Читать книгу Arguments Within English Marxism - Perry Anderson - Страница 8

Edward Thompson is our finest socialist writer today—certainly in England, possibly in Europe. Readers of The Making of the English Working Class, or indeed Whigs and Hunters, will always remember these as major works of literature. The wonderful variety of timbre and rhythm commanded by Thompson’s writing at the height of its powers—alternately passionate and playful, caustic and delicate, colloquial and decorous—has no peer on the Left. Arguably, too, the strictly historical achievement of the series of studies that extends across the 19th and 18th centuries from William Morris to the rich group of recent essays whose collection is promised in Customs in Common is perhaps the most original product of the corpus of English Marxist historiography to which so many gifted scholars have contributed. Setting aside any other consideration, it is rare for any researcher to become equally at home in two such contrasted epochs. Whatever comparative estimate is made in this respect—where doubtless no final judgement is attainable—two distinctive characteristics of Thompson’s practice as a historian stand out. Throughout, his has been the most declared political history of any of his generation. Every major, and nearly every minor, work he has written concludes with an avowed and direct reflection on its lessons for socialists of his own time. William Morris closes with a discussion of ‘moral realism’; The Making of the English Working Class recalls our debt to the ‘liberty tree’ planted by the early English proletariat; Whigs and Hunters ends with a general revaluation of the ‘rule of law’; an essay like ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’¹ speculates on the possible synthesis of ‘old and new time-senses’ in a communist society of the future that has surpassed the ‘problem of leisure’. Each of these texts has been in its own way a militant intervention in the present, as well as a professional recovery of the past. The massive consistency of their direction, from the mid 50s to the late 70s, visibly attested in the long Postscript to the new edition of the study of Morris (1977) is profoundly impressive. At the same time, these works of history have also been deliberate and focused contributions to theory: no other Marxist historian has taken such pains to confront and explore, without insinuation or circumlocution, difficult conceptual questions in the pursuit of their research. The definitions of ‘class’ and ‘class consciousness’ in The Making of the English Working Class; the critique of ‘base and superstructure’ through the prism of law in Whigs and Hunters; the reinstatement as disciplined imagination of ‘utopianism’ in the new edition of William Morris—all these represent theoretical arguments that are not mere enclaves within the respective historical discourses, but form rather their natural culmination and resolution.

The claim on our critical respect and gratitude, then, is one of formidable magnitude and complexity. Some appraisal of Thompson’s central ideas and concerns is, however, long overdue. The publication of The Poverty of Theory provides an occasion to begin such an assessment.² Released over a year ago, it has received a generally favourable press in England. But at the date of writing, no extended response to it has so far appeared. Given the challenge of the book, this seems like something of an anti-climax. In many ways, I cannot be regarded as the most apposite interlocutor. The Poverty of Theory contains four essays, three already published and one unpublished. The former include the famous critique of views of English society and history developed in New Left Review, entitled ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, to which I rejoined over a decade ago. The latter is an attack across two hundred pages on the thought of Louis Althusser, and by its scale and novelty inevitably dominates the book. The appropriate respondent to it would obviously be an Althusserian. However, in the absence for the moment of more indicated candidates, it seems worthwhile at this point to review the theses Thompson sets out in the book-length essay which gives its title—and manifesto—to the volume. For ‘The Poverty of Theory—or an Orrery of Errors’ is not only a polemic against Althusser: it is also the most sustained exposition of Thompson’s own credo, as a historian and as a socialist, that he has given us to date. The purpose of the essay here, then, will be threefold. It will look at Thompson’s criticisms of Althusser, and try to determine their justice. Simultaneously, and more importantly, it will seek to elicit some of the cruces of Thompson’s substantive work, through the grill of the principles and procedures he recommends in The Poverty of Theory.³ The treatment of Althusser, starting moderately and ending in a gale of fury, is unconventional in organization. Discussion of it will be facilitated by some regroupment of its themes, for a more compact comment on them. The Poverty of Theory is, in effect, dominated by four main problems: the character of historical inquiry, the role of human agency in history, the nature and fate of Marxism, and the phenomenon of Stalinism. I will consider each of these in turn, as they present themselves in Thompson’s criticisms of Althusser and in his own practice as a historian; and in conclusion will try to put Thompson’s work into a comparative context, capable of clarifying in some degree the differences which have arisen between him and New Left Review, a journal he took a central part in creating. Whatever our view of specific arguments in The Poverty of Theory, the enterprise itself must be welcomed. It represents the first full-scale engagement by an English historian with a major philosophical system from the continent, over the terrain of Marxism. A direct encounter between the two different discursive traditions represented by Thompson and Althusser has for some time now been much needed, for the development of historical materialism as a whole.⁴ It is to Thompson’s credit that he has undertaken the task, initiating a process of exchange that we must hope will eventually be many-sided.

1.Past and Present, No 38, 1967, pp. 56-97.

2.London, 1978.

3.References to the latter will henceforward be abbreviated to PT; The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin edition: 1963) to MEWC; Whigs and Hunters (1973) to WH; William Morris—Romantic to Revolutionary (1977 re-edition) to WM.

4.See the remarks in Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976, pp. 111-112.