New Left and Socialist Strategy

In the fall of 1956, Anderson began his studies at Oxford University. Within weeks, two events made for a tense campus environment among a student body already divided over political issues such as colonialism and European communism. The Soviet Union put down a revolution in Hungary, while Great Britain and France occupied the Suez Canal.

“It was virtually impossible,” Anderson said later, “for any lively young person not to be very quickly and deeply politicized by that experience.” Anderson and his friends called themselves “New Left” because of their adversarial stance toward the established left-wing currents, social democratic and communist. They did not champion any existing left government — certainly not that of Guy Mollet, France’s socialist prime minister, who sided with Britain over Suez. Nor did they look to Nikita Khrushchev, who had only partially reformed the Soviet Union three years after Joseph Stalin’s death.

For Anderson, politicization meant being active in left scholarly publishing. In 1960, two notable journals, Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner, merged and began publishing as the New Left Review (NLR). Anderson was appointed editor two years later and continued to hold the role until 1983.

His tenure was a major break from the NLR’s first formation. The new NLR reflected its editor’s temperament and the fact that Britain’s anti-nuclear movement had stalled (and with it, the momentum of the New Left). For Anderson, left intellectuals could provide a better understanding of the historical origins of the contemporary capitalist world. Armed with this knowledge, socialists could better confront the capitalists and their rhetoric.

NLR sought to publish original work and translate European ideas for the English-speaking world. Anderson and Tom Nairn also adopted an outsider’s point of view in a series of articles (or “theses,” as they called them) on Great Britain. They wrote about their home as if it were a foreign nation. Such an attitude may have come easy to Anderson, who maintained a detached curiosity about states and national pride.

Big History

Anderson’s fascination with the modern state led to his best-known study, published in two volumes in 1974, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (hereafter, Passages-Lineages). It was part of a planned four-volume work that picked up where Gibbon left off, extending from the Greco-Roman world to the modern system of European capitalist states and into the age of socialist revolution.

Anderson’s ambitious project was thus a work of big history. This was more common at the time than it is today — another Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, had already begun his influential trilogy about the “long nineteenth century” — yet the approach in Passages-Lineages was still rare in the sense that it sought to sustain a narrative over the course of millennia.

His objectives were equally grand. Anderson sought to arm socialists with a necessary history of the modern capitalist state, born in Western Europe, that ultimately conquered the world. Socialists would need such a history, he believed, if they were to seize state power and create a socialist economy and a free society.

Anderson argued that the modern capitalist state was the result of a historically determined sequence that began with the fall of Rome. He compared two aspects of Europe’s complex totality, the East and West, across two millennia. By totality, Anderson meant the combination of economic base and political superstructure and, to a lesser extent, cultural practices.

His approach was the antithesis of what might best be called official social science, an academic orientation that prioritizes the isolation of variables. Even the study of history — Anderson’s professional field — had in the twentieth century favored narrowly construed topics over short time frames. Yet for Anderson, totalization was essential for understanding how the past gave way to the present.

Instead of trying to establish the impact of individual factors on the larger whole, Anderson saw their interaction as producing something beyond their simple addition. “A totality,” he wrote in his essay “Components of the National Culture,” “is an entity whose structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction.” Yet there are countless ways to apply this principle. It is up to the writer to extract the significant from the insignificant parts.

As explained in Passages-Lineages, an early split between Europe’s East and West set each region on a trajectory that had ramifications for the development of feudalism and capitalism. These modes of production (a term that refers to how societies produce necessities for life) occurred in a necessary historical order.

Parcellized Sovereignty

In antiquity, the difference between Europe’s East and West had to do with the more complex political and economic structure of the Eastern Roman Empire, which was built over prior Hellenistic institutions. That earlier formation made the East more complex, durable, and, in a way, more advanced than the West. It was the backwardness of the West that enabled its reliance on large-scale slavery, defined by the ownership of human labor.

European feudalism in the West, which peaked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was for Anderson the result of a “catastrophic collision” between the Roman and Germanic social formations after the invasions that broke up the western part of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. He saw feudalism as a true synthesis of those earlier forms.

Those who labored were serfs, unfree, having been coerced into their positions through extraeconomic means, such as legal codes, sheer force, or other political instruments. They were required to work the land of another person in exchange for protection.

The political structure of feudalism was its own species of authority. Medieval Europe was characterized by what Anderson called the “parcellization of sovereignty.” Although political and economic authorities were fused together, they were never subject to a single overarching power. Instead social relations were separately managed at each step of the feudal hierarchy.

At the top, the monarch was beholden to his immediate subordinates (vassals), while the Church exerted independent power over medieval culture. Furthermore patchwork governance meant that some areas remained autonomous, such as communal lands (of woods, fields, and pastures, controlled by peasants) and the medieval town (where many skilled artisans lived). Anderson revealed an enduring politico-economic complex. Although its configuration differed from that of modern international capitalism, feudalism would eventually give way to the latter.

Absolutism

In the fourteenth century, everything changed. First, agricultural shortfalls led to famine and unused land grew scarce. Then, the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 caused the population to drop by perhaps as much as 40 percent. The feudal lords managed to put down subsequent peasant revolts, but those rebellions eventually led to social change.

According to Anderson, the development of independent towns and wage labor did not automatically lead to the modern capitalist state. There was no catastrophic collision of forces to be found. Instead an intermediate construct, called absolutism, took hold. Neither medieval nor modern, absolutism was an attempt by European monarchs to hold onto power when faced with the end of serfdom and an emboldened merchant class.

Absolutism amounted to the centralization of power within a feudal system. This did not mean that monarchs were able to assert total authority. Rather, as Anderson described it, the concept of absolutism described the “weight of the new monarchical complex on the aristocratic order itself.”

The relatively independent towns provided cover for the rising merchant class and the development of a proto-capitalist economy, while nascent capitalism coexisted with feudalism for a time. In the East, the same crises led to the opposite outcome: the consolidation of feudalism.

Anderson distinguished between two waves of enserfment: the first in the West from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, and the second in the East from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Although scholars commonly referred to the latter phenomenon as a “second serfdom” in Europe, in reality serfdom had never previously taken hold in the East.

The vast East did not have the same labor supply as the West. Monarchs imposed their will on the towns and pressed peasants into serfdom:

The Absolutist State in the West was the redeployed political apparatus of a feudal class which had accepted the commutation of dues. It was a compensation for the disappearance of serfdom, in the context of an increasingly urban economy which it did not completely control and to which it had to adapt. The Absolutist State in the East, by contrast, was the repressive machine of a feudal class that had just erased the traditional communal freedoms of the poor. It was a device for the consolidation of serfdom, in a landscape scoured of autonomous urban life or resistance.

Perhaps the most significant development in the East was the constant threat of war. As absolutist states in the West sought to exercise greater international power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, states in the East developed similar structures as a mode of self-defense.

Anderson’s narrative about the West showed a more complex view of sovereignty than is commonly found in the field of international relations. His narrative about the East showed a more complex view of the transition to capitalism. In both cases, the outcome of the early modern world was shaped by their political economies from a thousand years prior.

The Missing Revolutions

In the half century since Passages-Lineages, Anderson has not published his planned third and fourth volumes on the age of bourgeois and socialist revolutions. Gregory Elliott once suggested that the gap “constitutes the single most important fact about Anderson’s intellectual career — the ‘absent centre’ of his oeuvre.”

He has written extensively about modern European history, notably in books such as The New Old World (2009) and Ever Closer Union? (2021). These works extended his assessment of European capitalism into the twenty-first century. However, Anderson has not written as much about the proposed subject of the missing third volume, the bourgeois revolutions. This popular but contested idea refers to the end of feudalism that was supposed to have come about in countries like England and France at the hands of the rising bourgeoisie.

Scholars have long wondered why Anderson did not complete his project. Many surmised that he became convinced by Robert Brenner’s alternative explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in his 1976 essay, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe.” This essay launched a wide-ranging controversy about the origins of capitalism among historians known simply as the Brenner debate.

In this account, the role of the bourgeoisie was less significant than Marxists often assumed it to be. The real source of change, according to Brenner’s argument, lay in struggles between lords and peasants in the English countryside from the Late Middle Ages on. There was no need in this schema for a revolutionary bourgeoisie capable of mobilizing against the feudal order — indeed, revisionist historians of the English and French revolutions had begun to question whether such a class had ever existed.

Despite his admiration for Brenner, Anderson did not seem to have changed his mind in the light of this debate. He expressed doubts about the Brenner thesis in a letter to Immanuel Wallerstein (who, for his part, was skeptical about Brenner’s but also about Anderson’s account of the transition). When Brenner published his history of the English Civil War, Merchants and Revolution, in 1993, a review by Anderson warmly praised the work. But he argued that it provided strong evidence to refute some of Brenner’s previous arguments:

What converted a Parliamentary revolt into an armed revolution was, on Brenner’s showing, the catalytic role of the new merchants in London. Here, if ever, were revolutionary bourgeois. The species declared a fiction in France was bel et bien a reality in England, a hundred and fifty years before the Convention. There is a nice irony that it should be massive historical evidence, running against — not with — a theoretical conviction which has brought a Marxist scholar to this conclusion.

While working on his millennia-spanning histories of European social formation, Anderson also published several books about the intellectual development and challenges of Marxist theory: Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Arguments Within English Marxism (1980), and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983).  Yet in the 1980s, he saw the ideological spectrum move decisively to the right, in nearly every part of the globe.

Politically the decade brought the right-wing governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. Their neoliberal ideology promised lasting peace and prosperity through rolling back the postwar welfare state. Instead of producing an ideological backlash, neoliberalism won over long-established parties of the center and Left. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton adopted its tenets as their own, implementing welfare cuts that even their conservative counterparts would not have attempted twenty years earlier.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, free-market capitalism spread across the former Eastern Bloc like wildfire. Francis Fukuyama celebrated this period as the “end of history” in an article and book of the same name. For his part, Anderson responded to the Right’s ideological advancement by publishing analyses of countries and regions as well as essays about notable intellectuals from across the spectrum.

New Directions

As early as 1983, in the final installment of his “unpremeditated trilogy” on Western Marxism, Anderson wrote that the “flow of theory” over the past decade had not “run in the direction I envisaged.” By 2000, in an editorial for NLR, he could describe the closing of the twentieth century as a “neo-liberal grand slam.”

That same essay, “Renewals,” marked Anderson’s return as NLR editor (until 2003). He argued that the Right had won the twentieth century, describing neoliberalism as “the most successful ideology in world history,” and urged the Left to recognize the scale of its rout while also maintaining its opposition to capitalism. Political defeat did not equate to a change in beliefs.

Passages-Lineages and the trilogy that began with Considerations on Western Marxism were intended to be useful for socialist revolutionaries, as left-wing optimism endured. Anderson’s later writings addressed a very different political conjuncture. Against this backdrop, socialists did not need a guide for seizing power — they needed a guide for survival. This guide was also to be rooted in theory and history and, perhaps most important, in its uncompromising attitude.

Occasionally Anderson has mused about better worlds, both possible and utopian. In a 2004 essay on the work of Fredric Jameson, “The River of Time,” he cited a passage from Jameson’s Brecht and Method that described “the movement of this great river of time or the Tao that will slowly carry us downstream again to the moment of praxis.”

Water flows and brings change with it. It remains important today to dispute the rhetoric of inevitability frequently found in neoliberal writings. Yet the great danger facing humanity is that the river of time seems to be flowing in reverse.