Page 67 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

56 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

further. Liberalism in England has been carried in ‘socialism’, in the Labour
Party and in the mainstream traditions of left intellectualism. So pervasive is this
legacy from the Victorian dichotomy of industry and land that it is evidently
almost invisible. It has as good a claim to have been the characteristic content of
the English ideology than any kind of ‘pseudo-feudalism’. The means to a real
unmasking, however, is to recognize the coexistence of the two.

Postscript

This account is unrevised since 1974, and bits of it now cause unease. It will be
important, sometime, to return to the major theme. Meanwhile, contemporary
practice offers several models for a postscript. The first suggests that the author’s
jejune comments be read ‘historically’, perhaps as a record of ‘experience’. (Does
it show how one lumpen intellectual started to get drunk on Theory and was
lured to the lair of the Monster Althusser?) Alternatively, ‘the text’ could be
subjected to a really rigorous auto-critique on matters of theory, epistemology
and ‘pertinence’— on which grounds it would certainly fail. Both these kinds of
self-digestion require peculiar stomachs (strong but also extremely agile) and
lots of time and space. So this postscript is limited to re-emphasizing some
points (which still seem right) in the light of later developments.
The Nairn/Anderson themes have also been restated. The first chapter of Tom
Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain takes account of some criticisms but consigns
56
57
others to a footnote, where they ‘answer themselves themselves’. In In several
ways the new account is less vulnerable than the old. It takes off from a new
conjuncture: the crisis of the state in a dis-United Kingdom faced by the rise of
the new nationalisms. It focuses on the development of the British ‘state form’,
on inter-state relations and on the political cultures of England, Northern Ireland,
Scotland and Wales. The shift of focus from the 1960s essays is not, then, so
great: the puzzle remains the peculiarities of hegemony in Britain. The key
questions are: Why has the old British state system lasted so long? And why has
the threat of secession apparently eclipsed that of the class struggle in the 1970s?
The answers lie in ‘the historical character of the British state itself’, 58
There are several important adjustments to the earlier argument. There is a
more plausible portrayal of the ruling alliance in twentieth-century Britain. The
inherent absurdity of unending ‘aristocratic’ hegemony is replaced by the
convergence of finance capital (‘the permanent victory of the City over the
British economy’) and ‘the English intellectual class’, a hugely influential
grouping whose world view is a conservative liberalism. These social forces
have preserved the peculiar character of the state, formed first under the
dominance of agrarian capital and persistently ‘intermediate’, ‘transitional’ or
‘pre-modern’. A ‘patrician essence’—in state, in society and in the argument—is
thus preserved.
A second major modification concerns international determinants on state
forms. Nairn’s general explanation associates nationalism with ‘uneven