The 1980s and '90s administered a series of painful shocks to the milieu to which Anderson's early writing had been addressed. He appears to have undergone something of a political or intellectual crisis in the mid-'80s, leading him not just to reassess the prospects for the left in a world dominated by neoliberalism but also, one may infer, to reconsider the function of his own writing. Displaying an enviable resilience and capacity for self-renewal, he has committed himself to the ideal of "uncompromising realism," however politically discouraging the findings of such realism may be. Whether as a result of this recasting or because of changes in the public sphere of Western societies--or for quite other literary, personal or material reasons--Anderson, always a powerful analyst and coruscating polemicist, has emerged in the past fifteen years or more as one of the leading intellectual essayists of our time, read and admired far beyond any sectarian confines. In 1992 Verso (which he had helped to found as the publishing arm of NLR) issued two collections of his essays: English Questions brought together several already celebrated longer articles on the "deviant" character of British history and politics, viewed from within a particular European Marxist optic, while Zone of Engagement collected pieces mostly focused on recent and contemporary theorists and political commentators. Several of the essays in the latter volume, in particular, are models of serious intellectual appraisal: deeply informed, ranging, severe. There are few writers whose name on the cover of a periodical constitutes an irresistible incitement to find out what they have to say--on whatever the subject may be--but I know I am not alone in putting Anderson in that very select company.

Spectrum is a collection of fifteen essays, all but one of them previously published, the great majority in The London Review of Books or New Left Review. The contents are arranged in a progression across the political spectrum: from "the Intransigent Right" of Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Friedrich von Hayek; through the reformist conservatism of Ferdinand Mount and the anticommunism of Timothy Garton Ash; to "the Adjustable Centre" of John Rawls, Norberto Bobbio and Jürgen Habermas; and on to "the Vanquished Left" of E.P. Thompson, Robert Brenner, Sebastiano Timpanaro and Eric Hobsbawm (plus two slightly more marginal pieces on Göran Therborn and Gabriel García Márquez, both of which appeared originally in these pages). Although Anderson is on record as regarding decolonization and the women's movement as the most significant developments in human emancipation in the past half-century, his subjects in this collection are all European or North American (García Márquez aside) and all male.

Two further, less easily classifiable pieces are included in an appendix. The first is a sympathetic assessment of The London Review of Books from its inception in 1979 to 1996 (the piece first appeared as the introduction to an anthology from the journal published in that year). The other is a remarkable essay, arresting and haunting, on Anderson's father and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service for which he worked, one of the most improbable organizations thrown up by the uneven history of imperialism, largely staffed by well-educated Westerners but answerable to the Chinese government. This piece has some of the satisfactions of amateur family history, delving into Anderson's Anglo-Irish military background, but it is bolstered by his habitual command of the forces, both proximate and distant, at work in shaping world events and is inflected in places by tones not usually associated with his writing--delicate, painterly, compassionate.

The chief impression left by the best essays in this volume is one of extraordinary intellectual power. The analysis of the theoretical and empirical claims made in the work of its subjects is both dazzling and unyielding: These are "critiques" in the full sense of that term in its original German philosophical usage: reconstructions of the internal logic of ideas, deductions of the intellectual and sociological conditions of their possibility, withering exposures of their inconsistencies and omissions. His range is proverbial: It hardly seems fair that one man could move with such ease through the history of so many periods and regions or through so many different kinds of writing. The word "magisterial" is overworked, often as a slack synonym for "impressive," yet if one attends to its definition--"having the bearing of a master, invested with authority"--then the aura of omnicompetent grandeur about Anderson's writing makes the term irresistible. That the contemporary left should possess such a voice, one in which radical political aspirations are blotted neither by phony populism nor by rebarbative academicism, is important and heartening. Anderson remains an inspiring example of thinking in the world, about the world and for the world.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.