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58 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

in the later 1970s has been to stress complexity, autonomies and even
‘dispersions’, these accounts still use notions of relatively simple social wholes,
linked to ‘history’ by long evolutionary sequences. Social formations (patrician
Britain) continue to have essences by which they can be understood. Classes
continue to have homogeneous world views arranged around a few principles.
Key features of political ideology represent, unproblematically, developments of
another kind: the archaic appearances of the British state are held to represent its
essence, whatever transformations are occurring in particular state apparatuses. It
is odd that the main promoters of ‘theory’ remain so wedded to the ideas they
were using in the mid 1960s.
Politically, too, the account remains problematic. As we’ve seen, popular
forces, absent or supine in the earlier account, now appear as popular nationalisms.
The earlier project argued a principled case for concentration on a narrowly
intellectual culture. The uncomplicated populism of the old New Left was
rejected; the task, pursued with some success, was to create a radical culture
strongly influenced by continental Marxisms. This was always a paradoxical
position for socialists to occupy, and the contradictions have deepened since. The
new tendencies lacked indigenous popular roots and encouraged self-indulgent
and esoteric styles of theorization and expression. At the same time the
popularity of existing forms of Left politics was further eroded, popular spaces
being occupied by forces not easily analysable in NLR-ish terms, especially a
popular, anti-statist Toryism which, once in office, set about ‘modernization’ in a
highly coercive form. The new analysis does not offer much in response—unless
the future really does lie with the ‘new’ (now waning?) nationalisms or with some
other form of radical popular nationalism. But this hope (which seems to me to
smack of desperation) produces further paradoxes. Given the deep ambiguities of
nationalisms of all kinds (which Nairn interestingly describes) and the likely
association of nationalism and racism in the British context, the Nairn argument
looks more like a loophole from pessimism than real grounds for hope. And
anyway why must the desire for a better, non-capitalist world always appear in
disguise? Is socialism such a peculiar and unpopular thing that it can only work
indirectly, by proxy?
There is the problem, too, of the broader political tendency of the analysis. I
still think that the original criticism here was correct: the analysis points to
‘radical liberal’ conclusions (to ‘modernization’ rather than to a socialist
transformation of capitalist social relations). The tendency of the argument may
be at odds with the politics of the authors. It is a matter of where the central
contradictions are seen to lie. In the Nairn/Anderson accounts they lie between
the needs of modern capitalism (never very precisely defined) and powerful
determinations from the past. The contradictions are between old and new, or
between archaic superstructural elements and the needs of development of the
economy. Such contradictions are certainly important and not limited to the
British case (see, for instance, Gramsci on Italy in ‘Americanism and Fordism’).
But given overwhelming stress, this form of analysis may altogether disguise the