Chapter Six against the National Culture

I Perry Anderson’s work traverses not only historical epochs and academic disciplines, but, like his own biography, national borders, languages and ideational cultures. A cosmopolitan intellectual, more at home in the realm of universal ideas than any particular national culture, Anderson has been central to the history of the New Left in Britain, not just as long-time editor of New Left Review, but, above all, as chief interlocutor in a number of the New Left’s definitive debates.1 Perhaps consequent to an extra-territorial and anti-national, certainly anti-populist, social-being, and one that had its origins in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Anderson’s contributions to New Left thought have mostly assumed the ‘top down view’.2 This aspect has been reflected in a style and tone that others have described as ‘Olympian’.3 Not without predicament, and not free of certain interests, Anderson’s cosmopolitanism has provided New Left thought with a unique and illumi- nating perspective on the nexus between socialism and . But this perspective has entailed

1. See D. Thompson 2007, on Anderson’s long-standing association with NLR. He was editor of NLR between 1962 and 1983, although he stood down for one issue in 1968. After 1983, he remained closely involved with the journal, and eventually became editor again in 2000. Recently, he has handed editorship over to Susan Watkins, but he remains on the journal’s editorial board. 2. Anderson’s most pregnant description of the ‘somewhere’ from which he writes appears in Anderson 1974b, p. 8. 3. This characterisation recurs throughout secondary discussions of Anderson’s work. It began with Sedgwick 1976, p. 148. More recently, see Elliott 1998, p. xi; Collini 2008, pp. 187–95. 198 • Chapter Six costs, encouraged ambiguity, and at times resulted in myopia. In Anderson’s case, the telescopic vision from above has produced both illumination and evasion. This chapter will explore Anderson’s engagement with national identity from the angle of his association with New Left political thought; it will pay partic- ular attention to debates with other figures of the New Left, particularly E.P. Thompson, and ‘missed’ debates with Nairn and Hall. It will proceed in the fol- lowing manner. After a brief biographical intermission, the chapter will consider Anderson’s encounter with the national culture in the 1960s, beginning with an analysis of his contributions to the anti-nationalist project of New Left Review after 1962, which will close with an assessment of the ambiguities in his support for revolutionary in the ‘Third World’. Following on this discussion, the chapter will consider Anderson’s conception of the historicity of nationhood through a brief survey of his historical sociology. This survey will be juxtaposed with an enquiry into the nature of Anderson’s post-1968 socialist international- ism informed as it was by the ‘classical Marxist tradition’. Third, it will investigate Anderson’s most recent contributions to the national question, an assessment of his conception of the relationship between nationhood and , and the fortunes of socialism in relation to both. The chapter will conclude with a brief review of the place and value of Anderson’s (socialist) cosmopolitanism in our nationalist world.

II Anderson’s biography constitutes the antithesis of the nineteenth century - alist project.4 He was born in London (although conceived in – this odd biographical detail revealed in a recent essay on his father) in September 1938,5 the same month that Neville Chamberlain consigned the Sudetenland to Nazi dictate and Britain to the brief illusion that war with Germany could be avoided. The instance of Anderson’s birth proves the truth of what his brother, the scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson, has called the ‘counterfeit quality’ of the birth certificate.6 He spent his earliest years in China, where his brother was born, and where his father was employed in the Imperial Customs Union, subject now of an affecting and illuminating study in Anderson’s collection of essays, Spectrum.7 At the outbreak of war in 1939, Anderson went with his aunt to America and

4. Perry Anderson, as Skidelsky has suggested, ‘is notoriously elusive’: see Skidelsky 1999, p. 18. 5. Anderson 2005, p. 345. 6. B. Anderson 1998, p. 70. 7. Anderson 2005, pp. 343–88.