| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Perry Anderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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What would you advise students as they prepare for the future? As one listens to you talk about your life, there is an emphasis on a global perspective, there is an emphasis on steeping one's self in an intellectual tradition and in history. How concretely might students learn from your insights and experience and apply them to their own lives?
I would say two principal things. The first is that to acquire a sense of the world in which you live, you really do need to be extremely curious about the past, and not necessarily just the immediate past, but the remote past. This is a very, very future-oriented culture we live in today, but that can blind you. It's a presentist culture, but with a strong leaning to thinking simply about the future. That is a form of blindness. To orient yourself in the world as a young person, I think there's no other way than steeping oneself to the maximum extent possible in the accumulated previous experience of other generations, which are available fundamentally in books, of course. That's still the primary way of acquiring a knowledge of that. It's not exclusive knowledge, because now we have all kinds of other visual aides, which are very important. But that's the first thing: you have to be able to look back as well as forward. In order to be able to look forward intelligently, you need to have a strong sense of what occurred earlier.
The second thing, which is particularly important in the United States, which is an entire universe to itself -- it's a huge continent -- very large numbers of Americans and young Americans have never traveled abroad at all. That's much more difficult to do than if you're perched on the edge of Europe in England or something like that. You're bound to have a sense of these other cultures, but I do think there that the experience of not just travel as a tourist and so on, but living abroad, immersing yourself in some other culture, is absolutely decisive. You can't really be a -- a phrase which is often used -- a "citizen of the world" without some element of that.
One final question. Have you maintained an optimism about the future, given the theories that have guided your perspective on the world, and the present state of the world?
I never use the terms "optimism" or "pessimism" about myself. There were many people who became radicalized in the 1960s [who were] about, I would say, five, ten years younger than myself and my contemporaries, who had incredibly high hopes that the entire world would be changed through the turmoil of the late sixties and the early seventies. When that didn't happen, they were completely crushed, they were utterly disappointed, and they became either passive or very pessimistic. That was a very broad phenomenon. I never felt this because I came to, I suppose you might say, political consciousness, some historical consciousness, in the period in which the established order was very, very strong. You never felt that it was going to be overthrown overnight or changed radically. You were aware, if you were thinking about long-run history, that big historical changes take an awful long time to work their way through.
So the fact that the left was very strong internationally between the fifties and the seventies, and then has been very weak since then, that's just part of the flow of the time. It's never intimidated or discouraged me. I wouldn't say I was pessimistic then, just as I wouldn't have said, if you said to me in the late sixties, "Look at all this is going on around the world, the upsurges, insurgencies everywhere. Are you very optimistic?" -- I would have been rather cautious and said, "Well, no, it's great what's happening now, but, it may not last. We have to wait and see what the next turn of the wheel will bring."
So that brings us to a third point of advice for students, and that is, always maintain a dose of realism in what you're doing.
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.
Professor Anderson, thank you very much for taking the time to be here today, and for giving yesterday's Elberg Lecture.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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