Anderson is too intelligent and honest to deny the intellectual and political triumph of the right in the past decade, and yet he has never formally renounced his revolutionary convictions. They have just sunk quietly into the background, becoming a kind of coda to what is now his main occupation – the exposition of other people’s ideas. In this he is masterly. Yet intellect and political loyalties still occasionally conflict, producing confusion. A good example of this is his essay on Francis Fukayama’s The End of History. Fukayama’s grand narrative of historical progress – even though it culminates in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy – is of precisely the kind to win Anderson’s admiration. Anderson defends it against its detractors, claiming, on impeccably Marxist grounds, that their various refutations of Fukayama’s hypothesis amount to nothing more than local difficulties, and do not constitute a genuine contradiction. But then – as if suddenly realising what he has admitted – he amasses a whole set of difficulties of his own, ranging from environmental problems to feminism. But these are no more a fundamental contradiction than the difficulties he has previously dismissed. All are manageable within the confines of the present world-system. Fukayama has beaten Anderson at his own game.
Editor: Reader consider these portions of Commentary – Endgame by Joseph McCarney: Radical Philosophy 62, Autumn 1992
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In sharp contrast Perry Anderson hails it in A Zone of Engagement as a work of ‘conviction and elegance’ ,of’ graceful fluency’ and’ original argument’ , a ‘remarkable feat of composition’ in which ‘for the first time, the philosophical discourse of the end of history has found a commanding political expression’. ‘It is safe to say,’ he adds, ‘that no one has ever attempted a comparable synthesis – at once so deep in ontological premise and so close to the surface of global politics.’ These generous words may also be taken as illustrating a larger tendency. Clearly, the reception of Fukuyama ‘s book offers a rich field of inquiry.
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Perry Anderson gives the principle of them in remarking that the Right’s charge of ‘inverted Marxism’ is grounds for tribute on the Left. His own tribute is delivered in A Zone of Engagement with an intellectual force and authority that risks incongruously overshadowing its subject.
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Fred Halliday’s report in New Left Review 193 on ‘An Encounter with Fukuyama’ is the product of one of those unsatisfactory confrontations. This was a television discussion which was, as Halliday says, ‘somewhat deviated by the interventions of a bibulous Labour dignitary’ . Hence, it did not even begin to get the measure of Fukuyama’ s ideas and Halliday now seeks to make amends on his own account. He does this by graphically outlining some of the ‘many questions of interest and challenge to historical materialism’ raised by Fukuyama’s work. For present purposes, however, it may be enough to note his conclusion in which, echoing the ‘inverted Marxism’ theme, he suggests thatthe ‘problem with Fukuyama’s theory’ might be solved by doing to him ‘what Feuerbach did to Hegel, namely turn him on his head’. Halliday takes it to be a measure of Fukuyama’s breadth of reading and tolerance of his critics that he did not seem ‘too perturbed’ by the suggestion. Such equanimity deserves to be probed further. But first one should take account of the record of a meeting with a representative of historical materialism that is even warmer in tone and undeviated in its significance. This is Andrew Chitty’S interview in the second issue of Analysis, by far the most revealing document for Fukuyama’s thinking to have emerged from his British visit. In it Chitty refers to the vitriolic tone of much right-wing and establishment comment on the book, contrasting it with his own view as a Marxist that it is ‘one of the most developed expressions’ of bourgeois thought in the last twenty or thirty years. For the most striking vignette of Fukuyama’ s encounter with the British Left one has, however, to look to the occasion of his debate with Terry Eagleton. It came at question time when a speaker from the floor asked whether Fukuyama realised that the only friends he had in the world were orthodox Marxists like himself. Once again Fukuyama did not seem too perturbed. He seemed rather to endorse the suggestion in a complex reaction which united insight, resignation and humour. In the interview with Chitty he had declared himself proud to be an exemplar of bourgeois thought. Yet the responses to Halliday and to his anonymous questioner hint at levels of self-consciousness not adequately captured in that description, at a sensibility less flatly bourgeois than he likes to profess to the world.
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Indeed Fukuyama’s book can plausibly be read as the record of a struggle for his soul between Kojeve and Strauss. This unacknowledged and unresolved drama may go some way to account for the impression of generalised ambiguity the work has made on many readers
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This is so because the esoteric message of Fukuyama’s book is not at all personally congenial to him as a patriotic American liberal. His problem is that he lacks the theoretical resources to put up any serious resistance to it. Yet such resources are available in the tradition from which he claims indirect descent. For Hegel history is emphatically not to be characterised as essentially a struggle for recognition. It is rather ‘the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. A proper articulation of this view would surely enable one to see why the end of history is not, in principle, on offer from any kind of collectivist authoritarianism. That this is not clear to Fukuyama should be put down to the fact that, as various commentators have noted, the idea of freedom has no significant role in his theoretical scheme. The occasional references to it are the merest lip-service without any sense of intellectual or normative pressure behind them. This is perhaps not too surprising in view of the immediate provenance of his work, as outlined here. A living concern with freedom is scarcely to be acquired from a· conservative elitist such as Strauss. On the other hand, an interest in it as an ideal is, notoriously, not to be found in Kojeve either, ‘un Stalinien de stricte observance’, as he described himself. Nothing could better illustrate Fukuyama’s own distinctive brand of irony than his deadpan attempt to explain the problems in seeing Kojeve ‘as a liberal’. For Fukuyama to escape from his dilemma here he would need direct access to Hegel, unmediated by such an interpreter. An important lesson of his book is that his critics and admirers on the Left need this access too, now more than ever. As Kojeve’ s pupil, Lacan, remarked, it is just when we think we may be moving further away from Hegel that he may be sneaking up behind us. His understanding of how individual freedom may be concretely realised in a rationally-ordered community is still an indispensable starting point, indeed an as yet untranscended horizon of thought. The case for a welcome for Fukuyama from the Left rests on the assumption that his project and some of his methodology can be adapted in the service of quite other conclusions. From this standpoint it appears that the Right shows a sound instinct in being suspicious of him. The philosophy of history is our subject, and, now that Fukuyama has helped to put it back on the agenda, we have to take it over and revivify it. Our entire intellectual tradition rests on the belief that the truth of Hegel’s dialectic is socialism. This truth urgently needs to be demonstrated once again in the accents of our time.
Defeated on the political plane, Anderson has at last succumbed to the “siren voices of idealism”. His latest essay, The Origins of Postmodernity, is a work of cultural criticism in the classic tradition of Benjamin and Adorno. It is essentially a defence and an elaboration of Frederic Jameson’s thesis that postmodernism constitutes “the cultural logic of late capitalism”.
Postmodernism is a natural target of attack for a Marxist. What it signifies is the final disappearance of any critical perspective on the capitalist order. The Soviet Union, for all its imperfections, provided such a perspective, and its existence sustained the avant-garde throughout Europe and America. Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is immediately assimilated and commodified. Art, realising this, has abandoned its haughty intransigence and entered into alliance with the market. The tone of the essay is one of sorrowful resignation. Anderson can diagnose the malady, but he has no cure.
There is something strangely conservative about Anderson’s denunciation of a world in which, to quote Jameson, “we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience”. All that remains of Marxism, now that the political illusions have been shattered, is nostalgia for a lost seriousness. It can hardly be a coincidence that the fiercest critics of postmodernism, the most intransigent defenders of the eternal verities, have all been Marxists: Alex Callinicos, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton. At first glance this appears an ironic reversal, but on reflection it could hardly have been otherwise. Marxism cannot be other than conservative, because the one truly revolutionary ideology of the modern world – under whose sign “everything solid melts into air” – is capitalism.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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