Page 61 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

50 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

‘a comprehensive, coagulating conservatism’, ‘the patrician political style’ and
even, in a reference to the inter-war period, ‘the pseudo-feudal class structure’. 40
The distinctive feature of the Nairn/Anderson essays was the writing of history
from a stand-point in the present. In practice all history does this (usually
pretending not to), but these were emphatically political-historical essays. They
broke with a history that is either merely contemplative (for its own sake) or
merely professional (based on standards of mutual evaluation among people
called ‘historians’). It is important both to mark the seriousness of this
intellectual-political intervention and to encounter it on its own ground—the
ground of ‘really useful knowledge’.
It is easy to see how the theme of failure was suggested by the immediate
context of post-Macmillan Britain and the Wilson election campaign of 1964,
with its modernizing, technocratic rhetoric. As Edward Thompson convincingly
argues, it was strengthened by an implicit model of revolutionary and intellectual
excellence based on the no-less-specific experiences of ‘Other Countries’,
notably France. In the absence of an explicitly comparative dimension, the
41
project seemed to be informed by a rather self-indulgent Anglophobia.
It is obvious, in retrospect, that this was not the most useful way to approach
the history. The theory of failure, indeed, coexists throughout the Anderson/
Nairn early project with a contradictory half-recognition of the ideological and
political resources of the dominant classes in England, a powerful defence in
depth. Viewed differently, each of the Anderson/Nairn failures can also be read
as assets, as symptoms of strength, as a large but finite repertoire of solutions. So
by far the best part of Anderson’s analysis of the ‘present crisis’ is the passage
which deals with the barriers between a Labour electoral victory and qualitative
social change. He points to the polycentricity of power in late British capitalism,
the relative unimportance of military and bureaucracy, and to what he calls the
‘extreme importance of cultural institutions’. These points should have
42
provided Anderson’s problematic. They would have led not to questions about
failure but to an analysis of strengths and how to penetrate them. Another way of
putting this is to say that a backward-looking history is dependent on the
adequacy with which the present is grasped.
A second criticism concerns the kind of history Anderson was writing, quite
apart from its schematic character and its over-determination by too narrowly
conceived a political moment. The most convincing typification is Anderson’s
own—that he was writing a kind of totalizing history but of an idealist kind, a
history of superstructures in the manner of Lukács. It is indeed true that while
43
Anderson’s avowed project was ‘the distinctive trajectory of British society since
the emergence of capitalism’ or ‘the global evolution of the class structure’ no
44
less, he focused on ideology, political society and the state and ignored both the
forms of civil society and the mode and social relations of production. It is
important to note the consequences of this very un-Marx-like method.
First, an idealist history, applied to the British instance, reinforces, quite
arbitrarily, the a priori search for bourgeois failures. For, as we have seen, it is a