Perry Anderson Marxism And The New Left

For over forty years Perry Anderson, has been one of the most influential figures on the intellectual Left. Through his writings, his publishing, his editing of New Left Review, and teaching at UCLA, he has introduced and disseminated a range of European Marxist opinion to the English speaking world: Deutscher, Gramsci, Sartre, Lukacs, Althusser, Poulantzas, to name a few. His own books are seminal contributions to political theory. This survey of Anderson's works explores a myriad of political writings, considers the evolution of an influential current of New Left thinking from the 1960's onwards, and reviews its engagement with critical theorists such as Brenner, Fukuyama and Jameson.

"This first full reconstruction of Perry Anderson's distinguished career provides an overview of the evolution of the British New Left since 1956 and reveals a great deal about the vicissitudes of Marxist theory and political practice in the era of post-Stalinist communism. Gregory Elliott ultimately argues that, notwithstanding significant discontinuities in his intellectual development, Anderson remains a critically engaged thinker of the intransigent Left - a contemporary historian whose commitment to the long view renders him an indispensable commentator on our times. Elliott also sketches the collective career of New Left Review, one of the most influential international journals of the postwar period."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to the cultural mutations of bourgeois thought in their time. The philosophical antecedents of the various school within this tradition - Lukcsian, Gramscian, Frankfurt, Sartrean, Althusserian and Della Volpean - are compared, and the specific innovations of their respective systems surveyed. The structural unity of 'Western Marxism', beyond the diversity of its individual thinkers, is then assessed, in a balance-sheet that contrasts its heritage with the tradition of 'classical' Marxism that preceded it, and with the commanding problems which will confront any historical materialism to succeed it.

A major essay on the thought of the great Italian Marxist Perry Anderson’s essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” first published in New Left Review in 1976, was an explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist. Since then it has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci’s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, and war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci’s work, the essay shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany. Here arguments crisscrossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukács and Trotsky, with later echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections the essay provoked and the reasons for them. This edition also includes the first English translation of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures in prison.

The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class is probably the most influential single work of historical scholarship by a socialist today. An editor of The New Reasoner in 1957–59, a founder of the New Left in 1960, now an eloquent champion of civil rights, Thompson has most recently aroused widespread interest with the appearance of his Poverty of Theory, which combines philosophical and political polemic with Louis Althusser, and powerful advocacy of the historian’s craft. Arguments Within English Marxism is an assessment of its central theses that relates them to Thompson’s major historical writings themselves. Thus the role of human agency—the part of the conscious choice and active will—in history is discussed through consideration of its treatment in The Making of the English Working Class. The problems of base and superstructure in historical materialism, and of affiliation to values in the past, are reviewed in the light of Whigs and Hunters. The claims of utopian imagination are illustrated from the findings of William Morris. Questions of socialist strategy are broached in part through the articles now collected in Writing by Candlelight. Exploring at once differences and convergences between New Left Review and one of its founders, the essay concludes by suggesting the virtues of diversity within a common socialist culture.

The focus of Spectrum is the range of contemporary ideas that runs from conservative to liberal to radical conceptions of state and society, rarely considered in the same optic. It looks at the theories of major minds of the twentieth-century Right, including Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek; liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio; and significant figures in the culture of the Left: the historians Edward Thompson, Robert Brenner and Eric Hobsbawm; the classicist Sebastiano Timpanaro; the sociologist Goran Therborn; the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book concludes with some comparative observations on the two leading intellectual periodicals of the UK and USA, the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books; and a piece of family history.

This is the first of Lucio Colletti's books to be translated into English, in which he considers the scientific character of Marxism. In contrast to the pre-occupation with Hegel and his contribution to the formation of Marx's thought, Colletti goes back on the one hand to the founders of political economy and on the other to Rousseau. In Rousseau's critique of 'civil society' Colletti isolates a crucial watershed in the development of a counter-theory to modern bourgeois society. The second of Colletti's central concerns is with the unity of Marxism. For him it is an integral science of history and of society which denies the pretensions of bourgeois sociology to any scientific status. His attack is concentrated on Max Weber and his epigone Karl Mannheim, but has wider implications for sociology in general. This is followed by a devastating critique of Bernstein's evolutionist 'revision' of Marx. From Rousseau to Lenin also contains a polemical study of Marcuse's 'neo-romantic utopianism', and the masterly statements of the contemporary relevance of Lenin's State and Revolution and Marx's Capital to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origins and outcomes of European integration since the Second World War, and how today's EU has been theorized across a range of contemporary disciplines. It then moves to more detailed accounts of political and cultural developments in the three principal states of the original Common Market-France, Germany and Italy. A third section explores the interrelated histories of Cyprus and Turkey that pose a leading geopolitical challenge to the Community. The book ends by tracing ideas of European unity from the Enlightenment to the present, and their bearing on the future of the Union. The New Old World offers a critical portrait of a continent now increasingly hailed as a moral and political example to the world at large.