The life-span of journals is no warrant of their achievement. A couple of issues, and abrupt extinction, can count for more in the history of a culture than a century of continuous publication. In its three years, the Athenaeum put German Romanticism into orbit. The fireworks of the Revue Blanche, the first journal of a modern avant-garde, lit Paris for barely a decade. Lef closed after seven issues in Moscow. These were reviews at the intersection of aesthetic innovation with philosophy and politics. Journals of criticism have often survived longer—The Criterion, in various incarnations, for most of the inter-war period, Scrutiny from the thirties into the fifties. Reasons for closure might be external, even accidental, but typically the vitality of a journal is tied to those who create it. In heroic cases, a single individual can defy time with the composition of a personal monument: Kraus writing Die Fackel alone for twenty-five years, Croce rivalling the feat with La Critica. Usually, life-cycles of journals are more adventitious and dispersed. Editors quarrel, change their minds, get bored or go bankrupt, for the most part well before they go to the grave themselves.
A political journal is as subject to the incidents of mortality as any other. In one respect, more so—since politics is always a Kampfplatz, a field of division, breaking ties and forcing conflicts. Wreckage through disputes or scissions is more frequent here than anywhere else. In other respects, however, political journals have a different reason for being, that makes renewal beyond their first impetus a test specific to them. They stand both for certain objective principles, and the capacity of these to decipher the course of the world. Here, editorial fade-out is intellectual defeat. Material or institutional pressures may, of course, cut off any periodical in its prime. But short of such circumstances, political journals have no choice: to be true to themselves, they must aim to extend their real life beyond the conditions or generations that gave rise to them.
This journal, now entering its fifth decade, has reached such a point. Forty years is a significant span of activity, though not an extraordinary one—Les Temps Modernes, from which NLR learnt a good deal in its early days, has lasted much longer. But it is sufficient to call for an overhaul. With this issue, we start a new series of the journal marked by a break of numerals, in keeping with radical tradition, and a redesign of its appearance, in token of changes to come. Charged for the moment with the transition to another style of review, not to be achieved overnight, I set out below my own view of the situation of NLR today, and the directions it should begin to take. Billed as an ‘editorial’, the result is nonetheless a personal—and therefore provisional—statement: open to contradiction. So too will be the editorials that follow in each issue, written on topics of their choice by others, without presumption of any automatic agreement.
Any consideration of the future of NLR must start from its differentia specifica. What has made it distinctive as a journal of the Left? There would be a number of ways of answering this, but the simplest and most succinct is this. No other such review has attempted to publish across the same range of terrain—stretching from politics to economics to aesthetics to philosophy to sociology—with the same freedoms of length and detail, where required. This span has never been evenly or regularly explored, and the difficulties of moving between such completely discrepant registers of writing have consistently been scanted, to the cost of even the most patient readers. But here is where the character of New Left Review has effectively been defined. It is a political journal based in London that has tried to treat social and moral sciences—‘theory’, if you will—and arts and mores—‘culture’, for short—in the same historical spirit as politics itself. The best way of grasping the present situation of the review is to look back at the context in which the format of NLR was originally conceived, that made possible the combination of these interests. The conjuncture of the early sixties, when the review took shape under a new collective, offered the following features:
In this triple context, NLR undertook a range of programmes that at the time were innovatory for the English-speaking world. Politically, the review set its compass towards anti-imperalist movements in the Third World, and while parochial reflexes were still strong on the British Left, gathered a team whose interests eventually spanned most of the world—Latin America, Black Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East were all represented. At home, a set of distinctive arguments about the UK was developed, which came to have a certain influence. So when the explosion of the late sixties, triggered by the war in Vietnam, occurred in the West—first student rebellion, then labour upsurge—NLR was well placed to play some role in the ensuing tumult, and to gain an international readership by the mid-seventies.
Intellectually, the journal devoted much of its energies to the introduction and critical reception of the different schools of Western Marxist thought, a sufficiently large enterprise to occupy it for over a decade. Structuralism, formalism, psychoanalysis featured too—canonical texts or sources often first surfacing in its pages. On these fronts NLR was well ahead of the surrounding culture, pioneering a more cosmopolitan and radical horizon of reference than was easily available elsewhere in the Anglophone world.
Culturally, too, the review developed new styles of intervention, linking interest in traditional arts to engagement with avant-garde forms, and interventions on popular cinema or music. Peter Wollen’s famous series on film directors, or—say—Franco Moretti’s ‘Dialectic of Fear’, exemplified the freedom of movement between ‘high’ and ‘low’ terrains. The initiatives released by this ferment escaped narrow classification. NLR was premonitory both of the seventies’ rediscovery of feminism, and the eighties’ rediscovery of work, in the same few years. It was a creative period.