| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Perry Anderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Let's talk now about the period when you were at Oxford. What years were you there?
'56 to '59.
These were intellectually very exciting times. Tell us a little about that period.
I came up to Oxford in September, 1956, and within three weeks, the Soviet invasion of Hungary had occurred, which was, of course, an enormous international event; which came with a great cause: the Hungarian Revolution and its subsequent suppression by the Russian tanks and troops. At the same time, simultaneously, at the very same time, was the Anglo - French - Israeli attack on Egypt after Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal. And so you had this huge international double crisis, interconnected in some sense. That meant that the entire campus was seething, I would say, with political argument, tension, and debate. Not just on one thing, like the Vietnam War, but you had these two completely different events -- what was going on in Europe, and that's communism and what's the fate of communism; and at the same time, what's going on the Middle East, that's to do with colonialism, imperialism, and its sequels.
So it was virtually impossible for any lively young person not to be very quickly and deeply politicized by that experience. It wasn't consensual. It wasn't really like, let's say, what I think occurred on many U.S. campuses during the Vietnam War, where there was a massive, pretty unanimous rejection of the war by young people. You have to remember that in England in '56, the country was at war with Egypt, and large numbers of students and so on, in effect, bought the government's line: "Nasser, that's another Mussolini or another Hitler. We are fighting bravely against the dangers of a fascist dictatorship, and therefore, defending freedom" -- which was a complete pack of lies, of course.
But the fact is that it meant that in our college there was a very, very tense atmosphere between the two camps: those who were against the war and those who were for the war. That's a memorable experience. I can remember going into my college -- I was in one of the two most conservative colleges at Oxford -- and there were, I think, only about three or four of us [against the war]. So you went in for supper, everybody sitting at their benches, and you could feel the atmosphere and the isolation and hostility, because you were against the war but everybody else was in favor of it. In the university as a whole it was split more or less equally, but in this college we were in a very small minority.
In preparing for this interview, I was struck by two distinct concerns in your work. There are the very rich, deep historical studies on the one hand. But also, a focus with what's happening in the world, much like you described in your first days at Oxford. Help me understand how theory helps you deal with the enormity of this intellectual task. Is it difficult to reconcile these two perspectives?
Let me go back to the formative period around the late fifties/early sixties in England. What came out of the crisis and the ferment of late 1956 was, among other things, what came to be known as the New Left, which was originally British. Of course, the Americans spoke of their New Left, and the phrase has gone around the world, there's now a very lively Chinese New Left causing difficulties with the authorities there. But the English New Left was really the first one, and it came out of the idea of a double rejection. You were on the New Left if you were against what the Russians were doing in Hungary and you were against what the European governments, not the American government in this case, but the British and French governments were doing in Egypt.
And so from the immediate political reaction, [there was] the need to demonstrate in the streets, to take a stand against what our government was doing in Egypt, but also against what the Russians were doing in Hungary. Out of that came an attempt to understand what are the larger structures in the world which produced these events, what kind of left is it that ... it was actually a social democratic prime minister in France, for example, who launched the attack against Egypt. And, of course, it is the communist tradition, Stalinist tradition, which produced the monstrosity of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolt. So that was the background.
The British New Left defined itself as neither of those two things. And in doing so, it meant you had to try and think through a series of public questions, which were also intellectual and theoretical questions. It was about the history of the left, about the history of empire -- Soviet Empire/British Empire.
It's about this time that you become part of the New Left Review, is that correct?
Yes, very shortly after. The New Left Review was founded in 1960, the year after I had graduated. I suppose I wrote my first article for it in '61, and became editor in '62.
Tell us a little about this journal, in the context of the history, because it became an outlet for a discussion about both what was happening in the world and how it related to broader sets of theory.
Yes. When I and my immediate cohort took over the Review a couple years after it was founded, our aim was to produce a journal which had the seriousness, the capacity to publish something which was a very developed argument, which you associated with journals in the academy, in academic journals, not just journalistic or educational materials. But at the same time, ones that would be free from the professional apparatus, the necessary ivory tower aspects, of any purely scholarly journal. So it was an attempt to produce a journal that would be radical and scholarly, and at the same time aimed at a general intellectual public.
What is it like to edit a journal like that in those times?
The short answer is to say it was great fun, I have to say. Of course, in your twenties, you feel the weight of the world so greatly. So there's an element, looking back on it, I would say we did things that were in a kind of irresponsible spirit sometimes, because we were carefree, but at the same time, very, very passionately engaged in what we were trying to do.
Another feature of the journal, I should explain, is that we felt strongly that English, actually, Anglo-Saxon from an Anglo-American culture, had become in some way very provincial after the World War II. It was self-enclosed with just English-speaking, cultural, intellectual, and political references. And we thought that absurd. Here we were sitting in London, and there was this huge European continent, and incredibly rich intellectual traditions of its own, a lot going on politically that was fascinating, long histories -- France, Italy, Germany, Spain, so on and so forth. We thought we really have to try and bring that back into our culture, make it a living set of references for our generation. And that was very important, in terms of the international commitment of the journal-- its aim. This is one of the most important tasks that we set ourselves, and I think we did that work pretty well.
When you became editor again, recently, you wrote a long essay defining a new agenda. You talk about the journal as "... a political journal based in London that had tried to preach social and moral sciences -- 'theory,' if you will, and arts and mores -- 'culture,' for short, in the same historical spirit as politics itself." So it was not just politics?
No, no, by no means, no, no. We probably pioneered, for example, modern film studies. I mean, the serious, comparative study of film in the early sixties. And we published in the journal my colleague, Peter Walin, who is now at UCLA. A great architect. But we also published articles on literature, we published articles on philosophy; many, many other subjects other than just directly political ones.
Your work focuses on history and the longer-term dynamics of social and ideological conflict. What do you see as a guiding theme in that work? As a Marxist in orientation, how has grappling with these materials both informed your theory and changed your thinking about that theory?
Let me try to situate how I would see my own writing in the relationship to the intellectual tradition out of which it comes. You had mentioned that this was a Marxist tradition. England is famous for having had the most gifted, extraordinary levy of Marxist historians. 
We didn't have Marxist philosophers, but we did have this very, very great group of Marxist historians -- Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton -- there are many, many others. And that was a very direct influence, a model of attraction to the young people in my generation.
Now, this Marxism concentrated, mostly, I would say, in two areas, one of which was traditional economic history. After all, that's what everybody thought Marxism is about. It's about economic determination, it's about the way in which material production in daily life is the foundation of all the other institutions and ideas in society. You have to look first at the way in which the material products are produced. And so Marxist economic history was a very big field.
Other Marxist historians reacted against this. Edward Thompson is the most famous one, insisting, "No, Marxism isn't just economic determinism. Actually, it's an attempt to understand how people live, not just from what they live." That means you must look at their culture, their mentalities, their outlooks, their subjective hopes and dreams. And so you have a very, very rich cultural Marxism, in which looked at the customs of people, the way people live, and so on; the way they constructed their private life, as well.
So those are the two strands which formed the intermediate intellectual background against which I grew up: the cultural and the economic. My own temperament, I suppose -- it wasn't really such a conscious choice -- but my own temperamental preference was for politics in a somewhat more traditional sense. What Marxists were not very good at was actually discussing political life itself, not the culture as such, and not the economy, but the history of the state, and also the history of political ideas. Those are the two areas that I felt were a bit missing.
So that's what I attempted fundamentally. If you asked me what is the emphasis of my work, I would say that it's the transformations of political authority, state structures on the one hand, and trying to view it in a broad international and comparative way. On the other hand, what are the great moments, adventures, and misadventures of different bodies of political ideas that accompanied these historical transformations?
One of your mentors intellectually is Isaac Deutscher, and in an introduction to a set of his papers, you wrote that he had "serene political fortitude ... a spiritual independence characterized his work ... " and that the universality of what he wrote was given by literary power. Is it fair to say that those are virtues that, in a way, have to characterize this kind of theorizing? Can we extend your description of him to the way you think about what you do yourself?
These are terms of praise for a great historian. I wouldn't ascribe them to myself. That would be a vain and foolish thing to do. But they represent very, very strong values, at any rate, to which one should be attached, and should try to aspire. There's some temperamental element here; again, it takes all sorts to make a world. That's a traditional phrase which retains a lot of validity. Edward Thompson is a case in point, whom I had many debates with when he was alive. You couldn't characterize his temperament as serene at all. He was extraordinarily excited, passionate, turbulent, but he was a very great historian. That's another way of relating to the dramas and difficulties of one's own time.
Next page: The Status of the Left
Related link: Interview with E.P. [Edward] Thompson (1983)
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