Perry Anderson's The New Old World is out, and from the Verso announcement email comes this vintage 'Perry-ism':
With landmark chapters on France, Germany, Italy and Turkey (the omission of Britain is plainly acknowledged: its ‘history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment’).
Ouch! It isn't just because I've been teaching psychoanalysis today that one thinks this might be an omission that is a little 'overdetermined'. After all Anderson was one the pre-eminent thinkers of the 'British question', and can one really say the Blairite re-tooling of Thatcherism plus vestigial social democracy and the authoritarian and philistine elements of labourism has been of 'little moment' - not least in shaping the other European regimes, and making Thatcherism/neo-liberalism 'accessible' to post-social democracy cultures? Perhaps it is largely because I'd like to read Perry's evisceration of contemporary Britain, however.
3 comments:
I've been reading The New Old World on-off for the last month, and while it's vintage stuff, I suspect this admittedly amusing bon mot is an excuse for not having an LRB piece on Britain that he could then cannibalise for the book. Especially as Blair and Blairism is mentioned so often in the book as inspiration for the 'reforming' tendencies in the German, French and Italian left...
It's a little rum however - can't he write another essay just for the book? Ah, doubting Perry's wisdom, this way deviation lies
The NLR's notorious oscillation between tackling "the problem of England" (or the break-up of Britain) and finding it all beneath contempt continues. It's as if the cretinism and bad taste of one's enemies took the sails out of critique (impossible for many to dignify Blairism with the kind of analyses that responded to Thatcher's authoritarian populism). In any case, perhaps a time to revisit English questions such as the origins of the present crisis and the components of the national culture?
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