The Peculiarities Of The English

Abstract

In the last year or two, an ambitious work of analysis of British history and social structure has been set in train by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in New Left Review. This work also bears, though mainly by implication, on some major aspects of Marxist theory and analysis. The present essay is concerned to discuss some of the issues and themes which the two authors raise. These articles, taken together, represent a sustained attempt to develop a coherent historical account of British society. Undoubtedly the seminal article is Anderson's "Origins of the Present Crisis". But, if Nairn's work is less inspired, nevertheless both writers clearly inhabit the same mental universe. Both feel themselves to be exiles from an "English ideology" which "in its drooling old age. . . gives rise to a kind of twilight, where 'empiricism' has become myopia and 'liberalism' a sort of blinking uncertainty."