Perry Anderson

1.1.2 Ch. 1 : The Intransigent Right: Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek

Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived. Philosophy, economics, history, sociology, psychology, not to speak of the earth and life sciences, and the arts, all intersect at different points with terrain of politics, in its classic definition.

— Perry Anderson life

The classical legacies of political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche, and the immediate tasks of running the world, at home and abroad, have been of most concern to the Right. Normative philosophical constructions have become a specialty of the Centre. Economic, social and cultural investigations – of past and present – dominate the output of the Left. Any attempt to come to grips with all three outlooks is thus obliged to traverse quite variegated ground.

— Perry Anderson world

Garton Ash immersed himself much more deeply and single-mindedly than Ascherson in the politics of Eastern Europe during the final years of the Cold War. The period may have something to do with the difference. As the Eighties unfolded, the East European oppositions to Communism were steadily drawn into the magnetic field of the West’s dominant ideology – the uncompromising doctrines of the Right proclaimed by Reagan and Thatcher. For Garton Ash, then an editor and contributor at the Spectator, this was a natural and desirable evolution. For Ascherson, no friend of Thatcherism, it must have posed more difficulties.

— Perry Anderson politics

Historically, Garton Ash belongs to the last levy of the Cold War, a cohort fired by an uncomplicated anti-Communism. His staunchness made him a natural candidate for recruitment to MI6, which propositioned him early on, as it had Ascherson in his time.

— Perry Anderson war

Values – ethical, epistemological, aesthetic – figure in the contests over the field, but they do not define it. Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

— Perry Anderson truth

On closing Political Liberalism, the reader is no nearer a sight of electoral reform in the United States than when opening it. Rawls does not seem to have noticed that for political liberties to have equal worth, there would have to be the elementary change of proportional representation in the voting system, as well as equitable funding of the campaigning system.

— Perry Anderson change

In this like the later Rawls, the Habermas of Between Facts and Norms inhabits a mental world in which virtually the only significant interlocutors are colleagues or pupils close enough not to derange any of the basic premises of the work. The position is not quite the same with democracy. Here Habermas is more concerned to contrast his theory with the two rival contenders for a modern interpretation of its structure: liberalism, which views the negative freedoms of the individual as the foundation of any democratic order, and republicanism, which sees the active participation in public life of the citizen as the criterion of any real democracy.

— Perry Anderson life

How is this extended theoretical construction to be judged? The first, and most obvious, feature that separates Habermas’s later treatment of law from his original study of the public sphere is its completely unhistorical method. Where Structural Transformation carefully traces the emergence of the different constituent elements of its object through time, and to some extent also across space – touching on its distinctive trajectories in England, France and Germany – Between Facts and Norms not only makes scant reference to the actual genesis, let alone variation, of modern legal systems: it is built on a postulate that is contradicted by the slightest glance at the history of constitutional law. In no country were private liberties and public rights ever co-original.

— Perry Anderson time

Bobbio’s theoretical defence of the distinction between Left and Right, for all its eloquence, may thus be more vulnerable than it appears. If we ask why this should be so, the answer surely lies in the difficulty of constructing an axiology of political values without coherent reference to the empirical social world. Bobbio often writes as if he could separate his ideal taxonomy from contemporary history, but of course he cannot. In practice he admits the political scenery of the present into his account selectively, for the purposes of his argument. But it is in that present that the deeper reasons and limits of his intervention lie.

— Perry Anderson history

This does not mean, of course, that the concepts of Left and Right should be abandoned. Bobbio’s passionate call to retain them commands every respect. But to shut one’s eyes to the evacuation of their content by the trend of established politics since the mid-seven- ties is not to safeguard, but to attenuate them. A purely axiological defence of the idea of the Left, bereft of any historical account of the present or institutional attack on the status quo, will not resist the turn of the time.

— Perry Anderson politics

Philosophically, Bobbio’s response to the contemporary political condition of the West is the opposite of that of Rawls and Habermas. Where they have sought to efface the difference between sein and sollen, in a continual slide between idealizations of the existing world and factualizations of velleities beyond it, he has held fast to the principles of the legal positivism and political realism that formed him: values and facts are categorically separate domains, that are not to be confused. This is certainly an intellectual advantage he enjoys over them. But it comes at a price: to cut all connexion between the historical and the desirable risks delivering the world to what is undesirable, in the name of the same realism.

— Perry Anderson joy

In certain temperaments, intellectual skills and political sympathies have little or no connection. Frege’s anti-Semitism or Wittgenstein’s philo-Stalinism lacked significant leads to their philosophy. Such cases are common enough. Timpanaro was not one of them.

— Perry Anderson philosophy

Three themes governed Timpanaro’s output in this period. The first was specifically cultural. If European Romanticism swept the board as ideology and aesthetic under the Restoration, he argued that its success was due to a distinctive combination of traits. On the one hand, as a post-revolutionary outlook, it benefited from the break-up of the aristocratic side of the Enlightenment – displacing its etiquette of surface gallantry with a new sense of seriousness and inward passion.

— Perry Anderson success

In the work of Leopardi, this post-mortem classicism brought into exceptional focus a tension still for the most part latent in the Enlightenment itself.

— Perry Anderson art

Behind the wit and energy of The Freudian Slip, there lay the secret of Timpanaro’s occupation. He was a proof-reader not out of choice or circumstance, but under the pressure of intense neurotic distress.

— Perry Anderson choice

Historically, even in the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, they could be at variance. Rousseau, the most advanced political thinker of his generation, was emotionally a pietist; Voltaire, politically at ease with a benevolent absolutism, scorned the consolations of Savoyard Christianity. For Timpanaro, Leopardi had represented the possibility of a synthesis beyond either: firm republicanism, unswerving atheism.

— Perry Anderson christianity

The – now shop-worn – label of ‘magical realism’ is customarily applied to Márquez’s novels. It has never fitted Vargas Llosa, who disavows the adjective.

— Perry Anderson magic

The Violencia that ravaged Colombia for the next decade, pitting Liberals against the ruling Conservatives, took 200,000 lives – a catastrophe worse than any endured in Peru. This was the historical background to Márquez’s early career as a journalist and writer. But he seems to have remained eerily untouched by it.

— Perry Anderson writer

Over this landscape, Göran Therborn’s Between Sex and Power rises up like some majestic volcano. Throwing up a billowing column of ideas and arguments, while a lava of evidence flows down its slopes, this is a great work of historical intellect and imagination, the effect of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigour of his discipline at its best, with command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. But it is also a set of macro-narratives that compose perhaps the first true example of a work of global history we possess.

— Perry Anderson history

Uniformity is the one condition every part of the political spectrum deplores. The most unflinching neo-liberals invariably explain that universal free markets are the best of all guardians of diversity. Social Democrats reassure their followers that the capitalism to which they must adjust is becoming steadily more various. Traditional conservatives expatiate on the irreducible multiplicity of faiths and civilizations. Homogeneity has no friends, at least since Alexandre Kojève. But when any claim becomes too choral, a flicker of doubt is indicated. It scarcely affects the magnificence of this book. In it, you can find the largest changes in human relations of modern times.

— Perry Anderson faith

Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgement. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of Marx is never mentioned but his spirit is omnipresent, transforms the landscape of the English Revolution. Merchants and Revolution is distinguished by three achievements, any one of which would be impressive enough. Together, their combination is an extraordinary feat.

— Perry Anderson literature

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