The Murmur of Engines
F or more than fifty years, Perry Anderson has been the most erudite and compelling voice on the British Marxist left. His writing has always been marked by prodigious reading across the widest possible front, a commitment to clarity and analytical rigour, and fidelity to a materialist reading of history. The style is cool and forensic, its austere surfaces set off by a sprinkling of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned Anderson wide renown for the brilliance and complexity of their conceptual architecture, though the empirical soundness of their arguments was challenged by some historical specialists. The epochal disappointments of the 1980s, when it became clear that the political hopes of the radical left were not going to be realised any time soon, had a muting effect. The mordancy of the early decades made way for the realism of the mature Anderson style, marked by long and probing critical essays focused on individual issues and thinkers.
There was a mid-19th-century moment when critics emerged as arbiters of the present, applying a science of discernment whose purposes were no less (and sometimes were more) ambitious than those of the works they examined. Anderson is a critic in this mould. His attention falls not just on works, but also on the persons who fashion them. This is not because he is in the business of augmenting or destroying reputations, but because he sees writing as a way of being active in the world. He can say, with Sainte-Beuve, who pioneered this exalted form of critique: ‘I do not look upon literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man and his nature; I can savour a work, but it is difficult for me to judge it separately from the man himself. For me, literary inquiry leads quite naturally into moral inquiry.’
