Marxism and Form (Page 3)

Yet to what readership, so much of the world having changed, does Anderson now address himself, and from what vantage point, so many of the old doctrinal certainties having shriveled, does he now write? One of the phrases that has been used to identify the characteristic perspective of Anderson's recent work is "Olympian universalism." The noun is obviously apt: Not only is Anderson a staunch adherent of the Enlightenment tradition of unfettered rational analysis; he is a universalist in the geographical as well as philosophical sense, attending impartially to developments in all parts of the world. He is the least parochial of writers--apart, I feel bound to say, from his constant (and, in its way, parochial) dismissiveness of English culture as incorrigibly sterile and hidebound.

But "Olympian," too, does capture something that may be becoming more and more characteristic of his writing voice. One index of this that may at first appear no more than an idiosyncratic indulgence comes to strike the reader as a systematic self-distancing from the popular and demotic, and that is Anderson's deliberate deployment of a recondite, but nontechnical, vocabulary. Where else in contemporary writing is one likely to come across the following terms, culled almost at random from among these essays: magma, taxative, lustration, censitary, carmagnoles, scoria, galumphery, alembicated, exaptation, caducity, postilla, plus near archaisms such as contemn, glozing and moiety, as well as neuralgic (used to characterize an argument) and brigade (used as a verb, a particular favorite of Anderson's)? In addition, the extent to which his prose is sprinkled with words and phrases taken from other languages puts him in company with older grandees of European letters like George Steiner (he hits the true Steinerian note in such sentences as: "Leopardi is the last major European writer to be a direct interlocutor of Antiquity"). Even omitting the many French terms that can plausibly lay claim to a presence in educated English, we encounter tat gratuit, salonfähig, glacis, cabotage, guerres en chaîne, signum rememorativum, déphasage, en toutes lettres, chasses gardées, décombres, in nuce, fin de non recevoir, plumpes Denken and many more. No one could accuse Anderson of playing to the gallery. Instead, he moves with confidence among the choice spirits of European culture, past more than present, capable of seeming as distant as Petrarch or Spinoza from the streetwise Netheads who define contemporary popular styles.

Except, of course, when it comes to politics, and with Anderson it always does come to politics--or, rather, it always starts there. The primacy of the political in intellectual life is the unifying theme of these essays, and "politics is always a Kampfplatz," as he characteristically put it in his NLR editorial. The limply academic "site of struggle" would be a poor substitute for the German term here: Anderson has in mind a more direct clash between two opposing sides. The informing impulse of his analyses is to reveal how there always are only two sides. On this matter he speaks admiringly of the contention by the conservative German political philosopher and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that the defining feature of politics is the division between "friend" and "foe." This insistence lends a certain spatial simplicity to Anderson's charting of the intellectual field. On first inspection, various thinkers may appear to have multiple affiliations or to be otherwise hard to classify politically, but one of the most familiar cadences of Anderson's prose is the sound of digging beyond these surface distractions. For example, Ferdinand Mount may seem to be sympathetic to a number of radical constitutional reforms, "but the generous note struck on these pages must still find its place within the score as a whole." Similarly, Garton Ash's "sincerity" in criticizing the Western record in the Balkans may be "beyond question," but his promotion of the notion of "Central Europe" needs to be unmasked as "ideological," possessing "a hard policy edge." The center always turns out to be uninhabitable ground in Anderson's polarizing political topography; the "logic" (a favored term) of the underlying affiliations will always come out. Even iconic left-liberals like Habermas and Bobbio "ultimately" (another favored term) reveal their true colors. A highly critical account of the two philosophers' responses to "successive wars waged by the West" in the 1990s concludes: "The political complexion of such positions is clear enough." In these pieces Anderson acts as a zealous health-and-safety inspector for the left consumer, insisting that a range of interesting writing be labeled "Dangerous: May contain liberalism."

The other governing intellectual strategy of Anderson's writing is, these days, left more implicit: It might, unsympathetically, be termed "the tyranny of deep explanation." In parodies of old-style communist rhetoric, a place was always found for the phrase "It is no accident, comrade, that..." where the contention in question would assert a common causality linking two improbably distant developments. Anderson could no more be charged with crude economic determinism than with crude anything else. But a disposition to explain "consciousness" in terms of "social being" (to invoke Marx's canonical formula) lingers. As in so much contemporary work in the humanities and social sciences, especially of a self-described "radical" inclination, a particular cachet attaches to "explaining" ideas or aesthetic creations as the expression of some set of social circumstances assumed to be more fundamental. When this strategy is conjoined with a thoroughgoing insistence on the underlying topography of the Kampfplatz, one always risks hitting a paranoid note or seeming to understand history in terms of conspiracy theory writ large. One does not have to be committed to a know-nothing nominalism to find some of these proposed connections implausibly tight, just as one does not have to be a political innocent to find some of the alleged mechanisms implausibly sinister. Certainly, there are times in reading Anderson when history can seem like "no accident" waiting to happen.

This set of intellectual dispositions seems most likely to pay dividends when addressed to the work of figures who directly engaged in the ideological debate of their time, like Schmitt and Hayek. Less promising material is provided by figures who stuck closely to their own disciplinary protocols, like John Rawls. For the most part, Anderson provides a full and fair recension even of those theories he goes on to criticize, but I detect signs of impatience in his dealings with Rawls, perhaps akin to the impatience that characterized the younger Anderson's dismissive remarks about British philosophy of the 1950s and '60s. What he terms Rawls's "complete abstention" about commenting on current affairs is surely one source of this impatience; Anderson expects thinkers to act as public intellectuals, especially when their trade is political philosophy. But a knock-on effect of the tyranny of deep explanation may be at work, too. Thus, in his powerfully forensic recent piece on the responses of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio to the international conflicts of the end of the twentieth century, Anderson looks to (a selective description of) early political experience to account for the character of their respective philosophical enterprises: "Service in America's war to regain the Pacific; a boyhood in Nazi Germany; underground resistance against Italian Fascism. It would be surprising if three such distinct experiences were without trace in the work of those who went through them." "It would be surprising" sets off uncomfortable echoes of "it is no accident." But would it be so surprising? It is not, after all and pace Anderson's second sentence, the distinctiveness of the three experiences that makes them likely to leave this kind of trace: It would have to be, rather, that in each case the formative power of the experience was strong enough and relevant enough to affect the later work. The experiences in question came early in these figures' respective lives, before any of them had embarked on their defining adult activity. Moreover, not only are the experiences different; the genres of subsequent work were different, too. One can readily see why, in Bobbio's case, his involvement in the partisan resistance to Fascism might stand in an illuminating relation to his writings on postwar Italian politics. But Rawls was doing philosophy, and both the Kantian and analytic traditions that shaped his work gave that enterprise something of a formal or autotelic character. Anderson's tactics with Rawls, who comes in for some rough handling in this book, may occasionally appear to deny this enterprise its own internal imperatives.

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