Page 49 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

38 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

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general social evolutions of European society’. So they returned again and again
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to the English problem, seeking the levers of change. In 1892 Engels, who lived
to see new unionism (which excited him) and the Socialist revival (which often
irritated him enormously), recorded a final English verdict. Its mixture of fine
leading insights and a certain puzzlement is typical. Significantly, it was couched
as an analysis of ideology and of a political culture.
By its eternal compromises gradual, peaceful political development such as
exists in England brings about a contradictory state of affairs. Because of the
superior advantages it affords, this state can within certain limits be tolerated in
practice, but its logical incongruities are a sore trial to the reasoning mind. Hence
the need felt by all ‘state-sustaining’ parties for theoretical camouflage, even
justification, which, naturally, are feasible only by means of sophisms,
distortions and, finally, underhand tricks. Thus a literature is being reared in the
sphere of politics which repeats all the wretched hypocrisy and mendacity of
theological apologetics and transplants the theological intellectual vices to
secular soil. 5
Puzzled or not, then, Engels’s original project—‘the social development of the
English’—is our project—and the original markers, especially Marx’s
journalistic pieces, remain invaluable.
It ought to be a matter of some shame that after all this while English social
history, even in its Marxist variants, has not done what Engels promised. The
best work has been bounded by period, while the study of peculiarities requires
the long view. Historians like Hilton, Hill, Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson
have contributed massively within their own ranges, yet none of them has put his
own and the others’ work together in the kind of synthesis we need. Edward
Thompson was drawn into a wider speculative sweep only by Anderson’s
‘provocation’. So it is that we have to turn outside ‘history’ for more recent
starting-points: to a long political essay by an editor of New Left Review and to
the formidable comparative social history of a ‘loner’ among American
sociologists. In what follows I will discuss Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy first, then Perry Anderson’s ‘Origins of the present
crisis’. But I will also draw on Marx’s and Engels’s original formulations, on
Perry Anderson’s most recent book and on the debate provoked by the Anderson/
Nairn theses. 6
Moore’s book hinges on three related concerns. The most general of these is
‘modernization’. As several reviewers noted, Moore has a tendency to use terms
like this ubiquitously, without ever defining them. This derives in part from his
method, for he is concerned to build his concepts empirically, from the
comparison of instances. He is impatient with ‘tiresome word games as a
substitute for the effort to see what really happened’. This is a fine corrective to
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all those abstract formulations of the principal features of ‘traditional’ and
‘modern’ societies in which there often lurk Western, ‘democratic’ or capitalist
models of excellence. But the trouble with Moore’s cavalier treatment of