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INTRODUCTION 51

feature of the British route that the bourgeois thrust in the domains of production
and material life have been masked at the levels of ideology and state, especially,
perhaps, at the level of political society and party. An idealist history cannot
penetrate this formation, for it cannot compare the real relations and their
representation in ideology. Consequently, Anderson and Nairn’s main
explanatory notion (aristocratic hegemony) turns out to be nothing more than the
principal theme of English Liberal ideology. For from Ricardo and the
utilitarians to J.A.Hobson and late popular liberalism, not to mention a large part
of the Social Democratic tradition, the root of evils has been seen precisely as
‘feudal’, ‘aristocratic’ or ‘military’ residues in an industrial-democratic world. 45
The New Left Review analysis conforms to this very English tradition of radical
liberalism: it does not surpass it, still less unmask it. The failure is compounded
by a very one-sided reconstruction of the English Ideology itself, in which
agrarian-conservative elements are magnified and the liberal-industrial counter-
46
points virtually ignored. Edward Thompson’s criticism here is absolutely right,
and the trouble is that the ideology of liberalism is actually present in the
Anderson/Nairn story, but invisibly.
Second, this very unmaterialist version exaggerates the political moment in a
history of determinations. Anderson’s formative episodes, each of which fixes
something permanently in the social structure, are political moments, not, for
instance, trends in social and economic life. Against this it could be argued
(classically, for a Marxist) that the most determining moments are the periods of
transition from one mode of production to another, or from one sub-epoch to
another, within the capitalist mode. To give two obvious examples without the
elaboration they need: one ‘grand fact’ of British development is the very early
entry, first by half a century or more, into industrial capitalism; another is the
rather late, muted, defensive adoption of the forms of monopoly capital. Both
features have tremendous power for the ‘peculiarities of the English’. The Nairn/
Anderson theme of bourgeois failure, for instance, might best be applied not to
the whole span of history since the seventeenth century but, obviously enough, to
the British transition to monopoly capitalism and the persistent twentieth-century
failure to ‘modernize’. This, anyway, would be a good starting-point and the one
adopted by Hobsbawm in much of his work. A closer look might also show,
however, that this ‘failure’ is also of considerable ideological utility and usually
appears in exaggerated, one-dimensional versions.
Third, idealism produced an attenuated and formalistic history of class.
Edward Thompson’s criticisms on this score seem extraordinarily well aimed. In
effect, Anderson’s treatment of class fails doubly: it lacks the experiential,
phenomenological dimensions of Thompson’s own Marxism, but also any kind of
historical sociology. This (Anderson/Nairn) working class has no economic
function or social being. It is fooled in the head by ideas but not exploited and
governed in the factory. Class experience does not change along any of these
dimensions. Nor do classes have an internal structure of sets of internal social
relations—other than those of party or trade union. As James Hinton observes, it