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Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

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Here Perry Anderson groups together a bunch of essays written over the last fifteen years or so under the concept of the political spectrum, from right to left (and then, with no compelling explanation, appends essays on the London Review of Books and his father). His essay on right wing theorists Oakshoot, Schmitt, Straus and Hayek is too deferential. His choice of leftists--Thompson, Therborn, Brenner, Timpanaro, Marquez and Hobsbawm--is a little sad. It is as if the left does not produce thinkers anymore--admittedly most of his choices skew old (although the book is loaded with comments on contemporary politics, the cycle of struggles epitomized by Seattle-Genoa-Prague goes virtually unmentioned, as do any thinkers associated with the global justice movement or the World Social Forum). His liveliest writing is about centrists like Rawls and Habermas. Apparently support of US military interventions in places like Yugoslovia is what really gets Anderson angry these days--much more so than support for neoliberal policies. These essays, and the ones on Timothy Garton Ash (filed under the right, but of a piece with the centrists in his support for the US) and Hobsbawm (the best essay about a leftist) are the most worthwhile. There are many little gems scattered elsewhere--his theory about Italian intellectual life (in the essay on Timpanaro), his preference for the memoir of the reactionary Vargas Llosa to Garcia Marquez, etc. Anderson is always interesting, and his indifference to contemporary academic techniques of intellectual history is tonic (and, depending on your taste, you may find his vocabulary, the most obscure of anyone writing in English since Nabokov, either brilliant or pretentious); but he exaggerates the importance of the end of the cold war, which has clearly left him in a funk; and, even for an English Marxist, he is ridiculously tone deaf on US politics.

This a very stimulating collection of essays, of enormous intellectual range, provoking thought about matters of politics, philosophy, economics and history.

In the first grouping of essays, on politics, he criticises the reactionaries Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek, Ferdinand Mount and Timothy Garton Ash. In the second, on philosophy, he examines the work of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio. In his third section, on history, he surveys more approvingly E. P. Thompson, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Goran Therborn, Robert Brenner and Eric Hobsbawm. In a fourth section, he writes about the London Review of Books and also about his father's strange career in pre-revolutionary China.

Anderson is more critical of the undemocratic EU than he used to be, writing of the `dissolution of popular sovereignty at a European level', and noting, "the less immediately democratic the machinery of decision, the safer it was likely to be for the reproduction of capital."

He provides stinging critiques of idealist thinkers, Tory scoundrel Oakeshott and over-rated social democrat Habermas alike. He shows how Habermas' feeble, wishful embrace of capitalism has led him into supporting both the US empire and the growing EU empire.

Anderson explains why it was right to oppose all Labour's wars, against Habermas' initial support for the wars and subsequent equivocations. Anderson notes that Operation Horseshoe, the supposed Serbian plan for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, was a forgery produced by the Bulgarian secret service.

He cites the great American liberal philosopher John Rawls, who revealed the truth of American society and government when he wrote, "the purchase of legislation by `special interests' is an everyday thing."