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Conditions of Our Existence: Ernest Gellner (1925-1995)
“It is impossible not to see a biographical element at work in Ernest Gellner’s insistence on the need for radical rethinking of our place in history. For his life made him rather like the ‘pure visitor’ whose detachment he recommended as a cognitive strategy. Both his parents were . . .” read more
Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism
“A considerable part of world opinion has grown convinced that the end of history has led to a return of ethnic nationalism. The return is mainly a threat, and a permanent one in the sense that few can see any general cure for the fragmentation or anarchy now . . .” read more
The Crisis of Conservatism
“The Conservative Party has always been one of the great certainties of British politics. It has been so dominant throughout the twentieth century that some observers have begun to speak of this period as the ‘Conservative Century’. Between 1945 and 1995, the Conservatives formed majority governments for thirty-two . . .” read more
Financial Structures and Egalitarian Economic Policy
“In various incarnations, egalitarianism has been a fundamental concern of economic policy for most of the twentieth century. The egalitarian impulse—and its corollary, opposition to the stark inequalities of free market capitalism—was embodied in both Soviet-style socialism and social-democratic Keynesianism as they developed, primarily in the first quarter-century . . .” read more
Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe
“Eastern Europe’s market for policy ideas, suddenly opened in 1989, was swiftly captured by an Anglo-American product with a liberal brand name. This policy equivalent of fast food erected barriers to other new entrants and established a virtual monopoly on advice in most target states in the region. . . .” read more
Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe
“David Lockwood’s classic essay ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’ (1966) distinguished three ideal-typical images of society found among workers: proletarian, deferential and privatized. Lockwood was firstly reminding us of the sheer variety of workers’ beliefs, from classconscious proletarians, to conservative status-conscious deferentials, to the calculative, . . .” read more
Social Democracy and Full Employment
“‘The voters, now convinced that full employment, generous welfare services and social stability can quite well be preserved, will certainly not relinquish them. Any Government which tampered seriously with the basic structure 0f the full-employment Welfare State would meet with a sharp reverse at the polls’ (Antony Crosland,1956). . . .” read more
The 'Triumph' of Capitalism as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection
“By ‘capitalism’ I mean a mode of production in which formally free labour is recruited for regular employment by ongoing enterprises competing in the market for profit. This is an evidently Weberian definition: it takes up more or less directly Weber’s account of the rise of bü rgerlicher . . .” read more
Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance
“The tension between natural law and history—the theme of this series of lectures—has come down to us, as so many other ideas, from the ancient Greeks. In a most famous passage of his Rhetoric (1373b) Aristotle put it in this way:” read more
Conflict Probable or Inevitable?
“Tudor and Stuart historians have got back into the habit of writing very big books. Thus in the past two years, Kevin Sharpe’s The Personal Rule of Charles I took a thousand pages to present an apologia for Charles I’s Personal Rule, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the . . .” read more
Success and Failure of Peter Fuller
“The British have not been well served by their most popular critics of modern art. Their specious prose and philosophical posturing often masked confused, contradictory thought, producing a writing that was both patronizing and mystifying. They tended to be isolated by an atmosphere of philistine hostility which rarely . . .” read more
Contentious Commitments: French Intellectuals and Politics
“As Sunil Khilnani observes, in a characteristic turn of phrase, the marxisant intellectual culture of France after the Liberation ‘came to play a fundamental role in the entire afflatus of Western progressive thought’. Nettled by the Anglophone fashion for French modes in the 1960s and 70s, which invariably . . .” read more
The Plausibility of Socialism
“Socialism itself must be viewed as part of a democratic movement which long antedates it, but to which socialism alone can give its full meaning. The idea of democracy has been drastically narrowed in scope and substance in capitalist societies so as to reduce the threat it posed . . .” read more
Edward Thompson and the New Left
“The death of Edward Thompson on 28 August takes from us the most eloquent voice on the British Left, a historian who transformed his craft, a writer of some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, a thinker who knew that ideas were not a world . . .” read more
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: US Feminism Today
“Here is one picture of feminism and women’s experience in the contemporary United States: women advancing up the ladder in professions, public administration and management; making steady inroads into political office; changing attitudes and cultural images; winning legislation against discriminatory practices in education and employment; feminist scholarship transforming . . .” read more
The Chinese Road to Capitalism
“In the late 1970s, in the face of a deepening economic crisis, growing political unrest and the ideological exhaustion of Maoism, China’s pragmatic post-Mao leadership turned to the market to rescue their sinking bureaucratic economy. In the West, many left-wing China scholars began to look with favour on . . .” read more
The Entrails of Thatcherism
“Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative party for almost sixteen years and Prime Minister for eleven years. Under her leadership the Conservatives won three general elections and re-established themselves as the dominant party in the British state, while Labour declined to its interwar level of support. It . . .” read more
Custom Against Capitalism
“The appeal to history in the justification of capitalism has always required a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, we are obliged to accept that capitalist modernization thoroughly transformed the world to the unambiguous benefit of humanity. On the other hand, we must concede that in this . . .” read more
The Question of Electoral Reform
“Representative government in the United Kingdom has a very special character with respect to that elsewhere in Western Europe. In the first place, the British House of Commons at Westminster is the only parliament in Western Europe which neither now nor in the recent past has been elected . . .” read more
The Ruins of Westminster
“Britain, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is still officially known, resembles an ungainly, dilapidated, half-refurbished Victorian pile threatened by the simultaneous onslaught of subsidence, storm damage, woodworm and dry rot. This year brings an election that could be dangerously inconclusive and . . .” read more
The Regulation Approach: Theory and History
“In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the . . .” read more
Domestic Incentives for the Gulf War
“Why did the United States fight the Gulf War? What factors entered into George Bush’s decision to avoid a negotiated solution? The timing of that decision goes some way to answering these questions, and two conflicting theories have been offered: first, that Bush wanted war from the beginning, . . .” read more
Scenes from the Future: Komar & Melamid
“‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Gramsci’s famous dictum, written in his prison notebook in 1930, seems to describe two apparently disparate situations—the Soviet Union, plunged . . .” read more
Liberal Militarism and the British State
“The British contribution to the Gulf war, the Cold War rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher, and the fresh memory of the Falklands war remind us of the military propensities of the British state. Yet Britain has not had conscription since the fifties, its generals keep out of political life, . . .” read more
Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash
“As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century, the ruin of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Communism has been sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate it as an alternative to capitalism and to compromise the very idea of socialism. The debacle of Stalinism has embraced reform-communism, and has brought no benefit to . . .” read more
Why is the United States at War with Iraq?
“Why is the United States at war with Iraq? It is a lot easier to say what are not the reasons for us intervention in the Gulf than to provide a fully satisfactory account of its presence there. According to the Bush administration, the usa is . . .” read more
Explaining Everything or Nothing?
“Alan Carling accuses me of ‘everythingism’—that is, of believing that ‘you need a complete explanation of something before you can have any explanation of something.’ Do I really? I thought I was stating a rather more modest requirement, namely that a ‘paradigm’ like rcm, which claims to . . .” read more
The Limits of 'Political Marxism'
“It was hard to read Ellen Wood’s article ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’ without mixed feelings. The general thrust of her critique is undoubtedly correct: in the hands of Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski et al., the attempt to reinterpret historical materialism along . . .” read more
Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead
“Why is the West so fascinated by the recent events in Eastern Europe? The answer seems obvious: what fascinates the Western gaze is the re-invention of democracy. It is as if democracy, which in the West shows increasing signs of decay and crisis, lost in bureaucratic routine and . . .” read more
International Competition in Historical Materialism
“Classical expositions of historical materialism have presented the process of transition from one social form to another as endogenously generated. But Marxists have not been unaware of the facts of the diffusion of both technical and scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and political institutions and social structures . . .” read more
Commercial and Industrial Capital in England: A Reply to Geoffrey Ingham
“In response to Perry Anderson’s ‘Figures of Descent’ (nlr 161), I attempted in my contribution (nlr 167), as part of a more general critique, to defend the traditional Marxist view of British capitalism and the British Empire as being rooted in industrial and not in commercial . . .” read more
America in the 1960s
“Last year’s anniversary of 1968, the high-water mark of the 1960s student radicalization, can only partly explain the outpouring of books by participants in the events. I suspect that most of these had been thinking about writing a book on the 1960s for some time, and that the . . .” read more
Feminism and Postmodernism
“The term ‘postmodernism’ exerts an instant fascination. For it suggests that ‘modernity’ is, paradoxically, already in the past; and consequently that a new form of consciousness is called for, corresponding to new social conditions. But of course it does not tell us what the distinctive character of these . . .” read more
Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?
“Some time ago, in the pages of the New Left Review, a claim was made on behalf of ‘rational-choice Marxism’ as ‘a fully fledged paradigm, which deserves to take its place beside the two other constellations of theory currently discernible within the broad spectrum ofprogressive social thought—namely, post-structuralism . . .” read more
Gramsci and Marxism in Britain
“Outside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep or diversified an influence. Some of this has been channelled through the academic disciplines of history, political science and cultural studies, but much of it has worked directly upon the theory and practice of . . .” read more
The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?
“Any discussion of the character of an ‘exceptional’ state must presumably begin with a notion of what categorizes a state as ‘normal’. My own starting assumption is to accept Max Weber’s concept of the state: ‘an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation . . . . . .” read more
For and Against Althusser
“Gregory Elliott’s book appears at a time when the reputation of its subject seems near to total eclipse. In Althusser’s own country he is, as Elliott reports, practically a ‘dead dog’, buried beneath ‘the settled anti-Marxist consensus among the majority of the French intelligentsia’. In Britain he is . . .” read more
Gender and the Rise and Fall of Class Politics
“Is gender an autonomous form of social stratification? Does it form a compound with other bases of social inequality? How is it related to class, the ‘master’ concept of stratification theory? These questions have been forced into focus in recent years through the emergence of the married yet . . .” read more
The Situationist International
“De Sade liberated from the Bastille in 1789, Baudelaire on the barricades in 1848, Courbet tearing down the Vendôme Column in 1870—French political history is distinguished by a series of glorious and legendary moments which serve to celebrate the convergence of popular revolution with art in revolt. In . . .” read more
Taking Monarchism Seriously
“The institution of monarchy presents one of the most glaring paradoxes of British society and British history. It is a monarchy unique in the developed capitalist world in remaining unmodernized, undemocratized and utterly mystified. Elsewhere, in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the institution survives as a kind of hereditary . . .” read more
Meditations on a Theme by Tom Nairn
“In China an immemorial throne crumbled in 1911; India put its Rajas and Nawabs in the wastepaper-basket as soon as it gained independence in 1947; in Ethiopia the Lion of Judah has lately ceased to roar. Monarchy survives in odd corners of Asia; and in Japan and Britain. . . .” read more
The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American Experience
“I wish in this essay to peer through the Latin American looking glass, or abertura, to see what light may be shed on the ongoing struggle to democratize the South Korean political system. In Latin America the richest literature on the problems and prospects of democratization emerged along . . .” read more
Commercial Capital and British Development: A Reply to Michael Barratt Brown
“Despite their overtly historical nature, Anderson and Nairn’s essays on British development were profoundly theoretical. The identification of British ‘peculiarity’ or ‘exceptionalism’ involved a challenge not only to Marx and Engels’s commentaries on the times in which they lived, but also to the general Marxist theory of capitalist . . .” read more
Historical Materialism, Historical Sociology
“Michael Mann has recently published a large book on the history of power which few historians or sociologists can afford to ignore. Its 549 pages are only the first volume out of three; Mann’s aim will at the end be a massive retheorization of the sociology of power, . . .” read more
Exception or Symptom? The British Crisis and the World System
“Perry Anderson is too modest in his claims for New Left Review’s interpretation of English history, recently restated in ‘The Figures of Descent’. He suggests (p. 27) that ‘the consensus of at any rate the local left’ upheld the criticisms of that interpretation in Edward Thompson’s famous essay . . .” read more
The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?
“It is now virtually a commonplace among left observers and activists that we have recently witnessed the emergence of a New International Division of Labour and the Globalization of Production. For many, these twin tendencies manifest such deep structural transformations in the world economy that group or government . . .” read more
Away With All the Great Arches: Anderson’s History of British Capitalism
“The golden age of British History is now over, according to David Cannadine, not only as a nation but also as a subject of study—‘an account of the British past which reconciled repeated revolutions with a belief in ordered progress and which thus appeared to be simultaneously unique . . .” read more