Page 60 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 49

apartheid. Thrust into isolated subordination in the early nineteenth century, it
has remained there ever since.
This subordination is mainly a reflex of the failure of the bourgeoisie. As
Anderson puts it: ‘It is a general historical rule that a rising social class acquires
a significant part of its ideological equipment from the armoury of the ruling
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class itself.’ So, since English bourgeoisie had ‘no impulse of liberation, no
revolutionary values, no universal language’, ‘a supine bourgeoisie provided a
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subordinate proletariat’. The only real bourgeois legacy was Fabianism, the
pedigree of which is accurately traced to Utilitarianism, the nearest but partial
attempt at a hegemonic bourgeois ideology. In the absence of Marxism in
England, or an intellectual socialism worth the name, the working class was
infected by the Fabian taint or groped empirically towards pragmatic solutions.
The typical form of this blind activity has always been trade unionism, to whose
search for limited gains the Labour Party became an adjunct.
The third failure was the failure of English intellectuals in the critical domain
of the human sciences. Again, to do justice to part of the project that does not
fall within the scope of this essay, it is important to stress the value of
Anderson’s discussion of the English intellectual world, at least the ‘social
scientific’ part of it. ‘Components of the national culture’, Anderson’s major
essay in this field, belongs to a later historical moment than ‘Origins’—to the
student movement of the late 1960s rather than the Wilson election of 1964. Like
all of Anderson’s early historical work, it is enormously stimulating and
suggestive. His map of English ‘social science’ is indispensable. Yet, though
there are some changes of emphasis or some clarifications in the light of Edward
Thompson’s formidable criticisms, the treatment of intellectuals is still contained
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within the theme of bourgeois failure.
Since bourgeoisie never ‘achieved a political or social revolution in England’,
it never generated a ‘revolutionary ideology’. Its thinkers were confined within a
bourgeois corporatism: they never thought society as a whole—hence, their
parochialism, empiricism, failure to penetrate the English fog of traditionalism
and the long-continued absence of either a serious Marxist tradition or a
complete political theory or a classical theoretical sociology of any kind. The most
creative intellectual work has occupied the peripheries (literary criticism,
anthropology) or been contained and isolated (psychoanalysis). It has also
frequently been the province of émigrés. So where a revolutionary or synthetic
tradition ought to have been, there is an ‘absent centre’. English intellectual life
is, indeed, a history of absences: no Durkheim, Pareto or Weber; no Lukács or
Gramsci; no Sartre, Goldmann or Althusser. Much of the weakness of the British
Left is traced to this source.
The final failure—and the outcome of all this—is the nature of British society
in the mid 1960s: ‘sclerosed’, ‘archaic’, fossilized. One of the Nairn/Anderson
questions is why the oldest capitalist society appeared fixed in an almost
preindustrial, pre-capitalist mould. The language of their analysis stresses this:
‘the mythology of rank order’, ‘the pseudo-feudal coloration of British society’,