efficiently moving to undermine his own comparison. By this time, however, the main work of the book is done; Jameson's contribution lies in full view and the vital role of Marxist theory for understanding the present has been heavily and valuably underscored.
Marx and Engels, of course, misjudged the moment in 1848. They thought that European capitalism could be brought down if militant German workers sought to transform the liberal-national revolution into an immediately-following socialist upheaval; in older age they came to recognise that their hopes had been objectively illusory. The turmoil of 1968, likewise, brought not socialist transformation but the (un)popular conservatisms of Nixon, Pompidou and Heath. The world economy was rapidly transformed in the early 1970s, and the triumphs of the New Right under Thatcher and Reagan would arrive at the end of the decade, a movement whose hegemony can be gauged by the extent to which its neoliberal ideology has colonised the thinking of the major "centre-left" governments at the century's end.
The thirty years since 1968 have been, of course, a sustained period of crisis, at times for the entire capitalist world, always for its battered and beleaguered Left, and we salute those scholars -- Mandel, Hobsbawm, Jameson, Sassoon, Hall, Habermas perhaps, and others -- who have helped us to understand this new era, allying a powerful understanding of history to a keen theoretical intelligence. And the essays of Perry Anderson over this last quarter of a century themselves form a noble component of this international enterprise. Collectively, and in their own idiosyncratic way, they constitute an impressive attempt to comprehend the transformations of our world-in-progress. The seeds of Anderson's changing political perspective are rooted in the mid-1970s, as we have seen but also as we might expect from someone whose antennae have always been finely tuned to the shifting dialectics of the age. Interpreting the world is no substitute for changing it. Anderson would be the first to admit that. But when the world refuses to co-operate, it is the best that we can do.
