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Antipodean Feminism
“In the early years of this century, when thoughtful people anywhere discussed ‘the woman question’, Australia constituted the central case, the country where a progressive electorate and an engaged state were facing questions of gender equality head on. In 1902, Australia became the second country in the world . . .” read more
Nationalism and the Left in Germany
“A new/old spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of nationalism. Everyone underestimated its force and potential before 1989, and in the post-Cold War world, almost everyone is struggling to come to terms with it. There is a long history of the Left, in Germany in particular, being accused of . . .” read more
Democracy and the Ends of Marxism
“The relationship between socialism and democracy has been a complex and a contested one. To large numbers of socialists it was axiomatic that their project, both the goal of socialism and the movement for it, must be democratic. They saw socialism as the heir to older, liberal and . . .” read more
Class Analysis, History and Emancipation
“In both the popular press and the scholarly media we hear a lot about the crisis of Marxism, even of its death. Frequently the collapse of regimes ruled by Communist parties is equated with the collapse of Marxism as a social theory. However, while there is unquestionably a . . .” read more
Our Post-Communism: The Legacy of Karl Kautsky
“Recently, as a result of preparing for this paper, I read for the first time Karl Kautsky’s Bolshevism at a Deadlock, published in German, in September 1930, as Der Bolschewismus in der Sackgasse—which we could better translate perhaps as No Way Through for Bolshevism. I found this an . . .” read more
E.P. Thompson, The Historian: an Appreciation
“Edward Thompson was a remarkable person and a great historian. That does not mean that he was always right or that later generations will always read his works in the same ways. But he was wonderfully creative and original, full of pioneering insights, with his own distinctive style . . .” 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
Anti-Hegemony: The Legacy of William Blake
“This has been a long, and perhaps strange, way into William Blake. On one matter I am impenitent. Blake can’t have dreamed up a whole vocabulary of symbolism, which touches at so many points the traditions which I have discussed, for himself ab novo. Nor can he have . . .” read more
Witches and Shamans
“The subject on which I have been invited to speak today—witches and shamans—is central to my book Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, which is appearing now, a few years after the Italian edition, in Japanese translation. Instead of summarizing my book in its final form, I prefer . . .” read more
The Western Path to Freedom
“‘The smallest division of a household into parts gives three pairs,’ says Aristotle in the Politics, ‘master and slave, husband and wife, father and children’. It is obvious that a modern sociology textbook would not endorse such analytical presuppositions. But it is equally clear that modern readers would . . .” 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
A Usable Past?
“In a well-known passage in What is History?, E.H. Carr addresses the perennially perplexing issue of historical inevitability. Seeking to ridicule the ‘“might-have-been” school of thought—or rather of emotion’, Carr contrasts the treatment of more chronologically distant events from the more recent. ‘The historian,’ he tells us, ‘writes . . .” read more
Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective
“It is difficult to imagine a richer subject for a comparative history of democracy than the enfranchisement of women. Despite casual remarks about various governments ‘granting’ women the vote, enfranchisement in the overwhelming number of cases was preceded by a women’s movement demanding it. Indeed, extending over more . . .” read more
From Stalinism to Post-Communist Pluralism: The Case of Poland
“The classical theories of totalitarianism, as elaborated in the 1950s, described totalitarian systems as imposing total ideological conformity, effectively controlling minds and consciences, eliminating all forms of opposition, and thus being virtually immune to internal change. It is no wonder that the gradual dismantling of Stalinism, which began . . .” read more
The Idea of the Primitive: British Art and Anthropology 1918-1930
“The idea of the primitive has long been a potent and highly influential current in British thought and history. In particular, the period 1918–30 saw primitivism established as an important theme in writing on art and anthropology. Analysis of the concept may therefore usefully begin there—with a span . . .” 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
Modern Capitalism and Its Shepherds
“Merchant capital, usurer capital, have been ubiquitous, but they have not by themselves brought about any decisive alteration of the world. It is industrial capital that has led to revolutionary change, and been the highroad to a scientific technology that has transformed agriculture as well as industry, society . . .” read more
Unjust Taxation and Popular Resistance
“Historical materialism as a concept for understanding society, past, present and future, is under constant examination, by its adherents as much as by its opponents. Some of these discussions are stimulating, intellectually exciting and perhaps even useful for the definition of political strategies. Much space has been occupied . . .” 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
'The Poetry of the Past': Marx and the French Revolution
“Like so many German intellectuals of his generation, Marx was literally fascinated by the French Revolution: in his eyes it was quite simply the Revolution par excellence or, more precisely, ‘the most colossal revolution that history has ever known’. We know that in 1844 he was intending to . . .” 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
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
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
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
Mothers in the Fatherland
“In spring 1987, a political document caused a stir in the Federal Republic of Germany: the Mothers’ Manifesto produced by a section of women in the Green Party. Some passed on to the business of the day with a feeling of kindly satisfaction—there was no longer much to . . .” 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
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
Early Christianity
“The history of the early Christian church was traditionally written by clergymen—ecclesiastical historians or theologians—who had their own methods, criteria and style. In particular they tended to follow the example of their founder, Eusebius, in taking a teleological view of their subject, and consequently in discerning in the . . .” 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
Conservatives and Corporatism
“In the course of her closing speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984 Mrs Thatcher held high a copy of the 1944 White Paper on employment policy and triumphantly revealed that it carried on its cover the name of Margaret H. Roberts. While it may be intriguing . . .” read more
Labour in the Great City
“The giant city was a new phenomenon in Western capitalism, and a type of human settlement virtually unprecedented in the non-oriental world before the eighteenth century: that is to say, the city whose population was measured in several hundreds of thousands, and very soon in millions. Until the . . .” read more
Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism (Part III)
“The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when . . .” read more
The Origins of the Administrative Elite
“A quarter of a century ago, Perry Anderson wrote a path-breaking article challenging the framework that historians had established for explaining, among other things, political change in 19th-century Britain. His analyses at that time, along with the work of Tom Nairn, have received reinforcement from subsequent research and . . .” read more
The Figures of Descent
“The debates aroused by a number of theses on Britain, published in New Left Review some twenty years ago, had at their centre a dispute over the character of the dominant class in Hanoverian and Victorian England, and the nature of the state over which it presided. These . . .” read more
Problems of Marxist History
“Harvey Kaye is an American professor of Social Change and Development, an enviable title probably not yet adopted anywhere in conservative Britain. It must come more naturally to the American mind, in a country where things are always changing, even if as a rule circularly. One thing that . . .” read more
The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two
“The primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history is one of the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism. In societies divided into different social classes, such relationships are perforce class relations. History is thus explained, in the final analysis, as a . . .” read more
International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin
“Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . .” read more
Staying Power: The Lost World of British Communism (Part II)
“The Communist Party, in my recollection of it (I left the Party in 1956), was singularly free of what are known, in more conventional political formations, as ‘rows’. Succession struggles of a kind endemic in social-democratic parties were unknown, and indeed for the first ten years of its . . .” read more
The Bourgeois Revolutions in Soviet Scholarship
“In 1948 J. H. Hexter delivered a blistering attack on L.B. Wright’s Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935). Wright was a fertile and stimulating scholar, whose inter-disciplinary work opened up many of the topics historians have been profitably pursuing since 1935. But Hexter objected to Wright’s use of . . .” read more
The Lost World of British Communism
“British political life at the present moment seems peculiarly fissiparous. Four major parties are competing for the popular franchise (in Wales and Scotland five) where previously there were two, and there is an amoeba-like growth of minorities and tendencies within the parties themselves. With the rise of the . . .” read more
The Declassing of Language
“The novelty of Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class lies, as its title suggests, in its contention that the study of language must be the starting point for any understanding of political activity. To some readers this proposition may seem a trifle obvious and not really novel at . . .” read more
The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution
“It is now over half a century since Hitler came to power in Germany, inaugurating twelve years of bloodshed and destruction without parallel in human history. Throughout this period the Nazi phenomenon has posed a major challenge to human understanding. Why should fascism, in such an extreme, racist . . .” read more
Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists
“I must first state the nature of the problems with which I am concerned in this paper. As one who accepts the basic principles of historical materialism, I am nevertheless not so much concerned with debates located purely within its theoretical constructs as with the explanation of the . . .” read more
Marxism and the Course of History
“There was a time, not very long ago, when one of the most serious and frequent criticisms levelled against Marxism was that it subscribed to a mechanical and simplistic view of history according to which all societies were predestined to go through a single, inexorable sequence of stages . . .” read more
The Christs of Faith and the Jesus of History
“A joke has been going the rounds in theological circles for some time now. It goes like this. The Pope was told by the Cardinals that the remains of Jesus had been dug up in Palestine. There was no room for doubt: all the archaeologists, scholars and experts . . .” read more
Class in Marx’s Conception of History, Ancient and Modern
“It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to be speaking here today. It is an honour to have been asked to give the annual lecture in memory of Isaac Deutscher, a man who always resolutely pursued his own line of thought with the greatest courage, . . .” read more
'Drop the Glass Industry': Collaborating with E.H.Carr
“Carr and I first corresponded in 1955, after he had borrowed my thesis on The Development of the Soviet Budgetary System. We met a year later in 1956, when he gave a seminar in Glasgow, where I had my first academic job. In January 1958 he proposed that . . .” read more