In 1968, Perry Anderson drew attention to the bizarre role and status of literary criticism in the ‘national culture’; in a context in which the social sciences and historical disciplines were inhibited by a largely imported positivism, it seemed to offer itself as the only field in which a radical and synoptic cultural inquiry could take place. He rightly attributed this potential to the influence of Leavis and the way in which his work had been extended and transformed by Raymond Williams. In the last twelve years much has clearly changed. Not only has the overall picture altered, but especially the specific mode of literary analysis which Leavis made available as the basis of this cultural practice, the combination of the close reading of a defined canon with a global social and ethical awareness, has been questioned from within the field itself. Williams, for example, has more and more called attention to the limitations of literary criticism, and those who have opposed Williams have done so by trying to expose the culturalist ideology of the methodology he evolved from literary criticism. But the domination of a discourse which has its origins in Leavis and the impact of the journal with which his work is most closely associated, if it has been observed, resisted and even consigned to an alien past, has never been fully explained. The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ footnote＊ does just that, and in doing so, not only does it bring the bizarre within the realm of rational historical explanation, but it also shows how the conditions of its existence have not been met and altered. In other words, Mulhern, by raising the question of the historic significance of literary criticism, raises also the question of its continuing role in the national culture at a radical level. I shall argue that he has made, by doing this, the most important intervention in this domain of socialist cultural theory since Culture and Society appeared in 1958.

In Mulhern’s analysis, the concept of the ‘moment’ carries two implications. On the one hand, it indicates a completed history, places Scrutiny in a conjuncture of many levels—personal, institutional, ideological—which determines its formation, development and decline, and explains the link between its dominant ideological discourse and the parameters of its various concerns and points of view. On the other hand, precisely by exposing the specific conditions of its existence, he is able to show that the moment in time is not, at another level, ended simply by revisionist assimilation or by ideological distantiation, because such postures fail to confront Scrutiny as a form of cultural practice whose commitment to a ‘discourse on community’, chosen intellectual field (literary criticism) and particular combative style are mutually interdependent. To be specific at the cost of vulgarizing a complex account, Mulhern shows how, at a given point in its development, Scrutiny was displaced as the leading journal of literary criticism by its post-war Oxford rival, Essays in Criticism, which institutionalized and professionalized its methodology and levelled down its polemical urgency into ‘controversy’. Partly, this was made possible by the emergence of institutionalizing and conservative tendencies within Scrutiny itself. But it also leaves a space, the space made by its extramural, socially aware energies, which comes to be occupied by socialist cultural analysis. Such a development means that, in historical terms, the ‘moment’ as conjuncture is at an end. The new scenario is one in which ‘literary criticism’ is able to continue as an academic discipline unhampered by the pursuit of an expressive totality, while ‘socialist’ analysis educated within literary criticism pursues an effectively autonomous career in an unwanted penumbra. But this bifurcation of ‘the moment’ means only that its substance persists in a more resilient form. The moment will not be ended, Mulhern contends, without a more militant break, one which combats not only an ideology but also an ideological practice. The first step towards such a break is surely a firm historical understanding of the moment itself. There have, of course, been earlier analyses by socialist writers, but the present text differs from them in three ways which together make it a decisively new attack.

The first major difference is in the project itself. Earlier accounts (I think of Williams, Anderson and Eagleton in particular) focus primarily on Leavis. Despite the shrewdness of these analyses, two related limitations arise from this. In the first place, Leavis appears with an enigmatic aura, given an attention, even a respect, his work fails to justify either in itself or, more importantly, in terms of its impact in the context in which it is discussed. He is dwarfed, for example, in the ideological traditions in which Williams and Eagleton place him. What did Leavis contribute to the debate about culture and society whose terms were worked out by Carlyle and Ruskin, transformed into terms directly relevant to education and the study of literature by Arnold, and given new urgency by Eliot and Lawrence? The answer, crudely, is that he injected the Arnoldian variant of the tradition with some of the greater critical rigour worked out by I. A. Richards, and he managed a precarious mediation between Eliot and Lawrence. If this can be more positively stated, Leavis can be said to have made literary criticism the dominant field in which this tradition could survive without congealing itself as an identifiable ideology, but this is not because of the effectivity of his critical practice. He offered no ways of accounting for the complex effects of literary language: in this respect it was Richards who made the major tactical advance by making ‘practical criticism’ (the empiricist/idealist sanctification of literature as commodity) the determinant basis of literary analysis, and it was Empson and his American followers who facilitated the repression of the ideological formation of the literary text by an exclusive attention to the connotative features of language (I should say that Empson’s later work shows this influence to have been a misappropriation). Neither the history of an ideological tradition nor an analysis of the presumptions of literary criticism will explain Leavis’s importance. This is not to imply that his importance has been exaggerated, but that it has not been identified. And this is bound up with the second consequence of the focus on Leavis. His presence is enigmatic, but his nature, is too easily explained away, by this concentration because his work can be analysed merely as text, and as text, it can be identified as refutable ‘ideology’ whether, like Williams, we are considering a cultural tradition or, like Eagleton, the ideology of literary form. Both analyses move on a level of abstraction which, leaving intact the mystery of his presence, marginalizes the specific effectivity of what he represents.