Perry Anderson

strong dubdobdee blogpost energy

I've read the 3rd part of this Euro piece in one sitting. Mostly on Brexit, and you could mostly read without the other parts.

Perry's spinning plates technique is kinda incredible, and his way with detail -- what he can prioritise, what he does not -- gives rise to rich moments.

I'd add that to reduce his position on the EU to "Lexit" isn't correct. Throughout he is sober about what the EU is, what UK democracy is, in all of its shortcomings.

Perry has some sharp words for Remain support coming out of universities but it's not a class warrior position, more of an observation of the EU's relationship to UK higher ed.

I read, at last, Part II of PA in Europe, without reading Part I, which I don't have to hand.

Mostly a critique of the EU's infamous democratic deficit. Factually informative, but not surprising in outlook.

the meat of the essay is to show the context and geneaology of political philosophy that drives the character of its political model tho, right? the point of it being that he’s showing the intellectual mechanics that inform it. the use of that above the purely descriptive is to place it in the context of ideas which will be forming and formed by the future the world, no?

Fizzles: unlike you, I haven't yet read Part One. What you say may be what Part One is about, but so far it's not what Part Two is about. It's about 'mechanics' as in institutional operations, but not really about ideas.

i am postponing the 30,000 words of undiluted thrillpower until i have three clear days to go in hard

(adding that i suspect now more than ever that PA's 60s/70s project to detect and outline the ideology that actually underlay the UK's non-conformance to the standard evolution of polities -- the nairn-anderson thesis -- was, despite its probable good intentions at the outset, increasingly significantly distorts his reading of present-day UK politics. N&A were battling to refuse the "acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness" argument of course, and refusing to embed british exceptionalism in a negative characteristic = the absence of and casual freedom from any one affirmed ideology) (i mean it;s is thesis and fair play he wants to stick with it BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole) (also nairn omits discussion of the sex pistols from "the enchanted glass", his book on the monarchy, and not for good reasons IMO)

(so i will be reading it with all this very much in mind) (when i have a fkn second) (five clear days)

this post^^^ took me nearly three clear days and it's still full of typos

Btw, no mention of "ukania" in the first and third parts of that piece. Anderson skillfully used the ongoing relationship of UK politics to EU politics in the latter to draw out a set of insights from either. Mostly insights into Europe, but I got a lot out of it from a UK perspective.

I doubt that PA is seeking to surprise anyone with his outlook. Does he ever? Is anyone going to be surprised about any of his views on Brazil or India or UK? If you want to reduce his stance on to a one-liner -- which he resists by the vast quantity of reading and links he can make from it -- it's one of the i.e. all of this fucking sucks variety, but it's the facts and links that he draws that open up avenues for others. And in this, PA is getting to a map of this bloc of centre-right-to-centre-left coalitions that are highly robust, one that can survive all types and manner of crisis (created by itself or otherwise) that would topple national governments, one that can shrug at a member state's entire withdrawal from it.

BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole

I love this.

PA ends Part II saying that the EU's claims are almost all hollow but it has two benefits: free movement and a range of consumer goods. He recognises that those are popular - but then, in a way, dealing with them only in the last paragraph of a 10,000-word article suggests that he's slighting the practical benefits of the EU. As I have said before, I am unsure that he lives in the EU (or perhaps he does, half the year or something), which may be a reason he is cavalier about the everyday gains of being in it.

I think that a reader not knowing much about the subject, reading Part II and taking it at face value, would say: the EU is pretty bad and it would be good for a country to leave it and restore its democratic independence.

This isn't a very new sensation or surprising outcome - I felt the same after reading Susan Watkins on the EU in the LRB c.7 years ago, and she was, in effect, one of PA's successors as editor of NLR.

Reading Part III. A simple response consistently emerges: one that many of us have felt about many other things and fields.*

It's basically: "I believed you, indeed was profoundly impressed, when you were talking about those other places and things that weren't very familiar, but now you're talking about where I live and things I went through, and you keep saying things - even if only small things - that I know are wrong."

Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does.

[*A parallel: it's been said that everyone likes most things about Declan Kiberd's INVENTING IRELAND, except that Wildeans don't like the chapter on Wilde, Joyceans don't like the chapter on Joyce, Shavians don't like the chapter on Shaw ...]

im going to be using the expression ukania on ilx long after perry mason has shuffled off this mortal coil

"Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does."

Is it not very surprising or just wrong? I've certainly not seen this command of the overall narrative from anybody on the mainstream press though I've read good reporting on aspects of it.

Part of the reason people have been as divided on Brexit -- and not just along Leave or Remain either, with both camps having its own cliques -- is that there is very little agreement on the nature of the EU and its benefits and who are the main beneficiaries?

This was certainly part of the weakness of the Remain argument during the referendum and is a lot of the bathos of the angrier end of the FBPE crew

God knows when/if I'll get to read this PA piece but the subject of how the EU sells itself to its citizens would be worth a lot of analysis in itself

PA's argument is that it doesn't bother because it doesn't need to, and that the vitally important decisions made by (in partiuclar) the European Council and the ECJ are made in camera without the bother of tirseome politics or democracy.

I've read the first part and he essentially makes it sound like a confidence trick.

After the first part I'm mostly 'man, fuck a dutch tory'

As Perry Anderson's greatest admirer on ILX (with the caveat that Mark S was into amphibologies before I was) -- I found Part III of this overall remarkably poor.

The first half is a standard account of UK political history since the 1960s which you could assemble from Wikipedia or even from most UK adults' general knowledge -- but, as I noted, strangely specked with errors, casually misleading and false claims, which go with the 'breezy journalism' genre. Still, he does add *some* new analysis to this story, though its accuracy too remains questionable.

Then he gets on to Mount, Oborne, Wheatcroft - which feels much too easily self-selecting, PA as so often just going back to the same people he's been reading for years (especially Mount). It's at least interesting to see how much Mount has changed his tunes. But PA says these are all less impressive than Noel Malcolm and Richard Tuck, Hobbes scholars. Hm ... So what do they have to say?

Mainly that the EU is undemocratic and unaccountable - which is PA's general case, which could have been made in a page, not 30,000 words. But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits), surely *because those nations are neoliberal in their national politics anyway* ... That's all OK up to a point, but PA also TWICE cites the fact that Tuck argues that *Brexit makes the break-up of the UK less likely*.

Well, this could be true; it could be too early to say; but it flies in the face of everything that any political analyst has said for the last 6 years, and PA does *nothing* to explain why they're wrong and Tuck's right about it. And yet Tuck is one of his great sages!

And finally we get a last couple of pages just repeating the general charges of undemocratic structure and personal corruption, and along the way saying that the EU is politically worse than the UK.

Some of this article is true, some of it is insightful, but the balance of new insight to retreads is unusually unfavourable here by PA's standards. It's even noticeable that his prose is less sparkling than usual.

Part II was informative but unexciting. Part I, which Fizzles greatly admired, I still haven't properly read. But overall the balance of value here seems to be towards a let-down.

In part 1, there was a startlingly... tendentious (ie bad and wrong) paragraph about the founding of the United States.

"But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits)"

No large EU state is testing this claim precisely because it is against the rules they are bound to observe by being in the EU.

Good point on Tuck, it did seem one of two points -- the other on Momentum and languages -- that were obscure and needed more, though I think in the latter there was a larger point on Labour's infighting on the issue that would've detracted from the piece.

very busy at the moment and still only halfway thru the second essay

two things i wanted to note in passing before i forget:
i: "They are set not in stone, but in granite" wtf u think granite is anderson
ii: "documents of such ‘epic length’ that the Ireland’s EU commissioner declared of the last that ‘no sane and sensible person’ could read it" where am i going with this

Perry Anderson is no Mason

wtf u think granite is anderson

incredible. reminds me of some otherwise completely forgotten tv doc years ago where the presenter knelt down by a railway in france and said something about 'this rail of non ferrous metal', i thought 'whaddya think sncf stands for ya mook'.

copy-editors sleepwalking as ever in the great man's contributions: i mean if it were me i would be DELIGHTED to catch him out, less obnubilation more reading back what you just wrote SIR

Those are excellent amusing comments by Mark S.

Latest LRB features, not 3pp of letters followed by a long response from PA, but ... one letter, from someone who was involved in European defence policy 20 years ago.

"But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits)"

Actually this was also wrong? PA went through the episode where Italy tried to nationalise a utility in the early 60s, which was blocked by the ECJ.

I've still not read the second one, but 'not set in stone, in granite' strikes me as a forgivable rhetorical messing around with a maxim. Bit clumsy like but not it's not a mistake as such.

some non-clumsy messing around: "if x is set in stone, that stone is granite"

also (since i'm apparently in maximum subbing-nerd pedant-mode today): "the effect of 'constitutionalising' (the apostrophes are needed, because… )" -- perry ffs they're not "apostrophes ", they're quotatation marks

thats right "quotatation marks"

Indicating quotatating

I did find 'apostrophes' odd there.

The LRB's editor should quit after allowing these errors through.

Oh.

when i read it i legit sat there for a minute trying to remember the phrase "inverted commas" and then thinking did i invent that? has it just been apostrophes this whole time? no it hasn't.

A parody of Perry Anderson from 1966:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1966/xx/pseudlr.htm

still padding* thru the second installment and lolled at this: "Foucault’s overblown identification of knowledge with power here finds literal embodimen"

translation: "i sourly grant on OTM to a figure it's very important you grasp I deprecate" <-- dude this^^^ is bad rockwriting, terminology and also trope

*my work at the moment is a large book-length edit at deadline so i can only really read and think abt other stuff in the brief breaks i am barely taking (= i had no weekend to speak of) -- if only the great man knew of our dedication to his flawed genius eh

Kevin and Perry Go Large but it's Perry Anderson and idk some famous Kevin I haven't done the work here tbrr

Things I was shockingly old when I learner: Perry is a shortening of Peregrine

s/b PIPPIN imo

According to his wiki page, he started out as a rock critic, writing under the pseudonym Richard Merton. I wonder if any of his rock writings have ever surfaced

they're in the LRB archive* and they're NOT THAT GREAT!

one of my (way too many) highly delayed projects from last year is writing them up as an overlap of incompatible worlds!

*(tbf there may be more elsewhere also: e.g in alex cockburn's underground weekly 7 Days which isn't currently arechived on-line (or wasn't when i last looked) (pre-pandemic)

I will check out the LRB archive!

you have to pay per article :(

(which fair enough i guess -- they have a business model and writers shd be paid for their craft)

BUT

Surely not the LRB archive?

The NLR archive?

I'm unsure if it was Mark S who gave me PA on the Stones, or vice versa - I think the latter - in any case we discussed it quite a bit at some point. Possibly not on ILX. Possibly even in an actual pub.

PA's argument on the Stones is actually relatively good and distinct (ie: good because it is an argument at all, not just waffle). It's something like: the Stones are more interesting than others from a progressive POV, because they proceed by taking reactionary things (like sexism) to an extreme.

This argument is structurally very similar to Adam Mars-Jones' VENUS ENVY (c.1990?) in its praise of Alasdair Gray in contrast to Amis & McEwan.

I tend to agree with Mark S re PA on Foucault - that line didn't work very well. For PA's overall take on MF one might want to go back to the very entertaining IN THE TRACKS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (1983?).

oops yes apologies zelda, i meant the NLR achive not the LRB archive

i shouldn't actually be posting at all this morning i am RGHT UP AGAINST IT deadline-wise

[posts some more]

Coming back from a long ILX hibernation and have to post in reply to the parody article upthread, I genuinely LOL'd - thanks for sharing that! It looks like there are some old blog posts about him floating online as Richard Merton w/ excerpts (https://chaosofmemories.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/perry-anderson-meets-the-rolling-stones)

A t/s question on British Marxist historians writing music criticism under a pseudonym: Richard Merton (Perry) vs Francis Newton (Eric Hobsbawm)?

I still have to read the new LRB essays when I have the time...

PA on music would always interest me much more than EJH - simply because EJH, like Philip Larkin I suppose, only wrote about jazz. The very idea of PA on the Stones is, by contrast, utterly compelling to me.

That's a good blog post.