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INTRODUCTION 57

development’. Nationalisms arise mainly (or initially?) in peripheral or
hegemonized societies encountering coercion or competition from more
advanced sectors. British development, being especially early, lacked any such
moment of reactive popular nationalism. The later reliance on free-trade
imperialism further inhibited a modernizing drive, feeding instead a passive
nationalism of an inter-class kind, mainly mobilized in war-time. The
peculiarities of the British state can best be understood, then, in terms of a ‘world
political economy’. Its dominant classes have been especially successful as rulers
and conciliators, but the cost of the whole historical pattern has been the failure
to modernize.
The third main change in the argument has been hinted at already: a concern with
nationalisms of different kinds as a feature of political ideologies. Nationalism is
seen as a major—perhaps the major—form of popular politics. In this way the
New Left Review rediscovers the popular in the form of the nationalist. We’ll
look at the implications of this in a moment.
Yet many of the tendencies of the older account remain. The British route
remains fundamentally flawed, giving rise to a society that is comprehensively
blocked. In an argument now organized, explicitly, around the theme of
‘modernization’, this route is necessarily deviant. Britain has lacked ‘that
“modernizing” socio-political upheaval that ought to have refashioned both
society and state in logical conformity with the demands of the new age’. 59
Internal forms of social struggle, especially of a popular kind, are still more or
less absent as major determinants of outcomes. Popular forces are contained or
incorporated without major consequences for the British ‘state form’. This is
partly because of insistence on the patrician essence, partly because the account
is more concerned with how the state appears and how it is talked about than
with what state agencies actually do, and partly because the whole theorization
of struggle remains static and unrelational. Struggles happen but produce fixed
and permanent outcomes. Hegemony is still thought of in terms of the world
views of classes in simple relations of domination and subordination.
Transformations must, in this model, be externally induced; they cannot be
internally generated. The older account stressed the need for the importation of
Marxist theory; the newer account reposes hope in the nationalisms of the British
periphery. The old pessimism about the British working class is reinforced by the
genuine insights of the new account, which stress the contradictions of
unevenness at the expense of those of class.
Subsequent events make the account look idiosyncratic. Theoretically, it
represents a pre-structuralist moment—despite the frequent use of the word
‘structure’. If the debt is to Gramsci, it is to a Gramsci read through Lukács,
Sartre or Goldmann, not through the ‘complex unity’ of post-Althusserian
structuralisms. It is strange that the influence of a structuralist work is quite
minimal on writers usually held responsible for admitting these tendencies to
Britain. Nicos Poulantzas’s sharp criticisms of ‘Origins’ seem quite repressed
and are certainly not responded to. While the main tendency of theoretical work