new left review 1 jan feb 2000 1

T
he life-span of journals is no warrant of their achieve-
ment. A couple of issues, and abrupt extinction, can count for
more in the history of a culture than a century of continuous
publication. In its three years, the Athenaeum put German
Romanticism into orbit. The reworks of the Revue Blanche, the rst
journal of a modern avant-garde, lit Paris for barely a decade. Lef closed
after seven issues in Moscow. These were reviews at the intersection of
aesthetic innovation with philosophy and politics. Journals of criticism
have often survived longerThe Criterion, in various incarnations, for
most of the inter-war period, Scrutiny from the thirties into the fties.
Reasons for closure might be external, even accidental, but typically the
vitality of a journal is tied to those who create it. In heroic cases, a single
individual can defy time with the composition of a personal monument:
Kraus writing Die Fackel alone for twenty-ve years, Croce rivalling the
feat with La Critica. Usually, life-cycles of journals are more adventi-
tious and dispersed. Editors quarrel, change their minds, get bored or go
bankrupt, for the most part well before they go to the grave themselves.
A political journal is as subject to the incidents of mortality as any other.
In one respect, more sosince politics is always a Kampfplatz, a eld of
division, breaking ties and forcing conicts. Wreckage through disputes
or scissions is more frequent here than anywhere else. In other respects,
however, political journals have a different reason for being, that makes
renewal beyond their rst impetus a test specic to them. They stand
both for certain objective principles, and the capacity of these to decipher
the course of the world. Here, editorial fade-out is intellectual defeat.
Material or institutional pressures may, of course, cut off any periodical
RENEWALS
perry anderson
Editorial
2 nlr 1
in its prime. But short of such circumstances, political journals have no
choice: to be true to themselves, they must aim to extend their real life
beyond the conditions or generations that gave rise to them.
This journal, now entering its fth decade, has reached such a point.
Forty years is a signicant span of activity, though not an extraordinary
oneLes Temps Modernes, from which NLR learnt a good deal in its early
days, has lasted much longer. But it is sufcient to call for an overhaul.
With this issue, we start a new series of the journal marked by a break of
numerals, in keeping with radical tradition, and a redesign of its appear-
ance, in token of changes to come. Charged for the moment with the
transition to another style of review, not to be achieved overnight, I set
out below my own view of the situation of NLR today, and the directions
it should begin to take. Billed as an editorial, the result is nonetheless a
personaland therefore provisionalstatement: open to contradiction.
So too will be the editorials that follow in each issue, written on topics
of their choice by others, without presumption of any automatic agree-
ment.
1
Any consideration of the future of NLR must start from its differentia
specica. What has made it distinctive as a journal of the Left? There
would be a number of ways of answering this, but the simplest and most
succinct is this. No other such review has attempted to publish across
the same range of terrainstretching from politics to economics to aes-
thetics to philosophy to sociologywith the same freedoms of length
and detail, where required. This span has never been evenly or regularly
explored, and the difculties of moving between such completely dis-
crepant registers of writing have consistently been scanted, to the cost
of even the most patient readers. But here is where the character of New
Left Review has effectively been dened. It is a political journal based in
London that has tried to treat social and moral sciencestheory, if you
willand arts and moresculture, for shortin the same historical
spirit as politics itself. The best way of grasping the present situation of
the review is to look back at the context in which the format of NLR was
originally conceived, that made possible the combination of these inter-
ests. The conjuncture of the early sixties, when the review took shape
under a new collective, offered the following features:
anderson: Editorial 3
t Politically, a third of the planet had broken with capitalism. Few
had any doubts about the enormities of Stalins rule, or the lack
of democracy in any of the countries that described themselves as
socialist. But the Communist bloc, even at its moment of division,
was still a dynamic realityIsaac Deutscher, writing in NLR, could
take the Sino-Soviet split as a sign of vitality.
1
Khrushchev, viewed
as a revolutionary romantic by current historians of Russia, held
out promise of reform in the USSR. The prestige of Maoist China
was largely intact. The Cuban Revolution was a new beacon in Latin
America. The Vietnamese were successfully ghting the United States
in South-East Asia. Capitalism, however stable and prosperous in its
Northern heartlands, wasand felt itself to beunder threat across
the larger part of the world outside them. Even at home, in Western
Europe and Japan, mass Communist movements were still ranged
against the existing order.
t Intellectually, the discredit of Stalinist orthodoxy after 1956 and
the decline of domestic Cold War conformity after 1958 released
a discovery process of suppressed leftist and Marxist traditions
that, in starved British conditions, took on aspects of a theoretical
fever. Alternative strands of a revolutionary Marxism linked to mass
politicsLuxemburgist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Council Communist
started to circulate. Simultaneously, the various legacies of a Western
Marxism born from the defeat of mass politicsfrom the era of
Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci onwardsbecame available for recovery.
Crucial to the inuence of these Western traditions was its continuity
into the present: Sartre, Lefebvre, Adorno, Marcuse, Della Volpe,
Colletti, Althusser were contemporary authors, producing new texts
as NLR was sending its numbers to press. British isolation from such
continental patterns made sudden, concentrated encounter with them
all the headier.
t Culturally, exit from the conformist atmosphere of the fties was a
much broader phenomenon than this, and the rupture just as abrupt.
The two dominant markers of the period were the emergence of
rock music as a pervasive sound-wave of youth revolt, in contrast to
the generally saccharine output of the previous perioda popular
form laying claim to both aesthetic breakthrough and social upsurge.
1
Three Currents in Communism, NLR 23, JanFeb 1964.
4 nlr 1
Britain was itself the leading country in this transformation, whose
shock-effects were not yet routinized, as they later became. The second
critical shift was the emergence of auteur cinema, as conception and
project. Here the inuence of Cahiers du Cinema and the Nouvelle
Vague that came out of it was decisive. In this reception, the position
accorded classic Hollywood directors by French cineastes opened a
loop that dened much of the period. In effect, the new ascendance of
cinema and music set free a dialectic between high and low planes
of reference in the cultural life of the sixties that looks retrospectively
distinctive. Playful or serious, the ease of trafc between the twoan
absence of strainowed much to the most important theoretical
current of the time, aside from Marxism, which was structuralism.
The moment of the early Barthes or Lvi-Strauss (Mythologies or Tristes
Tropiques), bringing a common method to the study of each, was
critical for the mediation between high and low forms. Recuperating
the legacy of Russian formalism, this was a structuralism whose
concerns were still perfectly congruent with those of the cultural Left.
2
In this triple context, NLR undertook a range of programmes that at
the time were innovatory for the English-speaking world. Politically, the
review set its compass towards anti-imperalist movements in the Third
World, and while parochial reexes were still strong on the British Left,
gathered a team whose interests eventually spanned most of the world
Latin America, Black Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East
were all represented. At home, a set of distinctive arguments about the
UK was developed, which came to have a certain inuence. So when the
explosion of the late sixties, triggered by the war in Vietnam, occurred in
the Westrst student rebellion, then labour upsurgeNLR was well
placed to play some role in the ensuing tumult, and to gain an interna-
tional readership by the mid-seventies.
Intellectually, the journal devoted much of its energies to the introduc-
tion and critical reception of the different schools of Western Marxist
thought, a sufciently large enterprise to occupy it for over a decade.
Structuralism, formalism, psychoanalysis featured toocanonical texts
or sources often rst surfacing in its pages. On these fronts NLR was
well ahead of the surrounding culture, pioneering a more cosmopolitan
anderson: Editorial 5
and radical horizon of reference than was easily available elsewhere in
the Anglophone world.
Culturally, too, the review developed new styles of intervention, linking
interest in traditional arts to engagement with avant-garde forms, and
interventions on popular cinema or music. Peter Wollens famous series
on lm directors, orsayFranco Morettis Dialectic of Fear, exempli-
ed the freedom of movement between high and low terrains. The
initiatives released by this ferment escaped narrow classication. NLR
was premonitory both of the seventies rediscovery of feminism, and the
eighties rediscovery of work, in the same few years. It was a creative
period.
3
Four decades later, the environment in which NLR took shape has all
but completely passed away. The Soviet bloc has disappeared. Socialism
has ceased to be a widespread ideal. Marxism is no longer a dominant
in the culture of the Left. Even Labourism has largely dissolved. To
say that these changes are enormous would be an under-statement.
It cannot be maintained they reduced the review to silence. Each in
their fashion, writers associated with it have responded with spirit to
the conjuncture of 89. Texts in different registers would include Robin
Blackburns Fin-de-Sicle: Socialism After the Crash; Peter Wollens
Our Post-Communism: The Legacy of Karl Kautsky; Alexander Cock-
burns The Golden Age is Within Us; Fred Hallidays The Ends of Cold
War; Tom Nairns Faces of Nationalism; Benedict Andersons Radical-
ism after Communism; Tariq Alis Fear of Mirrors; and the list could
be lengthened.
2
It would be interesting to trace the variety of these reac-
tions, and of other contributors published by the review. Judgements of
each will differ. But as a whole the tradition of the journal acquitted itself
without dishonour.
Ten years after the collapse of Communism, however, the world has
moved on, and a condition of re-launching the review is some distinc-
2
Respectively: NLR 185, JanFeb 1991 (Blackburn); NLR 202, NovDec 1993
(Wollen); Verso 1994 (Cockburn); NLR 180, MarApr 1990 (Halliday); Verso 1997
(Nairn); NLR 202, NovDec 1993 (Anderson); Arcadia 1998 (Ali).
6 nlr 1
tive and systematic approach to its state today. What is the principal
aspect of the past decade? Put briey, it can be dened as the virtually
uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neo-liberalism.
This was not so widely predicted. If the years 198991 saw the destruc-
tion of Soviet-bloc Communism, it was not immediately obviouseven
to its championsthat unfettered free-market capitalism would sweep
the board in East or West. Many East European dissidents, West Euro-
pean progressives, North American conservatives, foresaw some kind of
re-balancing of the global landscapethe Left perhaps gaining a fresh
lease of life, once released from the crippling moral legacy of Stalinism,
and Japanese or Rhenish corporatism proving superior in both social
equity and economic efciency to Wall Street or the City. These were
not isolated beliefs, and could draw on authorities of distinction. As late
as 1998, Eric Hobsbawm and former Marxism Today writers were still
hopefully proclaiming the end of neo-liberalism.
3
In fact, the trend of the time has moved in the opposite direction. Five
inter-linked developments have changed the scene quite drastically:
t American capitalism has resoundingly re-asserted its primacy in all
eldseconomic, political, military, culturalwith an unprecedented
eight-year boom. However inated are asset values on Wall Street,
burdened with debt private households, or large the current trade
decits, there is little doubt that the underlying competitive position
of US business has been critically strengthened.
t European social-democracy, having taken power across the Union, has
responded to continent-wide slow growth and high unemployment
by across-the-board moves towards an American modelaccelerating
deregulation and privatization not only of industries but also social
services, often well beyond the limits of previous conservative regimes.
Britain had a head-start in deregulation, but Germany and Italy are
now bidding to catch up, and France lags more in words than deeds.
t Japanese capitalism has fallen into a deep slump, andalong with
Koreanis being gradually pressured to submit to deregulatory
standards, with increasing unemployment. Elsewhere in Asia, the
3
The Death of Neo-Liberalism, Marxism Today one-issue revenant, NovDec
1998.
anderson: Editorial 7
PRC is eager to enter the WTO at virtually any price, in the hope
that competitive pressures from foreign capital will weed out state
industries, without having itself to take responsibility for their fate;
while India is for the rst time now willingly dependent on the IMF.
t The new Russian economy, the weakest link in the global market
system, has provoked no popular backlash, despite catastrophic
regression in productive output and life-expectation. Stabilization
of its nancial oligarchy under a plebiscitary leadership, capable of
centralizing power and privatizing land, is now in prospect.

These are massive socio-economic changes, working their way across
the globe, which have already found canonization in Daniel Yergin and
Joseph Stanislaws enthusiastic survey The Commanding Heights. They
have been accompanied by two complementary, political and military,
shifts:
t Ideologically, the neo-liberal consensus has found a new point of
stabilization in the Third Way of the ClintonBlair regimes. The
winning formula to seal the victory of the market is not to attack, but
to preserve, the placebo of a compassionate public authority, extolling
the compatibility of competition with solidarity. The hard core of
government policies remains further pursuit of the ReaganThatcher
legacy, on occasion with measures their predecessors did not dare
enact: welfare reform in the US, student fees in the UK. But it is now
carefully surrounded with subsidiary concessions and softer rhetoric.
The effect of this combination, currently being diffused throughout
Europe, is to suppress the conictual potential of the pioneering
regimes of the radical right, and kill off opposition to neo-liberal
hegemony more completely. One might say that, by denition, TINA
only acquires full force once an alternative regime demonstrates that
there are truly no alternative policies. For the quietus to European
social-democracy or the memory of the New Deal to be consummated,
governments of the Centre-Left were indispensable. In this sense,
adapting Lenins maxim that the democratic republic is the ideal
political shell of capitalism, we could say that the Third Way is the best
ideological shell of neo-liberalism today. It is scarcely an accident that
the most ambitious and intransigent theorization of ultra-capitalism
as a global order, Thomas Friedmans The Lexus and the Olive-Tree,
should at the same time be a brazen paean to US world hegemony,
8 nlr 1
and an unconditional advocacy of Clintonism, under the slogan one
dare not be a globalizer today without being a social-democrat.
4
t Finally, the Balkan War has rounded off the decade with a military-
diplomatic demonstration of the ascendancy of this constellation.
Comparison with the Gulf War suggests how much stronger the New
World Order has become since the early nineties. Bush had to mobilize
a vast army to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in the name of
protecting Western oil supplies and a feudal dynasty; without succeeding
in either overthrowing the regime in Baghdad, or drawing Russiastill
unpredictableinto the alliance against it. Clinton has bombed Serbia
into submission without so much as a soldier having to re a shot, in
the name of a moral imperative to stop ethnic cleansing, that is likely
to conclude in short order with a removal of the regime in Belgrade;
and brigaded Russia effortlessly into the occupation force as a token
auxiliary. Meanwhile China, after the destruction of its embassyon
the heels of a respectful visit by its Premier to the UShas cooperated
meekly in setting up a UN screen for the NATO protectorate in Kosovo,
and made clear that nothing will be allowed to disturb good relations
with Washington. For its part, the European Union is basking in a
new comradeship-in-arms with the United States, and joint purpose
in generous reconstruction of the Balkans. Victory in Kosovo has in
this sense not been just military and political. It is also an ideological
triumph, that sets a new standard for interventions on behalf of human
rightsas construed in Washington: Chechens or Palestinians need not
applyaround the world. The society created by the capitalist free-for-
all of the past twenty years was in need of a good conscience. Operation
Allied Force has provided it.
4
The intellectual atmosphere in the advanced countries, and extending
well beyond them, reects these changes. If the bulk of the Western
intelligentsia was always substantially satised with the status quo, with
4
The Lexus and the Olive-Tree, New York 1999, p. 354. In similar vein, Yergin and
Stanislaw end their glowing tour of the world-wide triumph of markets with a
concluding homage to Blairs great accomplishment in fusing social-democratic
values of fairness and inclusiveness with the Thatcherite economic programme:
The Commanding Heights, New York 1999, p. 390.
anderson: Editorial 9
a more restless and imaginative minority anking it to the right, the left
was still a signicant presence in most of the leading capitalist states
down through the eighties, even if there were important national vari-
ationsthe British becoming less conservative, as the French or Italians
became more so, and so forth. With the homogenization of the political
scene in the nineties, one would expect there to have been a Gleich-
schaltung of acceptable opinion as well. By the end of the decade, this has
gathered pace. If we look at the spectrum of what was the traditional
formerly socialistLeft, two types of reaction to the new conjuncture
predominate.
The rst is accommodation. In its hour of general triumph, capitalism
has convinced many who at one time believed it an avoidable evil that it is
a necessary and on balance salutary social order. Those who have rallied,
explicitly or tacitly, to the Third Way are obvious examples. But the range
of guises in which accommodation can be reached are much wider,
and are quite compatible with a sceptical or even derisive view of of-
cialBlumenthalCampbelloleographs of the new order: extending
from frank acknowledgement of a down-the-line superiority of private
enterprise, without mollifying embellishments, to simple dropping of
the subject of property regimes altogether. One consequence of the shift
in the ideological climate at large is that it becomes decreasingly neces-
sary even to express a position on these issues, as they fall outside the
perimeter of signicant debate. Clamorous renegacy is quite rare; the
commoner pattern is just changing the subject. But the depth of actual
accommodation can be seen from episodes like the Balkan War, where
the role of NATO was simply taken for granted, as a normal and desir-
able part of the political universe, by a wide band of opinion that would
not have dreamt of doing so ten or twenty years back. The underlying
attitude is: capitalism has come to stay, we must make our peace with it.
The second type of reaction can best be described as one of consola-
tion.
5
Here there is no unprincipled accommodationearlier ideals are
not abandoned, and may even be staunchly reafrmed. But faced with
5
It is a matter of logic that there is a third possible reaction to the turn of the time,
that is neither accommodation nor consolation: namely, resignationin other
words, a lucid recognition of the nature and triumph of the system, without either
adaptation or self-deception, but also without any belief in the chance of an alterna-
tive to it. A bitter conclusion of this kind is, however, rarely articulated as a public
position.
10 nlr 1
daunting odds, there is a natural human tendency to try and nd silver
linings in what would otherwise seem an overwhelmingly hostile envi-
ronment. The need to have some message of hope induces a propensity
to over-estimate the signicance of contrary processes, to invest inap-
propriate agencies with disinterested potentials, to nourish illusions in
imaginary forces. Probably none of us on the Left is immune to this
temptation, which can even claim some warrant from the general rule of
the unintended consequences owing from any historical transforma-
tionthe dialectical sense in which victories can unexpectedly generate
victors over them. It is also true that no political movement can survive
without offering some measure of emotional relief to its adherents,
which in periods of defeat will inevitably involve elements of psychologi-
cal compensation. But an intellectual journal has other duties. Its rst
commitment must be to an accurate description of the world, no matter
what its bearing on morale may be. All the more so, because there is
an intermediate terrain in which consolation and accommodation can
overlapthat is, wherever changes in the established order calculated
to fortify its hold are greeted as steps towards its loosening, or perhaps
even a qualitative transformation of the system. Russell Jacobys recent
End of Utopia offers trenchant reections on some of this.
5
What kind of stance should NLR adopt in this new situation? Its general
approach, I believe, should be an uncompromising realism. Uncompro-
mising in both senses: refusing any accommodation with the ruling
system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would understate
its power. No sterile maximalism follows. The journal should always
be in sympathy with strivings for a better life, no matter how modest
their scope. But it can support any local movements or limited reforms,
without pretending that they alter the nature of the system. What it
cannotor should notdo is either lend credence to illusions that the
system is moving in a steadily progressive direction, or sustain conform-
ist myths that it urgently needs to be shielded from reactionary forces:
attitudes on display, to take two recent examples, in the rallying to Prin-
cess and President by the bien-pensant left, as if the British monarchy
needed to be more popular or the American Presidency more protected.
Hysteria of this kind should be sharply attacked.
anderson: Editorial 11
Appeals to venerable traditions or established institutions toso to
speaklive up to their own standards, form a different sort of case. A
great deal of the best writing on the Left today seeks to take the ruling
conventions at their wordtreating ofcial hypocrisy, the gap between
word and deed, as the homage vice must pay to virtue, that promises a
happy ending. This was the approach classically favoured, and eloquently
practised, by the rst New Left. Many contributions to the journal will
continue to be couched in these terms, and should be judged on their
often considerablemerits. There is, however, a risk in this style of
address. The line between the desirable and the feasible may be left
unclear, allowing mystication about the realities of power, and what
can rationally be expected of it. It is best to leave no ambiguity here.
The test of NLRs capacity to strike a distinctive political note should be
how often it can calmly shock readers by calling a spade a spade, rather
than falling in with well-meaning cant or self-deception on the Left. The
spirit of the Enlightenment rather than the Evangelicals is what is most
needed today.
6
A decade does not make an epoch. The neo-liberal grand slam of the
nineties is no guarantee of perpetual power. In a longer historical per-
spective, a more sanguine reading of the time can be made. This, after
all, has also been a period in which the Suharto dictatorship has been
overthrown in Indonesia, clerical tyranny weakened in Iran, a venal oli-
garchy ousted in Venezuela, apartheid ended in South Africa, assorted
generals and their civilian relays brought low in Korea, liberation nally
won in East Timor. These were not movements that enjoyed the con-
dence of investors in the West, as the spring-time of peoples in Europe
had done. An optimistic view would take them as the seeds of a reckon-
ing to comethe latest acts of a continuing emancipation of nations that
constitutes the real process of democratization on a world scale, whose
outcome we can barely yet imagine. Another version would point rather
to the general weakening in the hierarchy of the sexes, with world-wide
pressures for womens emancipation, as the leading story of the age;
or to the growth in ecological consciousness, to which even the most
hardened states must now pay formal respect. Common to all these
visions is an intimation that capitalism may be invincible, but might
12 nlr 1
eventually prove solubleor forgettablein the waters of profounder
kinds of equality, sustainability and self-determination.
If so, such deeps still remain unfathomable. The spread of democracy
as a substitute for socialism, as hope or claim, is mocked by the hollow-
ing of democracy itself in its capitalist homelands, not to speak of its
post-communist adjuncts: steadily falling rates of electoral participation,
increasing nancial corruption, deadening mediatization. In general,
what is strong is not democratic aspiration from below, but the asphyxi-
ation of public debate and political difference by capital above. The force
of this order lies not in repression, but dilution and neutralization; and
so far, it has handled its newer challenges with equanimity. The gains
made by the feminist and ecological movements in the advanced world
are real and welcome: the most important elements of human progress
in these societies of the last thirty years. But to date they have proved
compatible with the routines of accumulation. Logically, a good measure
of political normalization has followed. The performance of feminists in
the United States, and Greens in Germanywhere each movement is
strongestin the service of Clintons regimen in the White House and
NATOs war in the Balkans speaks for itself.
This is not to say that any other force in the advanced capitalist countries
has shown a greater quotient of effective antagonism to the status quo.
With rare exceptionsFrance in the winter of 1995labour has been
quiescent for over twenty years now. Its condition is not a mere out-
come of economic changes or ideological shifts. Harsh class struggles
were necessary to subdue it in Britain as the United States. If somewhat
less cowed in Europe, workers still remain everywhere on the defensive.
The only starting-point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of
historical defeat. Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to
its rule, the bases of whose powerabove all, the pressures of competi-
tionwere persistently under-estimated by the socialist movement. The
doctrines of the Right that have theorized capitalism as a systemic order
retain their tough-minded strength; current attempts by a self-styled
radical Centre to dress up its realities are by comparison little more
than weak public relations. Those who always believed in the over-riding
value of free markets and private ownership of the means of production
include many gures of intellectual substance. The recent crop of bow-
dlerizers and beauticians, who only yesterday deplored the ugliness of
the system they primp today, do not.
anderson: Editorial 13
6
NLR 229, MayJune 1998; an expanded version will appear as a Verso book.
7
The New Collectivism, NLR 233, JanFeb 1999.
For the Left, the lesson of the past century is one taught by Marx. Its rst
task is to attend to the actual development of capitalism as a complex
machinery of production and prot, in constant motion. Robert Bren-
ners Economics of Global Turbulence, taking up an issue of NLR, sets
the appropriate example.
6
No collective agency able to match the power
of capital is yet on the horizon. We are in a time, as genetic engineering
looms, when the only revolutionary force at present capable of disturb-
ing its equilibrium appears to be scientic progress itselfthe forces of
production, so unpopular with Marxists convinced of the primacy of rela-
tions of production when a socialist movement was still alive. But if the
human energies for a change of system are ever released again, it will be
from within the metabolism of capital itself. We cannot turn away from
it. Only in the evolution of this order could lie the secrets of another one.
This is the sense of enquiries like those by Robin Blackburn in NLR into
the trend of nancial institutions.
7
There are no certainties here; so far,
all that is possible are proposals and conjectures.
7
Ideologically, the novelty of the present situation stands out in histori-
cal view. It can be put like this. For the rst time since the Reformation,
there are no longer any signicant oppositionsthat is, systematic rival
outlookswithin the thought-world of the West; and scarcely any on a
world scale either, if we discount religious doctrines as largely inopera-
tive archaisms, as the experiences of Poland or Iran indicate we may.
Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of
principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideol-
ogy in world history. What this means for a journal like NLR is a radical
discontinuity in the culture of the Left, as itor if itrenews itself gen-
erationally. Nowhere is the contrast with the originating context of the
review sharper than in this respect. Virtually the entire horizon of ref-
erence in which the generation of the sixties grew up has been wiped
awaythe landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal
measure. For most students, the roster of Bebel, Bernstein, Luxemburg,
Kautsky, Jaurs, Lukcs, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci have become names as
remote as a list of Arian bishops. How to reweave threads of signicance
14 nlr 1
between the last century and this would be one of the most delicate and
difcult tasks before any journal that took the term left seriously. There
seem to be few guide-posts for it.
If we look at the intellectual traditions closest in time and inuence to
the early NLR, the situation does not at rst look much better. Most of the
corpus of Western Marxism has also gone out of general circulation
Korsch, the Lukcs of History and Class Consciousness, most of Sartre and
Althusser, the Della Volpean school, Marcuse. What has survived best is
least directly political: essentially, post-war Frankfurt theory and selected
Benjamin. Domestically, Raymond Williams has been put out of court,
much as Wright Mills in America twenty years ago; Deutscher has disap-
peared; the name Miliband speaks of another time.
On the other hand, the history of ideas is not a Darwinian process. Major
systems of thought rarely disappear, as if they were so many species
become extinct. Though no longer seen within any coherent context,
strands of these traditions have continued to show remarkable vitality.
It could be said that British Marxist historiography has now achieved a
world readership, something it never knew before, with Hobsbawms
Age of Extremeswhich seems likely to remain the most inuential
single interpretation of the past century well into this one, as the over-
all history of a victory from the viewpoint of the vanquished. Jamesons
work on the postmodern, descending directly from Continental Marx-
ism, has no exact counterpart as a cultural version of the age. Robert
Brenner has provided the only coherent economic account of capitalist
development since the Second World War, Giovanni Arrighi the most
ambitious projection of its evolution in a longer timeframe. Tom Nairn
and Benedict Anderson are leading voices on the political ambiguities of
modern nationalism. Rgis Debray has developed one of the most sys-
tematic theories of the contemporary media now on offer. Terry Eagleton
in the literary eld, T. J. Clark in the visual arts, David Harvey in the
reconstruction of geography, are central gures for all concerned with
these disciplines.
It is enough to list such names to see that no forcible unication of them
into a single paradigm is conceivable. The span of different methods,
interests and accents is far too wide. If that is in part a consequence
of the fragmentation of the culture of the Left, it is also an expression of
a creative disinhibition and diversication of lines of enquiry. Respect-
anderson: Editorial 15
ing these, the review should seek to present an intelligible landscape,
in which such bodies of work have an accessible relationship to one
another.
At the same time, there is a wider intellectual spectrum with few or no
Marxist origins, dening itself as loosely on the left, that is in move-
ment today. Taking the elds of philosophy, sociology and economics, it
would include the work of Habermas, Derrida, Barry; Bourdieu, Mann,
Runciman; Stiglitz, Sen, Dasgupta. Here criss-crossing shifts of position
can be seen, previously moderate thinkers becoming radicalized as neo-
liberal hegemony has become more absolute, while others once more
radical have become reconciled to elements of the conventional wisdom.
But more signicant than these eddies is a common feature of much of
this range of work: the combination of bold intellectual ambition and
broad disciplinary synthesis with timorous or truistic commitments in
the political eld itselfa far cry from the robust and passionate world
of Weber, Keynes or Russell. Here the consequences of the uprooting of
all the continuities of a socialist tradition, however indirectly related to,
are very visible. The result is typically a spectacle of impressive theoreti-
cal energy and productivity, whose social sum is signicantly less than
its intellectual parts.
By contrast, commanding the eld of direct political constructions of
the time, the Right has provided one uent vision of where the world
is going, or has stopped, after anotherFukuyama, Brzezinski, Hunt-
ington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman. These are writers that unite a single
powerful thesis with a uent popular style, designed not for an academic
readership but a broad international public. This condent genre, of
which America has so far a virtual monopoly, nds no equivalent on
the Left. There, at best, normative schemes of a cosmopolitan democ-
racy or law of peoples, bracketing or euphemizing the actual course of
things, remain the lame alternative. NLR has not engaged much with
either. This ought to be one of its priorities. It is unlikely the balance of
intellectual advantage will alter greatly before there is a change in the
political correlation of forces, which will probably remain stable so long
as there is no deep economic crisis in the West. Little short of a slump
of inter-war proportions looks capable of shaking the parameters of the
current consensus. But that is no reason to mark timepolemical or
analyticalin the interim.
16 nlr 1
8

The cultural scene, too, bears little resemblance to that in which the early
NLR ourished. Three major changes have dened the interval. First, there
has been a massive displacement of dominance from verbal to visual codes,
with the primacy of television over every preceding means of communi-
cation, followed by the rise of subsequent electronic media in which the
same shift has been technologically replicated. This pattern has, of course,
dened the arrival of postmodern forms at large. Secondlyanother hall-
mark of the lattermost of the tension between deviant or insurgent
impulses from below and the established order above has been absorbed,
as the market has appropriated and institutionalized youth culture in much
the same way it earlier encapsulated avant-garde practices: butthis being
a mass marketmuch more thoroughly. The commodity apotheosis of
idols like Jackson or Jordan are the upshot. Thirdly, the voltage connect-
ing high and low systems, whose circuit was such a feature of the modern
period, has been shorted as the distance that was a condition of it has
tended to collapse. The effect is mutual caricature, as the two converge on
common terrain: slumming at the Royal Academy, and pretention at the
OscarsSensation and Dreamworks as obverse forms of kitsch. Literature,
dragged into the same vortex by prize-money and publicity budgets, gener-
ates Eco or late Rushdie.
For the journal, it is the critical side of the situation that matters. Here the
pattern on the side of production has been inverted. Where once there was
lively interchange between high and low levels, a polarization has occurred
that tends to leave each sealed in hypertrophied discourses of their own.
Thus high forms have fallen prey to tortuous routines of philosophical
deconstruction, while popular forms have become the playground of cul-
tural studies of a sub-sociological type. Each has origins in radical lines
of work in the late fties and sixties: Hoggart and Williams on one side,
Bataille to Derrida on the other. Formally speaking, the respective muta-
tions continue to identify themselves, for the most part, with the Left:
indeed, in grander momentsas critics on the Right are quick to point
outvirtually as the Left, at any rate in America. What they too often
amount to, however, is a choice between obscurantism and populism,
orstill worsea mixture of the two, parading a weird blend of the dema-
gogic and apolitical.
anderson: Editorial 17
Obscurantism as wilful impediment of meaning has few defenders.
Populism, on the other hand, is sometimes thought to have progressive
potential. But if we set aside its legendary origins in Russia, where the
Narodniks would be regarded by current standards as thoroughly elitist,
what populism typically means today is faking an equality of condition
between voters, readers or viewersthat does not exist, the better to pass
over actual inequalities of knowledge or literacy: ground on which a cynical
right and pious left all too easily meet. It is thus not surprising that of the
two hermeneutics on offer, cultural studies is currently the more inuen-
tial, and in its deteriorated forms the main obstacle to any recreation of
an unselfconscious sense of movement between high and low. Commend-
able exercises in the analysis of mass culture are not lacking, in which the
original intentions behind the HoggartWilliams line have continued. All
too many, however, of the progeny of the Birmingham School have lurched
towards an uncritical embrace of the market as zestful fount of popular
culture. In these conditions, the role of NLR should be to bend the stick
resolutely in the opposite direction, while avoiding any neo-Leavisite over-
tones. Julian Stallabrasss contributions to the review have struck a requisite
note, engaging critically both with the newest electronic media, at the level
of the games arcade, and with the newest British painting, as itin every
senseplays to the gallery.
In any radical journal, tension is always likely between two forms of
criticism, equally necessary yet markedly distinct. One can think of these
as, roughly speaking, avant-garde and hegelian approaches to cul-
turethe rst committed to staking out an aggressive, even if one-sided
imperative stance, the second to deciphering in more indicative mood
the historical or philosophical intelligibility of a wider scene: Clement
Greenberg and Fredric Jameson as respective virtuosos. The two styles
are not exclusive, and the review should encourage both. The need for
one or the other varies, inevitably, according to topic or conjuncture. In
an area like the cinema, earnest reections on the meaning of the latest
box-ofce hit from Hollywood or Elstree, even if well-aimed, are a waste
of NLRs space, compared with treatment of directors, above all outside
the Anglophone world, who are short of attention or difcult to see. For,
counter-balancing the negative developments in the metropolitan zone
of the past period, there has been one enormous cultural gain at large
the multiplication of peripheral producers in Asia, Africa, the Middle
East, Latin America. This is very poorly covered in the West, and should
be a priority for the Left to address. One good text on Hou Hsiao-Hsien,
18 nlr 1
Kiarostami, Sembene, Leduc is worth a hundredno matter how criti-
calon Spielberg or Coppola. A sequence along these lines, extended
to the new European cinema (Amelio, Reitz, Jacquot, Zonca), would be
the natural successor to Peter Wollens path-breaking series in the early
NLR.
More generally, the kind of literary geography Franco Moretti has been
developing, because it focuses on the market as well as the morphology
of forms, provides a natural bridge between elite and mass zones of cul-
ture, as well as, most recently, an outward turn to global systems that
offers a model of another kind. In all elds, NLR should try to counter
the provincialismactually, narcissismof the English-speaking world,
by focusing, if necessary more than proportionately, on non-Anglophone
works and producers. One of the most striking features of the current
English scene (a fortiori American too) is that although foreign lan-
guages, literatures and politics are much more widely learnt in schools
and universities than they were twenty years ago, the cultural references
of the newest generationseven at their most sophisticatedare often
narrower, because the hegemony of Hollywood, CNN and Bookerism
has increased exponentially in the interim. A glance at the slipstream of
current journalistic fashions is enough to register the paradox. In keep-
ing with its tradition, the review should resist this involution.
9
Editing a journal with this set of concerns has always been a tightrope
affair. To achieve a balance between such disparate elds as the eco-
nomic and the aesthetic, the sociological and the philosophical, would
be tricky enough in itself. Here they come together, by the nature of the
review, under the primacy of the political, that poses its own problems
of denition and selection. The order of the journal tacitly reects its
organizing focus, editorials or lead articles normally dealing with inter-
national issues of the day. NLR remains rst and foremost a political
journal, outside any polite consensus or established perimeters of opin-
ion. But this is not a politics that absorbs the domains it touches on.
The culture of any society always exceeds the spectrum of politics active
within it, as a reservoir of meanings of which only a delimited range
have to do with the distribution of power, that is the object of political
anderson: Editorial 19
8
The outstanding argument for the asymmetry of culture and politics is to be
found in Francis Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time, Cork 1998, pp. 67, 5253,
a book to which the review will return in a forthcoming issue.
action.
8
An effective politics respects that excess. Attempts to conscript
any theoretical or cultural eld for instrumental purposes will always be
futile or counter-productive. That does not mean indifference. The Left
needs a cultural politics; but what that signies rst of all is a widening
of the limits of its own culture. It follows that NLR will publish articles
regardless of their immediate relationship, or lack of it, to familiar radi-
cal agendas.
A major change of the past epoch, often remarked upon, has been the
widespread migration of intellectuals of the Left into institutions of
higher learning. This developmenta consequence not only of changes
in occupational structure, but of the emptying-out of political organ-
izations, the dumbing-down of publishing houses, the stunting of
counter-culturesis unlikely to be soon reversed. It has brought with
it, notoriously, specic tares. Edward Said has recently drawn attention
sharply to some of the worst of thesestandards of writing that would
have left Marx or Morris speechless. But academization has taken its
toll in other ways too: needless apparatuses, more for credential than
intellectual purposes, circular references to authorities, complaisant self-
citations, and so on. Wherever appropriate, NLR aims to be a scholarly
journal; but not an academic one. Unlike most academicnot to speak
of otherjournals today, it does not shove notes to the end of articles, or
resort to sub-literate Harvard references, but respects the classical cour-
tesy of footnotes at the bottom of the page, as indicators of sources or
tangents to the text, immediately available to the reader. Where they are
necessary, authors can be as free with them as Moretti is in this issue.
But mere proliferation for its own sake, a plague of too many submis-
sions today, will not pass. It should be a matter of honour on the Left to
write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.
The journal will feature a regular book-review section, and encourage
polemical exchange. NLR has always enjoyed an undeserved compara-
tive advantage in the language in which it is published, since English has
a world-wide audience that no other idiom possesses. By way of com-
pensation, it should try to bring to the notice of its readers important
works that are not published in English, as well as those that are. The
20 nlr 1
reviews in this issue offer an improvised sample of what we might do. Of
polemics in its pages, the journal has traditionally had too few. We hope
to change this. The current number contains a pair, as will the next.
Here, as elsewhere, the criterion is not political correctness, however
construed, but originality and vigour of argument. There is no require-
ment of contributors that they be conventionally of the Leftthere are
many areas, perhaps especially in the eld of international relations,
where arguments against standard progressive pieties, usually shared by
pillars of respectable liberalism, are superior to them. The most devas-
tating criticisms of the expansion of NATO and the war in the Balkans
often came from the Right. The review should welcome interventions
like these. By contrast, surplus to requirements are apologia for ofcial
policies from the Left, of which quite a few were to be heard as the B52s
took off for Kuwait or Kosovo. These are available any day in the estab-
lishment press. The value of polemical exchange here should be to lie
clear of this chloroformed zone.
Finally, a word on location. NLR was a journal conceived in Britain, a
state we must hope will not last much longer, for the reasons trench-
antly set out by Tom Nairn. It has had much to say about the UK, and
will not stop now. At the same time, many of its editors today live or
work in the US, about which the journal has also published a good deal.
Over two decades, writing on America by Mike Davisits most consist-
ent contributorhas left an indelible mark. There is also the European
background that stimulated most of the initiating ideas of the review.
The scope of NLR has always been wider than this Western base-line.
But while the journal has covered the rest of the worldThird and
Second, as well as First, while these terms still heldfor better or worse
according to period, its writers have continued to come essentially from
its homelands. This we would like to change. The time should come
when the contributors to NLR are as extra-Atlantic as its contents. For
the moment, that is out of reach. But it is a horizon to bear in mind.
new left review 1 jan feb 2000 21
r. taggart murphy
J APAN S ECONOMI C
CRI SI S
J
apans troubles have persisted now for nearly a decade. That
the worlds second largest economy and leading net creditor
should remain mired in seemingly endless stagnation/recession
confounds policy makers and observers around the globe. And
their fears over the consequences have deepened since the onset of the
developing world crisis in July 1997. It is evident that the United States
alone cannot generate sufcient demand to pull the developing world
out of the doldrumsthat it requires the assistance of other leading
economic powers. With a Europe preoccupied for the time being with
its new currency, the only sizeable power left to help the United States
propel the world forward is Japan. Yet far from being part of the solu-
tion, Japan appears to be a big part of the problem.
Complaints about Japan have become numbingly familiar. According
to widely accepted conventional wisdom, Tokyos inability or unwilling-
ness to come up with a growth-restoring policy-mix blocks recovery in
Asia. Japans consumers do not spend on imports; its companies, facing
weak demand at home and insulated from the pressure of nancial mar-
kets to exit unprotable lines of business, dump production abroad,
squeezing out developing world competitors. The countrys imploding
banking system has become a kind of black hole of global nance, suck-
ing in liquidity that ought to be going to poorer countries to fuel growth.
Meanwhile, concerns that a sudden stock market reversal in the United
States could bring the American expansion to a halt exacerbate worries
about Japan. For without a Japan to pick up some of the slack, as it were,
we would truly be staring global recession in the face.
1
22 nlr 1
What particularly frustrates so many non-Japanese is the sense that
Japans policy challenges, while severe, are neither novel nor mysteri-
ous. The policy recipe urged on Tokyo is pretty straightforward: scal
stimulus and monetary expansion; the closing down of sick nancial
institutions combined with recapitalization of the rest; dismantling of
anti-competitive regulations and cartels; reforms of corporate governance
and nancial markets that force companies to become more protable
or face bankruptcy or takeover. Most observers acknowledge that this
policy mix could cause political difculties for any government that tried
to carry it out. At the same time, it appears no more onerous than the
restructuring of the American economy in the 1980s or the measures
implemented in a number of European countries in order to qualify for
membership in the euro bloc. Japans failure to act seems to boil down
to a simple lack of political courage.
The result has been increasingly testy foreign pressure on Japanmuch
of it, although by no means all, emanating from Washington. It is
common knowledge that the Japanese elite often relies on so-called
gaiatsu (foreign pressure) to provide political cover for unpopular but
necessary change. Indeed, the June 1998 meetings in Tokyo of central
bankers and deputy nance ministers from eighteen countries are a case
in point. Japan found itself totally isolated, pressed on all sides to take
the necessary measures to stimulate its economy and heal its banking
system. The meetings may have even contributed to the ruling Liberal
Democratic Partys (LDP) losses in the next months elections for the
Upper House, and the subsequent replacement of the Hashimoto cabi-
net with a cabinet under Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi that gave the
initial impression of being prepared to do what it took. Certainly, much
of the impetus behind the sixty trillion yen bank bailout package, the
seventeen trillion yen stimulus package, and the de facto nationaliza-
tion of several important banks can be traced to these meetings. Yet they
were actually arranged by Japans Ministry of Finance (MOF), leading to
accusations in the Japanese media that they had been deliberately staged
to produce a loud chorus of foreign pressure on Japan, thereby providing
political cover for an about-face by Japans policy elite.
2
1
Originally presented as a paper at the Centre for Social Theory and Comparative
History at UCLA, this article will appear in Robert Brenner (ed.), The New World
Economic Disorder, Verso forthcoming.
2
For example Kinkyutsuka Kaigi Seimei, Shingen Nihon no Sekinin Tou: Fuan
no Rensahadome? (Declaration from Emergency Currency Meeting; Inquiring
murphy: Japan 23
More, however, lurks behind the exasperation with Japanat least in
Washingtonthan simple resentment at having to play the perennial
heavy in an unending political drama that a supposedly mature indus-
trial democracy should no longer need to stage. Indeed, if gaiatsu were
all it took to elicit the changes Washington wants to see, Larry Summers
and Bill Clinton would no doubt be happy to endure the painlessfor
themslings and arrows of the Japanese mass media in applying what-
ever pressure is required. Japans is not the rst governmentnor will
it be the lastto nd foreign pressure a convenient cover for imple-
menting much-needed domestic change: witness the deft ends to which
the Italians have employed the Maastricht Treaty obligations, or South
Korean President Kim Dae Jungs handling of the IMF requirements
imposed on his country. Rather, what seems to produce widespread
indignation with Japanand this indignation is certainly not conned
to Washingtonis the sense that the Japanese elite does not realize how
bad things are, that it is kidding itself. How else to explain the incredu-
lity with which the consumption tax increase of April 1997 was greeted
in policy circleswhat are these people doing raising taxes? Dont they
know their economy is at on its back? Or the increasing shrillness
with which well-known economists such as Paul Krugman and Andrew
Smithers berate Japans monetary authorities from the pages of the
Financial Times?
3

Response of Japanese ofcialdom
Maybe we ought to stop for a moment, therefore, and ask ourselves why
Japanese elite ofcials act as if they believe that Japans economic plight
is not so bad after all. Could it be that they are right; that Japans eco-
nomic situation is not so terrible? This seems like a stupid question.
The numbers coming out of Tokyo do not lie. Unemployment and
bankruptcies are at their post-1940s peaks. GNP shrank in 1998, and
the poor third-quarter numbers for 1999 suggest that the high growth
rates recorded in the rst half of the year were indeed, as many had
on Epicenter Japans Responsibility: Halting the Chain Reaction?) Nihon Keizai
Shimbun, 21 June 1998. For an English language account from the same news
organization (Japans leading provider of news on business and nance) see Japan
Faces Dangerous Isolation, The Nikkei Weekly, 6 July 1998.
3
Paul Krugman Personal View: Japan heads for the edge, Financial Times, 20
January 1999. See also letters to the same newspaper from Andrew Smithers on 11
November 1998; 15 January 1999; 21 January 1999.
24 nlr 1
feared, simply the one-off products of huge dollops of public spending
rather than signals of any fundamental turnaround. Repeated attempts
to jumpstart the Japanese economy with such spending have saddled
the country with a government decit which, as a percentage of GNP, is
among the highest in the OECD. The Tokyo Stock Exchange languished
for nearly a decade in the grip of one of the most vicious and protracted
bear markets of the century; even the recovery that set in early in 1999
is simply taking it back to levels that a few years ago would have been
regarded as disastrously low. Real estate prices have fallen more than 60
per cent from their late 1980s peak, with no oor in sight; most of the
nations banks would be insolvent if Japan followed Western account-
ing standards. And to top it off, we have seen over the past year spikes
in both interest rates and the yen. While interest rates have come back
down, the forces that led to the spikes are still there; if higher interest
rates return or the yen does not soon weaken again, a range of Japanese
manufacturers that have been kept alive since the mid nineties on the
life support of a weak currency and extremely low interest rates will not
survive.
Yet the sense remains that, irrespective of whatever political difculties
may stand in the way of getting the country moving again, Japans policy
elite doesnt really think things are that bad. How could this be? Lets
dismiss the notion right away that these people are stupid. Stupidity
might serve to explain why they are not doing what Paul Krugman
thinks they should do, but it doesnt square with the facts. This is the
same policy elite with the same educational and social backgrounds
that guided the country from complete devastation to the front rank of
the worlds industrial powers in less than three decades. In any intel-
ligence test one cared to use, the bureaucrats who staff the Ministry of
Finance (MOF), the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI),
the Bank of Japan (BOJ), and the Economic Planning Agency, together
with the upper management ranks of Japans corporate and banking
hierarchies, could hold their own against their counterparts anywhere.
Nor is their information faulty; public accounting standards in Japan
may leave something to be desired and outside investors certainly fret
at their inability to grasp the real nancial situation of Japans banks
and corporations, but MOF bureaucrats know exactly what is going on
inside the countrys nancial institutions. For the MOF controls bank
funding powers, the opening of branches, the hiring of personnel, and
approvals for all nancial products. It has engineered every single bank
murphy: Japan 25
merger since the 1930s. Japanese bankers do very little without MOF
blessing; indeed Japanese banks can be regarded essentially as institu-
tions charged with the execution of MOF policies.
4
So stupidity or faulty information doesnt help us explain why the Japanese
elite acts as if it werent really sure it faced a crisis. Maybe they privately
know how bad things are, but dont want to give the impression of
panic. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis. If ordinary
Japanese households sensed panic in their leaders, if the currency and
equity markets saw a policy elite sick with worry, it could only make things
worse. Central bankers and nancial regulators are expected everywhere
to project serene, unappable condence; market participants monitor
their every twitch for signs of anything else. But this theory falls apart the
moment one actually looks at the measures taken by Tokyos policy elite.
Far from giving the impression of attempting to project masterful con-
trol, these people act openly as if they dont quite know what to do about
problems that they are not convinced are all that urgent. Everyone points
ngers, yells at them to do something; since this nger pointing comes
from their most important allies and foreign customersand now from
sizeable domestic constituencies, with the capacity to make troublethey
know they must respond. Yet because these problems seem to them fun-
damentally unrealor at least beside the pointtheir policy response
lacks coherence. How else to explain such seemingly monumental policy
errors as the consumption tax hike of April 1997? The dithering on the
bad debt problems, when the dimensions have been clear to everyone
since 1992 at the latest? The mule-like obstinacy of the BOJ in refusing to
spring the liquidity jaws that seem to have trapped Japan, notwithstand-
ing a domestic and international chorus of economists and policy makers
urging the deliberate creation of inationary expectations? The about-face
on government purchases of the bonds being issued to nance the latest
bank bailout and stimulus packages? First the MOF says its Trust Fund
Bureau wont be buying the new bonds, creating a bond-market panic and
driving long-term interest rates up; a few weeks later, it reverses course
and says that after all it will mop the excess debt.
4
Akio Mikuni writes in Japan: The Road to Recovery, Occasional Papers #55
(Washington: Group of Thirty 1998), p. 33, The MOF has absolute power over
Japans nancial institutions thanks to a licensing system that accords licensees
the status of little more than subordinate, quasi-public institutions. Mikuni is the
founder and president of Mikuni & Co. Ltd., Japans only independent, investor-
supported bond rating agency.
26 nlr 1
Taken together, Tokyos policy moves paint a portrait of befuddlement,
uncertainty and serious internal rifts. Banking crises are the nancial
equivalent of res; one expects alarm, panic, remen rushing to the
scene; what one doesnt expect are groups of obviously capable remen
standing around debating whether there really is or isnt a re; if there
is, should we use water to put it out, or might we run out of water, so
maybe it would be better to try one of these new chemical extinguish-
ersexcept the bill for that would be too high? In the meantime, a whole
eld of bystanders jumps up and down shouting, Put out the bloody re
before it burns our houses too! So the remen feel they must look busy
but dont really do very much.
Viewing the world from Tokyo
Maybe Tokyos remen have other things on their minds. Their behav-
iour may mystify Wall Street and neoclassically trained economists,
but Japans policy elite is not primarily concerned with the factors that
usually preoccupy ofcials in capitalist countries: market condence,
corporate prots, sound banks, stable prices, rising living standards.
Other things being equal, its nice to have these things, but even a cur-
sory look at the history of Japans policy preoccupations show that other
things are more important. Take something as unexceptional as sound
banking, for exampleseemingly as uncontroversial as motherhood.
Sound banking implies prudent lending: lending directed towards sol-
idly protable borrowers that doesnt nance overcapacity. It implies
proper matching between assets and liabilitiesin other words, that
banks dont use short-term funding to nance long-term lendingand
concern with adequate capital cushions. Yet Japanese banks not only
paid little attention to such matters; at numerous times during the post-
war era they had been actively encouraged by the authorities to make
funds available to borrowers who showed no signs of protability, and
to nance overcapacity in a host of industries from automobiles to semi-
conductors. They were encouraged to fund long-term loans to these
sectors with a mixture of short-term deposits and borrowing in the so-
called call money market (Japans short-term interbank market), with
shortfalls made up by the BOJ. When, in the early 1980s, the more
nancially stable Japanese corporates began to reduce their reliance on
bank funding, the authorities looked the other way as the banks began
to shovel loans at lesser quality developers and stock market specula-
torsindeed, the authorities deliberately used the banks to push vast
murphy: Japan 27
amounts of credit into an overheated economy, creating in the late 1980s
the greatest nancial bubble in history. Regulators in most countries
urgeor requiretheir banks to maintain thick capital cushions; back in
the mid-1980s, at the so-called BIS negotiations to determine universal
bank capital standards, Japans ofcials argued that their banks did not
need such thick cushions.
5
Today, these same ofcials openly connive
with the banks to make the cushions look thicker than they actually are.
It is tempting to say that after all Japans regulators really must be stupid;
that they dont know how to administer a modern nancial system.
Resisting this temptation has proven too much for an army of commen-
tatorssome of whom ought to know betterindulging themselves in
a veritable orgy of gloating over Japans current difculties. But all this
triumphalism misses the point; sound banking as dened in the West
has never been a policy objective for Japans elite, any more than get-
ting prices right or properly functioning markets for labour, consumer
goods, corporate control and housing.
What, then, have their policy objectives been? Answering this question
requires doing something quite unfashionable in todays ahistorical,
ageographical, model-fetishizing intellectual worldpaying attention to
history and to institutions; in this case, Japans modern history and the
bureaucratic power structures that determine policy there.
This is not the place to give Japans modern history and institutions
the treatment they deservesuch an enterprise would require several
lifetimes of scholarly work and occupy many thousands of pages. But
at the risk of sounding simplistic and reductionist, two points must be
emphasized. First, Japan was what might be called a catch-up developer,
obsessed with avoiding what had been the fate of most of the non-West-
ern worldcolonization. And second, Japan has not experienced what
classical Marxists would term a genuine revolutionone class overturn-
ing anothersince the twelfth century, when a rising class of provincial
5
The reference is to the Bank for International Settlements under whose aegis
international bank-capital standards were worked out. By March 1993 banks were
to have raised the minimum ratio of capital to total assets to 8%, with at least half
this capitalso-called Tier Oneto consist of equity and retained earnings. A spe-
cial exception was made for Japanese banks, permitting them to count 45% of the
difference between the book value of their equity holdings and the market value of
these securities towards their capital requirements.
28 nlr 1
warriors usurped the prerogatives of a sclerotic centralized aristocracy.
(The Meiji Restoration, while hugely important, was, in the last analysis,
a struggle between elements of the ruling elite. The feudal character of
power relations in the preceding Tokugawa era survived the Restoration
essentially intact and indeed continues in some form to this day.)
Lets start with the catch-up developer. Catch-up developers from
Bismarks Germany to Park Chung Hees Korea conceive as the overrid-
ing aim of economic policy not living standards and market condence
but the building of the infrastructures of an advanced economy. If a
steel industry is a prerequisite for an advanced economy, then policy
makers in catch-up developers will do what it takes to ensure their
country has a steel industry, even if that means bank loans to unprot-
able companies at subsidized rates and agrant violations of Ricardian
free-trade norms. Japan, of course, is the paradigmatic example of a
catch-up developer, but there is even more to it than that. Japans fran-
tic and successful attempts to avoid colonization in the late nineteenth
century led to forced development of industries essential to warmaking,
a process that accelerated with the invasion of China in 1933 and the
subsequent war with the United States. Once the war ended, Japans
economic bureaucracies put the institutions of forced development to
work, rst in the service of those industries deemed essential to postwar
recovery and then to transforming Japan into an industrial power of the
rst rank.
Japans economic administrators therefore judge their performance
by the criteria of the countrys technological prowess and industrial
strength. Anyone who has spent any time in Japan or done business
with Japanese companies knows that the Japanese are obsessed with
the relative standing on global markets of their manufactured products
in terms of cost, quality and technological advancement. The prot-
ability or price-earnings ratios of the manufacturers themselves have
been, until very recently, almost irrelevanteven meaningless. But on
top of this concern with brute industrial strengthnatural in a country
whose entire modern history essentially constitutes a desperate quest to
avoid domination by capricious foreigners whose motives could never
be trustedhas been the unique legacy of a political and social order
that has not been overturned in its most fundamental aspects for 800
years. For that legacy brings with it the unspoken fear that an overturn-
ing might someday happen. Japan did in fact narrowly escape revolution
murphy: Japan 29
in the 1870s and again in the late 1940s.
6
Thus we see the obsession on
the part of Japans governing class with the maintenance of social peace,
and a nearly pathological aversion to anything that potentially threatens
disorder or a loss of control. Indeed, Japans 125-year-long drive for tech-
nological self-sufciency and overwhelming industrial might is really
part and parcel of the overall efforts to neutralize any threat to the exist-
ing order. For ever since the Portuguese appeared in Japanese waters
in 1543 with their warships, their guns and their subversive religion,
foreigners have represented arguably the biggest single source of such
threats. In 1854, a 250-year-old effort to isolate Japan from the world col-
lapsed; and 1945 saw the utter ruin of attempts to use military means in
order to force foreigners to deal with the country on its terms. Japans
administrators have thus been left with the single tool of economic policy
in trying to control relations with the outside world.
The 1990sa Japanese perspective
Looked at from the perspectives of industrial might and social order,
then, the 1990s presents much more of a mixed picture than do the
standard measurements of GNP growth, corporate prots and unem-
ployment rates. To be sure, even when seen through the eyes of Tokyos
policy elite, the picture is not good. Uncertainties once thought resolved
have returned with greater force. Demands for changefrom both inside
and outside Japanhave increased in volume and frequency. After two
decades of technological leadership, the country nds itself again a fol-
lower in the most widely touted new industries. Formerly reliable policy
tools no longer work as they used to. Doubts proliferate about the ability
of Japans administrators to honour all the promises made to disparate
groups in the country that have the capacity to make trouble.
At the same time, neither is the picture wholly bleak. In a wide range
of manufactured products, Japanese companies can still provide higher
quality goods at lower costs than their competitors anywhere. Japanese
dominance of key industrial components is so great that it is no more pos-
sible these days to run an industrial economy without buying goods from
Japan than to do so without buying petroleum. Complex machines
6
See Andrew Gordons account of the erce and often violent struggles for control
of the workplace, to use his term, in the immediate postwar years in The Wages of
Afuence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan, Cambridge, Mass. 1998.
30 nlr 1
computers, automobiles, aircraftcannot be built without Japanese
components. For all its nancial troubles, the country still commands
the worlds largest pool of savings and remains the number one net cred-
itor. Indeed, that is why Japans difculties so exercise central bankers
and nance ministers around the worldif Japan were a poor country
with few savings, who would care?
Japans administrators are clearly under pressure. But at the same time,
stretched as they may be, I think they believe that they still command
the resources to cope with threats to the existing order, whether those
originate from irate foreign countries or increasingly restive domestic
groups. Indeed, one could make a convincing case that both internation-
ally and domestically, those threats have receded somewhat in the last
three years. A Clinton administration that came to ofce determined to
force change on Japan and overhaul chronic American payments decits
with Tokyo essentially gave up pushing structural reform in the fall of
1998 with the tacit endorsement of the bank bailout and stimulus pack-
ages at the expense of the earlier much-hyped reform efforts. And since
early 1999, believing that no other alternative to a disastrous Japanese
economic collapse exists, Washington has sent several signals that it
is once again prepared to accept a further widening of Japans record
trade and current account surpluses. Meanwhile, at home, the most far-
reaching attempt in fty years to impose political control over Japans
governing bureaucracy shows every sign of having run out of steam.
The Liberal Democratic Party, which has long traded political cover for
the bureaucracy and non-interference in bureaucratic policy making in
return for funding to feed its principal power basesthe countryside
and the bloated construction sectorhas succeeded, at least for the time
being, in neutralizing the rst signicant opposition it had faced since
1960. This is an opposition that had, back in 1993, actually managed
to turn the LDP out of ofce for a few months with a programme of
imposing political control over the bureaucracy. But the prospect scared
too many inuential groups in Japanthe bureaucrats themselves, of
course, but also the quality newspapers which fundamentally determine
what passes for public opinion in Japan. And the LDPbureaucracy
nexus now appears completely in charge again.
Which doesnt mean they dont face severe challengesor that they have
any unied notion of how to respond to them; but understanding the
likely policy responses to these challenges means making the effort to
see them through the eyes of Japans policy elite.
murphy: Japan 31
Loss of technological leadership
Reviewing some of the biggest of these challenges, we could start with
the loss of technological leadership in such industries as computers
and telecommunications. This has had a profoundly demoralizing effect
on Japans administrative elitemore so, I would suspect on the basis
of my conversations in Tokyo, than such widely publicized problems
as the banking crisis and the exploding scal decits. For by the late
1980s, Japans policy elite believed they had achieved their century-long
goal of an advanced industrial structure wholly under Japanese con-
trolthus forcing the outside world to deal with Japan on its terms,
rather than the reverse. But the unexpected resurgence of American
industry in the 1990sparticularly the growth of industries clustered
around software, the internet and the personal computermeant that,
at their moment of triumph, Japanese companies found they did not
after all control the direction of markets in the most important new
industries. Indeed, Japanese semi-conductor and computer components
companies grumble that they have been reduced to the status of price-
takers; that Dell, Compaq and Cisco treat them the way they treat their
second- and third-tier subcontractors in Japan. Meanwhile, complaints
about the American dominance of the internet are ubiquitous, but the
complaints tend to be resigned rather than deant. For Japans admin-
istrators know full well that the price of taking on the United States
head-to-head in internet and software-related industries is the importing
of the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley, complete
with maverick young scientists walking out on established university
professors, billion-dollar start-ups run by boys in their early twenties,
and highly developed venture capital markets immune to bureaucratic
interference. Despite periodic attempts to mimic certain aspects of this
culturethe Japanese electronics giants that encourage their program-
mers to wear jeans to work; the attempts by MITI to pass out some $1.5
billion over the past two years to jumpstart software development
7

Japans bureaucrats will not willingly allow anything so threatening to

the established order as a Silicon Valley ethos to take root. Instead, look
for a continued Japanese drive to ensure that key hardware components
are dominated by Japanese manufacturersthey may not be able to
dictate the pace of development, as they once thought they could, but
the world will still have to do business with them. Look for continued
7
MITIs software promotion activities can be viewed at the website: www.ipa.go.jp
32 nlr 1
Japanese leadership in so-called embedded software: the software incor-
porated into the likes of elevators and automobiles.
Banking crisis and credit rights
A second challenge, of course, is that banking crisis which so exercises
policy makers and observers everywhere. But Japans administrators,
even though they may use the word, do not see it as a banking crisis in
the way Western regulators wouldif they did, they would long ago have
closed down shaky banks, recapitalized the healthier ones and foreclosed
on bad debt. Instead, Tokyos mandarins view the problem in terms of
what Karel van Wolferen has very usefully termed credit rights.
8
In a
capitalist society, there is no such thing as a right to credit held by any
entity other than perhaps the government itself through its powers to tax
and print money. No other public sector institution, private company or
individualeven the strongest and richestenjoys any automatic right
to credit. But in Japan, an elaborate, although informalthat is, not cod-
iedsystem of credit rights is administered by powerful ofcial and
unofcial bureaucracies. Credit is thus allocated through criteria that
are fundamentally bureaucratic in nature rather than market drivenan
institution or person that meets certain criteria receives a right to credit;
the quid pro quo for access to credit being support for, or at least acqui-
escence in, bureaucratic policy goals. Once this notion is understood,
then such key elements of Japans economic structure as main banks,
keiretsu or corporate clusters, the convoy system for the nations banks
(gososendan), and lifetime employment fall into place. Most companies
have main banks that are expected to support corporate activities irres-
pective of protability. The MOF long administered a so-called convoy
system that guaranteed the viability of all the banks. Corporate clusters
anchored by cross-shareholdings allow each member unlimited access
to group resources while imposing, on the other side of the coin, unlim-
ited obligations to other group members. Companies are expected to
provide for the life-long livelihood of core employees (seisha-in).
The banking crisis can best be understood as the outward manifesta-
tion of the inability of Japans administrators to meet all the demands
of those with credit rights. The reasons why this crisis developed in
the 1990safter several decades in which no such problems existed
8
Unpublished paper.
murphy: Japan 33
are many and complex, but they boil down to an inability to generate
the constant increases in nominal GNP that characterized the Japanese
economy from the 1950s through to the late 1980s. Akio Mikuni has
suggested that this in turn is rooted in Japans emergence as a net
creditor nation, leading to secular upward pressure on the yen and a
deationary bias in the economy.
9
A net creditor nation is almost surely
a mature economy; mature economies do not as a rule grow quickly. At
the same time, claims on foreign countries generate deationary pres-
sures because those claims can be and are exercised through purchases
of cheaper foreign goods and assets. This has been particularly obvious
in the Japanese case with land. Land prices underpinned the structure of
asset values to such an extent that many Japanese economists describe
the Japanese system as tochi hon-i-sei, or land-value economy. (Loans of
more than one year were typically, for example, secured by land; most
Japanese banks paid little attention to corporate cash ow, instead look-
ing at the value of corporate land holdings.)
10
Many of Japans growing
claims on foreign countries have been exercised in such a way as to put
tremendous deationary pressures on Japanese real estate prices, which
had reached such stratospheric levels in the late 1980s that the market
value of the Imperial Palace Grounds was said to be greater than that of
the whole of Canada.
Tokyos overriding concern in this decade has been to get the country
moving without a large-scale revoking of credit rights. Building a oor
under the stock market with public funds in the summer of 1992, secur-
ing the help of the US Treasury to reverse a soaring yen in the summer
of 1995, the extremely low interest rate regime and periodic oods of
public works spending, the resolution of the housing loan crisis, the
consumption tax hike and the series of MOF-administered bank merg-
ers all make sense in this light.
11
9
Mikuni, op. cit. See particularly pages 810.
10
For the critical role that real estate played in the bubble economy of the late
1980s, see R. Taggart Murphy, The Weight of the Yen, New York 1996, pp. 2104.
11
The consumption tax hike, implemented against the advise of the US Treasury
and many independent economists, appears to have had two purposes: rst, to
increase the revenues available to the Japanese government, thereby boosting the
discretionary funds available to honour credit rights; and second, to maintain control
over the structure of interest rates. In any economy, the rate the government
itself pays for funds forms the oor interest rate. But as the Japanese govern-
ments nancing needs increase, the ability to borrow in deance of market forces
comes under question. The Japanese government has historically met its borrowing
34 nlr 1
By the fall of 1997, however, with the collapse of three major nancial
institutions and overall growth turning sharply negative, it had become
evident not only that efforts to revive the economy were going nowhere
but that it was going to be impossible to honour all credit rights. What we
have seen since then is a kind of triage, with credit rights being revoked
to politically weak sectorssmall independent businesses for example,
some of the lesser corporate clusters, also-ran manufacturersnot to
mention much of the nancial sector where the MOF has, since the late
1980s, openly forced shotgun mergers (that of the Mitsui and Taiyo
Kobe banks to form the Sakura Bank a harbinger of the mega-mergers
of the past year), permitted a number of highly visible institutions to fail
(Yamaichi Securities, for example, and the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank),
and effectively nationalized the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan and the
Nippon Credit Bank. Highly visible tie-ups with foreigners, on the lines
of the stake Renault has taken in Nissan, and the success in the last
two years by foreign nancial institutions in areas heretofore closed to
them should not, however, be misinterpreted. This ongoing credit triage
is not being decided by market forces free of bureaucratic interference.
No sign exists that Japans administrators really want to see genuine
markets in credit and corporate control take root. Even if they were so
inclined, it would take at least a decade to build the institutional infra-
structure of a modern capitalist economy: independent ratings agencies,
a sizeable accounting profession (in an economy two and a half times as
large as Britains, Japan has about one eighth the number of chartered
accountants), enough lawyers, judges and courts to handle the reso-
needs by force-feeding government bonds (so-called JGBs) to syndicates of banks
and securities rms that had no choice but to participate, and through purchases by
the MOFs trust fund bureau, funded by the assets of the postal savings system. With
the advent of the banking crisis and the desperate need to restore protability to
the banks, continued forced-feeding of unprotable JGBs has become less tenable.
Meanwhile, the assets of the postal savings system are increasingly stretched.
But having to nance the Japanese governments debt through real bond markets
responding to market forces would inevitably produce a sharp hike in interest
rates, as was demonstrated late in 1998 when the trust fund bureau announced it
would cut back its JGB purchases. The announcement was rescinded in the wake
of a sharp rise in both the yen and interest rates, but it remains inevitable in the
absence of debt monetization (see discussion below) if Japans scal borrowing
requirements continue to snowball. MOF ofcials appear to have hoped a hike in
the consumption tax would forestall such a snowballing, but they miscalculated.
The depressing effects on the economy more than outweighed the additional tax
revenues.
murphy: Japan 35
lution of economic disputes. But the situation does create signicant
opportunities for foreigners in a number of industries, from pharmaceu-
ticals to automobiles, where foreign participation is seen as preferable
to technological backwardness, or widespread layoffs and plant closings.
And there is no question but that Japans authorities have decided that
Japans bankers and brokers simply do not possess the expertise neces-
sary to run highly competitive modern nancial institutions. In a pattern
that goes back to the early Meiji period, foreigners are being temporarily
welcomed in this sector and given the opportunity to make signicant
money until such time as the Japanese learn what they need to know.
While some of the expertise the foreigners are introducing is purely
technical in natureto an extraordinary degree, for example, cash is still
used in Japan to settle obligations, cheques are almost unheard of, and
even payments done via ATMs are encrusted with high and antiquated
fees;
12
technology introduced by foreigners will surely shake up the pay-
ment and settlement systemsthe foreigners will also bring with them
market forces that have the potential to destabilize the Japanese system
and threaten bureaucratic control over credit allocation. Indeed, this is
already happening to some degreeJapanese corporations have been
tapping international capital markets for twenty years now and money
has been leaking out of the Japanese system for most of this decade
as investors seek higher returns offshore. It is a mistake to conclude,
however, that simply because the administrators of the Japanese system
are, under duress, permitting the introduction of market forces into
areas where they were previously suppressed, that they have abandoned
their long-held conviction that economic outcomes ought to be deter-
mined by a highly trained bureaucratic elite rather than the free play of
market forces. It is, of course, conceivable that the foreign nancial insti-
tutions represent the thin edge of a wedge that will nally undermine
bureaucratic control. But aside from the difculty referred to above in
creating the infrastructure of a capitalist economy out of whole cloth,
the bureaucracy continues to have formidable powers at its command
in forestalling outcomes that it views as undesirable. In particular, tax
policyboth the policies themselves and the aggressive use of audits
12
To pay your rent in Japan, for example, you have two choicesyou can take the
cash to your landlords bank, ll out a form, and wait a few minutes while the trans-
action is processed. Or you can pay your bank to do itusual cost is about 400 yen
($3.30), irrespective of the amount involved. You can use an ATM, but it will still
cost you.
36 nlr 1
discourages many Japanese from investing overseas. Institutions which
are insufciently accommodating to bureaucratic wishes can be made
the subject of onerous investigations, manufactured scandals, and the
institutional equivalent of show trials.
13
Unpredictable outside world
A third challenge lies in the growing unpredictability of events outside
Japan that impinge on the countrys prosperity. Since 1952, the year
that marked the end of the American Occupation, Japans principal
tool in coping with the outside world has been a sustained, herculean
effort to ensure that the United States provided a protective umbrella
for Japanor, really, two umbrellas: rstly, a military/security umbrella
that made it unnecessary for Japan to have independent foreign policies
and security arrangements. If the United States had not managed for
Tokyo those functions by which a state is most easily identiedcon-
ducting foreign relations and providing for securityJapan would have
been forced to hold some sort of internal debate that carried the potential
for terrible domestic disruption in a country that has still not even begun
to examine the institutional reasons for the disaster of the Second World
War. And secondly, the United States provided an economic umbrella
that, among other things, ensured access to world markets for Japanese
goods at a competitivethat is to say, undervaluedexchange rate. For
the unrestricted ability to dispose of excess production on world markets
forms an absolutely essential safety valve in an economic system where
investment is unconstrained by the need to compete for credit.
Broadly speaking, Japan has employed two sets of tactics in ensuring
that the United States maintained these umbrellas. The rst set, used
until the early 1980s, involved threats that Japan would go socialist or
communist unless the United States cooperated in this or that area or
trade problem. Such threats have been empty since 1960 at the latest,
13
The plethora of rules and regulations that ostensibly govern economic life are so
numerous and impractical that it is hardly possible to do business without violat-
ing one or more of them. When the bureaucracy wishes to make an example of
someone or some institution, the offending party is made the target of an ostenta-
tious investigation for following what has heretofore been accepted practice. Karel
van Wolferen has written extensively about the use of scandals in the Japanese
system to maintain order. See Sukyandaru ni yotte Nihon Kenryoku Kikou wa
Ikinobiru (The Structure of Japanese Power depends on Scandals), Chuo Koron,
October 1991, pp. 18694.
murphy: Japan 37
but to a Washington trapped by its own ideological misconceptions and
with inadequate resources devoted to Japan,
14
the notion that leftists
stood dangerously close to the levers of power in Tokyo retained some
credibility well into the 1980s.
The second set of tactics that have today almost entirely supplanted
the rst set (which has now dwindled to the depiction of sentiment on
Okinawa vis--vis the location of American bases there) stem from the
growing nancial leverage Japan has accumulated over the United States
since the early 1980s. At the time, an incoming Reagan administration
enacted a set of policies guaranteeing that the US national debt would
explode and that the United States would become the worlds leading net
debtor nation. Japan emerged both as principal foreign holder of claims
on the US government and as the indispensable nancier of Americas
current account decitdirectly, through its heavy purchases since the
early 1980s of US government debt, and indirectly, through the coun-
trys willingness to denominate the bulk of its claims on the outside
world in dollars rather than yen. Japan has used the resulting leverage,
particularly in this decade, to blunt American trade offensives (the with-
drawal of American threats to impose sanctions on Japans automakers
in June 1995sanctions that had across-the-board political support in
the United Stateswas, for example, due solely to fears over disruptions
in the bond and currency markets) and to secure essential American
cooperation in reducing the value of the yen whenever it threatened to
impose an intolerable burden on Japans exporters.
But while these tactics have been successfulseen most recently in
the tacit American acquiescence early in 1999 in yet another widening
of the Japanese trade surplusthey carry increasingly unpredictable
side effects. Case in point: the August 1995 joint interventions by
the Japanese and American authorities to halt a soaring yen/dollar
rate. In the weeks before that intervention, it took only 80 yen to
buy a dollar. That kind of rate, had it continued for a year or more,
would surely have forced a restructuring on JapanJapanese exporters
were not even covering variable costs. But Japanese ofcials made an
extremely plausible case to then US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin
that, if left alone, that rate would end Japans ability to prop up the
14
One former top ofcial of the Ofce of the US Trade Representative told me he
couldnt even get the funds for subscriptions to leading Japanese newspapers.
38 nlr 1
US current account decit.
15
That would nally have pulled the curtain
down on the perennial American trade and current account decits, but
at the cost of plunging the US into recession. For the current account
plugs the difference between what a country spends and what it pro-
duces. In the American economy of the 1990s, high capacity utilization
rates preclude any rapid increase in output. Thus the only way in which
the current account decit can fall is through a reduction in spending;
to put it in other terms, through a recession. To a politically weakened
administration reeling from the disaster of the 1994 Congressional elec-
tions and facing a presidential election eighteen months off, the prospect
of a recession was far more frightening than that of a widening trade
decit. And when the Japanese offered their help in forestalling such
a recessionalbeit at the cost of perpetuating the bilateral trade imbal-
ancethe administrations senior economic policy ofcer took it.
But as both Rubin and the Japanese were to discover, it is no longer a
bi-polar world. The yen did indeed drop, pulling Japan back for a while
from the precipice. At the same time, the Bank of Japan set about back-
ing up the foreign exchange goals with extremely low interest rates.
16
But as Keynes once noted, in an economy where banks wont lend and
people wont spend, this is no more effective than pushing on a wet
noodle. Instead of reviving the domestic economy, the low interest rates
attracted the hedge funds, giving rise to the so-called yen carry trade
17
and funding the offshore lending of the Japanese and European banks
who made it available to eager borrowers in other Asian countries where
15
See John Judiss account of the negotiations between Rubin and the Japanese
ofcials in the New Republic, 9 December 1996.
16
The ofcial discount rate, already an extraordinarily low 1.75%, had been cut in
April 1995 to 1.0%. In September of that year, it was cut again to 0.5%.
17
A bit of nancial jargon that refers to borrowing yen funds in Tokyo at extremely
low interest rates, exchanging the proceeds for a higher interest currency (usually
dollars), and on-lending in that currency. Prots come from capturing the differ-
ence between the yen and other currency interest rates, but are at risk if the yen
suddenly strengthens. This is indeed what happened in October 1998, following
the Russian debt moratorium. The yen soared from 135 to 115 to the dollar as many
nancial institutions suddenly had to scramble to meet their yen obligations when
their lenders, knowing the borrowers exposure to Russia and fearing their ability
to meet their obligations, began calling in their nancing facilities. The precipitous
rise in the yen wiped out most of the prots in the yen carry trade, spread the
damage from the Russian moratorium far beyond those institutions exposed to
Russia and helped to precipitate the near-collapse of leading hedge funds such as
Long-Term Capital Management.
murphy: Japan 39
it nanced unsustainable bubbles in property and other markets. The
bubbles all burst, bringing on the worst global economic crisis since the
1930s, and crippling what had become Japans most important export
market. For not only had the competitiveness of neighbouring Asian
countries been hit hard by the weakening of the yendirectly affecting
their ability to earn foreign exchange through exports and thus their abil-
ity to purchase Japanese goodsbut the nancial crisis in these countries
devastated hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments which
had been directly or indirectly funded via the Japanese banking system,
thus delivering yet another blow to a set of institutions already reeling
from domestic difculties.
Now Japan must contend with the arrival of a new uncertainty: a euro
that already shows signs of complicating efforts to maintain a price
advantage for Japanese goods on world markets. The unanticipated cur-
rent weakness of the euro helped set off the latest surge of yen strength
that now threatens to destroy whatever chance of recovery Japan has.
Any future surge in the value of the euro is much more likely to reect
an easing dollar than an easing yen. And a European Central Bank has
much less reason to help a beleaguered Tokyo reduce upward pressure
on the yen than does a US Treasury acutely sensitive to Japans key role
in sustaining the swollen American current account decit.
Domestic discontent
Amidst the challenges from abroad, Japans policy elite confronts what is
probably an even bigger challenge at homecoping with domestic dis-
content. In an economy no longer growing, where credit triage is forcing
the administrators to revoke many of the indiscriminate promises made
to almost any domestic group with the capacity to cause trouble, political
and economic life in Japan today is characterized by increasing rancour.
In the absence of an infrastructure of market mechanisms and legal
institutions sufcient to perform ordering functions, ever more open
intimidation and arbitrary exercises of power determine who survives
and who doesnt. The political gridlock reported overseas that delayed
a bank bailout package until October 1998 only forms the surface of
a tremendous power struggle in Japan over the disposition of the bad
debt. Almost every important power group in the country is involved,
one way or another, in the struggle and, of course, that very visibly
includes organized crime, which has made an orderly process of fore-
closure impossible.
40 nlr 1
So far, this struggle does not threaten the essence of the Japanese
system; a system that survived the Second World War and the
American Occupation essentially intact can cope with a decade of
no growth and a trillion dollars in bad debts. But the struggle does
have far-reaching economic implications, and has itself now become
a cause of the countrys problems, as well as a result. This is most
obvious in the behaviour of Japanese households, which have had their
condence shattered in a range of institutionslifetime employment,
the Ministry of Finance, the banking system, the very foundations of
postwar growth and prosperity. This collapse in condence has not
coalesced into anything resembling a serious political threat to the
existing orderindeed, as noted above, the attempt by some of Japans
more astute politicians to impose political control over the bureaucracy
appears for the time being to have collapsed. But it has fostered
a climate of risk-averse malaise that takes concrete nancial form,
among other ways, in the rapidly expanding withdrawals of household
funds from the banking system and the growth of cash in circulation,
now running greater than ve times that in the United States on a
per capita basis.
18
The pressure from abroad to monetize Japans scal
decits
19
in the hopes of creating inationeven assuming technically
it could be done in a country where banks are not lending and people
are not spendingwould remove the last remaining prop of consumer
condence: the purchasing power of household savings.
Interdependence and the policy conundrum
The success or failure of Japans policy responses to these challenges
forms one of the four great uncertainties looming over the global econ-
omy, whose fate in turn is wrapped up in how these challenges are
met. For the other three great uncertaintiesrecovery in the developing
world, the success of the euro, and the continuation of the American
expansionare very much connected to what happens in Japan. This is
18
As estimated by Mikuni & Co.
19
Monetization is a technical term referring to creation of additional money by
central bankers in amounts equivalent to additional debt issued by governments.
In most cases, ination results, which is why central bankers usually oppose the
practice. Some debate exists as to whether Japan actually could monetize additional
debt. The Bank of Japan can of course create additional yen funds, but it may
encounter obstacles to pushing those funds out into the economy because banks
are loath to lend, businesses to borrow, and consumers to spend.
murphy: Japan 41
not simply because the global economy badly needs the additional pur-
chasing power that a recovering Japan could provide. While true, this
point is overshadowed by something even more important: the American
economic expansion depends upon Japans ability and willingness to
prop up the dollar and nance American current account decits.
Which saddles Tokyo and Washington with an exquisite policy conun-
druma world economic engine dangerously dependent on American
household consumption badly needs a revitalized Japanese economy to
help fuel a broad global recovery. But the very process of overhauling the
Japanese economy threatens American consumer spending.
To grasp this, recall that more American household assets today are tied
up in mutual funds than in bank deposits. As households watch their
net wealth grow, thanks to the booming stock market, they save less
and less (another way of saying they spend more and more). Indeed,
the household savings rate in the United States today is actually nega-
tive. But in an economy operating at full capacity, shrinking the current
account decit can only be done by reducing spending, thereby shutting
down the last remaining engine keeping the global economic plane aloft.
And the structural overhaul widely prescribed to get the Japanese econ-
omy moving and thus rev up another engine carries precisely that risk.
Thus the policy conundrum. Japans sick banks appear to be at the heart
of the countrys problems but they are, in fact, symptoms of a deeper
structural crisis. Decades of investment without regard for protability
or return have saddled Japan with horrendous overcapacity, which takes
nancial shape as bad loans on the books of the nations banks. Doing
something about this overcapacity means job losses and bankruptcies.
It means acknowledging that the deposits that nanced most of this
capacity via the banking system are not worth anything like what people
think they are. But tell Japans households, whose savings overwhelm-
ingly take the form of deposits with the bank or the post ofce, that those
deposits may not be safe; tell them that their companies may close and
they may lose their jobs, and you have a full-scale depression on your
hands as banks collapse and people stop spending.
Indeed, this has been happening in slow motion. Ordinary Japanese are
not stupid. They know that many, even most, banks are being kept from
insolvency only by emergency transfusions; that the business environ-
42 nlr 1
ment is awful. They react like sensible people would anywherecutting
back all but essential spending and pulling money out of tottering banks.
Worsen this palpable unease in Japan by doing what the champions
of structural reform have long been advocatingclose down the shaky
banks; put unprotable companies out of business while streamlining
the restand you risk turning a recession into a full-edged depression.
Who will then nance the US current account decit?
The Japanese do not, of course, prop up this decit all by themselves.
Developing countries trying to export their way out of their difculties
and Europeans anxious not to miss out on the American equity boom are
also helping to nance the American decit. But nancing from these
other sources comes and goes, while the Japanese surplus boasts roughly
the same life-span as that which it has long nancedthe American
decit. Just as the latter has grown steadily through times of ination,
bear markets, recession, runaway Federal decits, recovery, bull markets,
budget surpluses and todays boom times, so the former has similarly
expanded through the so-called miracle economy years, the oil shocks,
the early 1980s industrial superpower years the late 1980s bubble, and
the stagnation, recession, nancial crises and deation of the 1990s.
Since the sum of the worlds decits and surpluses have to balance, any
country that runs a current account surplus is, by denition, indirectly
supporting the US decit. But Japans current account surpluses have
directly supported and nanced the countervailing American decits
over the past two decades because of a historical anomaly: while Japan
is the worlds leading net creditor nation, its claims on the outside
world have been denominated not in its own currency but largely in
the currency of the worlds leading debtor nation. Japans exporters typi-
cally bill their overseas customers in dollars rather than yen. Equally
importantly, these businesses have generally refrained from repatriat-
ing their dollar export earnings, leaving the dollars on deposit with
Japanese banks where they ultimately nd their way into the US banking
system. Akio Mikuni and I will argue in a forthcoming book that Japans
monetary authorities have long run what amounts to a currency board,
matching the dollar earnings of Japanese companies with yen credit crea-
tion, thereby permitting Japanese businesses to meet their yen expenses
without repatriating their dollar earnings. Indeed, Japanese banks have
traditionally supplemented the dollar deposits of Japanese businesses by
raising additional funds in offshore dollar markets. Collectively, these
murphy: Japan 43
practices by Japans exporters and banks, backed up by what amounts
to yen monetization of the dollar earnings of Japanese companies, have
been essential to maintaining a far stronger dollar (or, in other words,
a far weaker yen) than that which Japans endless trade and current
account surpluses would otherwise seem to dictate. Indeed, this has
been the implicit aim of the policies: to forestall a surge in the yen/dollar
rate that would impose killingly high cost pressures on Japanese busi-
nesses and open the oodgates to waves of cartel-busting imports.
Problems of the yen
But Japans economic troubles have seriously endangered these dollar-
support mechanisms. The increasing publicity given to Japans banking
troubles and the lowering of bank ratings by the international ratings
agencies have made it difcult or impossible for Japans banks overseas
to raise dollar funds from non-Japanese sources. As a result, while
Japans net creditor position continues to grow, its gross creditor posi-
tion has been shrinking, weakening a major prop of dollar strength.
And even more importantly, the perilous state of the Japanese banking
system threatens the means that the Japanese monetary authorities have
always relied upon to release credit into the economy.
20
So far, these pressures have been contained, although it should be noted
that the yen now shows signs of another ruinous surge along the lines of
the one that nearly destroyed the economy in the spring of 1995, when
it took only 79 yen to buy a dollar. But if Japan were to experience the
fabled hard landing that many believe is the inevitable price of mean-
ingful structural reform, it is difcult to see how these dollar-support
mechanisms could survive. In particular, a sudden collapse of con-
dence in the entire Japanese banking systemsomething that has been
a real threat now since the fall of 1997, when the Hokkaido Takushoku
Bank imploded before the authorities were able to halt the crashwould
make it impossible for the BOJ to continue monetizing Japans dollar
earnings. Japanese companies would be forced to repatriate dollars and
20
Rather than open-market operations, where the Federal Reserve buys and sells
US government securities in order to control the money supply, Japans monetary
authorities have typically relied upon bank credit creation and so-called adminis-
trative guidance. See Yoshio Suzuki, The Japanese Financial System, Oxford 1989,
particularly pp. 31726. The author was the director of the Institute for Monetary
and Economic Studies at the Bank of Japan.
44 nlr 1
exchange them for yen, driving the dollar sharply down. As the dollar
fell, a US bond market crash would surely follow, as dollar interest rates
rose sharply to attract investors worldwide into dollar instruments. That
crash would mark the end of the American expansion.
Faced with this nasty prospect, both Washington and reform advocates
in Japan seem to have concluded that pumping up the Japanese economy
with the steroids of massive spending was preferable to risky root-and-
branch reform. The key moment appears to have been the decision in
June 1998 by the then US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, to inter-
vene in the foreign exchange markets to help prop up the sagging yen
that had become the most concrete manifestation of Japans alarming
condition.
21
On the eve of the intervention, President Clinton spoke to
the then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto in a widely publicized tele-
phone call and extracted a promise from him that Japan would inject
public money into the banking system and pump up the economy. The
most convincing explanation for at least the timing of these moves was
Clintons imminent visit to China and the need to avoid a devastating
devaluation of the Chinese currency on the eve of the summit. Beijing
had made it clear in all kinds of ways that unless something was done to
halt the rapid fall of the yen and get Japan growing again, China could
not be held to its promise not to devalue.
The intervention was only the rst sign of the policy shift. At the hastily
called Tokyo meetings of deputy nance ministers and central bankers
from eighteen countries on 20 June 1998, mentioned above, Japan
21
Alert readers may discern a seeming contradiction herewhy intervene to sup-
port a sagging yen if the long-term danger is a soaring yen which destroys the
global viability of the dollar and the ability of the United States to nance current
account decits? By the summer of 1998, pessimism about Japan had become so
widespread that investors worldwide were unwilling to hold any yen instruments,
creating a vicious circle as expectations of further yen weakening took hold. This
directly threatened the Tokyo stock marketincreasingly dependent on foreign
portfolio investorsand thus the capital ratios of Japans banks. Had the situation
continued, most of Japans banks would have been forced into open bankruptcy,
destroying the dollar-support mechanism discussed above. At that point, a whipsaw
would probably have occurred, along the lines of the smaller one that did occur
in October 1998 (see note 16), only instead of taking the yen from 135 to 115 in
four days (something that astonished market participants at the time), the whip-
saw could have seen the yen go from 180 or 190 to 60 or 70, nally breaking the
Japanese system and global prosperity along with it.
murphy: Japan 45
found itself completely isolated, subject to demands on all sides that it do
whatever it took to restore growth. The Obuchi cabinet nally succeeded
three months later in pushing massive stimulus and bank bailout pack-
ages through the Diet.
But the latest numbers suggest that all this spending has delivered
only one more still-born recovery, something we have seen repeatedly
since 1992. The rationale behind the attempts to jumpstart the econ-
omy seems, admittedly, clear enough: a revival of condence by both
domestic consumers and foreign investors such that aggregate demand
recovers to the point where it becomes self-sustaining. With demand up,
businesses begin investing. Banks start lending again and as the overall
economy picks up, the shrinking of the huge debt overhang from the
banking crisis can get underway. And a rising economy brings with it
rising tax revenues and thus the wherewithal to repay the money bor-
rowed to spark the recovery. Meanwhile, investors, both domestic and
foreign, seeing a self-sustaining recovery, start pouring money into the
Tokyo stock market, reinforcing the virtuous cycle.
This scenario or something close to it is clearly what Japanese ofcialdom
has banked on, and they underlined their policy efforts with an extraor-
dinary public relations campaign designed to convince sceptics both in
and outside Japan that the corner had nally been turned. Whatever the
policy results, the PR campaign at least worked brilliantly: the Tokyo
stock market rose substantiallyindeed, for dollar-based investors, the
combined effects of a rising yen and rising stock prices made Tokyo the
most protable of the worlds major equity markets in 1999. The for-
eign press saluted the supposed restructuring of the Japanese economy,
while many inuential economists at major international banks advised
their clients not to miss out on the Japanese turnaround.
22

But while the nal verdict on the latest recovery efforts is not yet in,
the most recent evidencenot simply the third quarter GNP numbers
22
Deutsche Banks well-known economist Dr Kenneth Courtis was quoted in
Sunrise for Asias Economy, Los Angeles Times, 7 March 1999, saying that if the
current moves by the Bank of Japan work out, you will see a ood of money come
into the stock market, and the economy and nancial system will begin to emerge
from the worst crisis of a major economy since the 1930s. Just six months earlier
in a newsletter he had written of the critical decisions now so desperately urgent to
reverse course before the country careens into a massive nancial iceberg. Deutsche
Morgan Grenfell Global Strategy Research Asia, 25 June 1998.
46 nlr 1
but the fact that prots for the corporate sector as a whole have, for
the rst time in fty years, turned negativesuggests that the nay-
sayers may have the last word. At the time of all the hype about Japans
turnaround, Ron Bevacqua, then Senior Economist for Merrill Lynch
in Tokyo, warned in a newsletter of the risk that the cyclical rebound
would be short-lived. Akio Mikuni maintained that a sustainable recov-
ery is not possible for Japan until excess capacity is eliminated. Far from
addressing the problem, the bank bailout package permitted it to con-
tinue. Mikunis fears that the bailout money would be used by banks to
prop up borrowers who ought to be allowed to fail, have turned out to be
valid.
Bluster and cooperation
Indeed, on closer examination, even the governments commitment to
reation was less than total. The MOF announcement in late 1998 that
its Trust Fund Bureau, a long-standing parking place for excess govern-
ment debt, would actually reduce bond purchases, produced both a
stronger yen and a sharp rise in longer term interest rates as the bond
market gagged on all the new debtthe opposite of what a reationary
government would presumably want. While the MOF soon reversed its
decision, and both interest rates and the currency temporarily came
partway back down, the underlying forces that drove the MOFs earlier
announcement did not go away. As of this writing, the yen is again
threatening to break the 100-yen barrier. Meanwhile, demands on the
Postal Savings Systemthe primary source of funding not only for the
Trust Fund Bureaus bond purchases but a myriad of other MOF-decreed
purposes (including purchases of the bad debt of many banks)may
spiral out of control. Exacerbating these concerns are fears that in 2000
and 2001 the Post Ofce may see a net outow of deposits as a wave
of ten-year xed deposits, taken down in 1990 and 1991 during a tem-
porary spike in interest rates, mature and are not renewed. The Bank of
Japan has made it clear it has no intention of monetizing the new debt
to accommodate the extra spending. The strains on the Postal Savings
System and the stance of the BOJ led Bevacqua to warn that at some
point rising interest rates are likely to choke the economy.
Even if Japans authorities manage to take all the right macroeconomic
steps, these do not address the underlying microeconomic, structural
reasons that many fear will block a sustainable return by Japan to the bril-
murphy: Japan 47
liant economic performance for which the country was, until recently,
so celebrated. For the political forces allied against reform are very
great, including as they do not only many of Japans frightened house-
holds but almost every entrenched domestic power group. One major
exception is Japans most successful companiesToyota, Honda, Sony,
Matshushita, Kyocera, Canon, Ito-Yokado and the like. Since Japans
prosperity is ultimately in the hands of companies like these, it is con-
ceivable that if the domestic impasse seriously endangers their ability to
compete on world markets, they could force far-reaching reforms. Such
reforms could include, for example, the curbing of cartel-like arrange-
ments by which strong companies have traditionally borne the burden of
supporting their weaker competitors, suppliers and other corporate clus-
ter members. Or, to translate into the language of nance, the liabilities
of such companies might nally become explicit and understandable to
outside investors. Indeed, unofcial bureaucracies such as the Keidanren
which have always played a critical order-keeping role in the Japanese
system have increasingly come under the control of top performers such
as Toyota and Kyocera rather than old-line establishment rms such
as Nippon Steel, suggesting that a powershift may be occurring. But if
it is, it is probably more in the nature of a co-opting than a herald of
fundamental change. For predicting that Japans champion companies
will cede control of key management prerogatives to outside investors,
or place protability and the concerns of shareholders over those of
the ministries, banks and the other members of corporate clusters and
industrial associations into which they are bound by all-encompassing
bureaucratic webs, is tantamount to predicting upheaval on the scale of
the Meiji Restoration. It could happen, and if Japans very survival were
at stake, it probably would. But current circumstances, bad as they may
be, do not yet begin to threaten such.
And of course whatever lip service the United States pays to reform,
anything that endangers Japanese support for the dollar and the nanc-
ing of the American current account decit will ultimately be resisted
by any President or Treasury Secretary who cares about keeping his job.
Since the structural reform which Washington has been preaching at
Japan for a generation now carries precisely that risk, future administra-
tions are almost certain to continue the pattern set by the Clinton White
Houseempty bluster about the need for change; quiet cooperation in
maintaining the existing order.
48 nlr 1
Thus, some form of muddle through is, if not the most likely outcome,
certainly the most likely strategy to be followed by Japans policy eliteas
it was through the 1990s. To be sure, loud and persistent demands for
change will produce at least the appearance of a response. As stresses
intensify, the weaker and less organized segments of Japanese society
will be sacriced to protect the central corein much the same way that
survivors of the Kobe earthquake afliated with major companies soon
found themselves rehoused while small shopkeepers and the like were
essentially left to fend for themselves. In trying to predict the future,
there is little we can say with any certainty, but we can be condent that
the very last thing to change will be the essence of the Japanese sys-
temopaque, bureaucratic decision-making and prerogatives without
accountability to voters, journalists, outside shareholders, CPAs, politi-
cians or courts.
The problem with muddle through, however, is that it makes insuf-
cient allowance for system-threatening shocks brought on by the law
of unintended consequences in action. The damage inicted by the
developing world crisis of 1998 on the Japanese economy and on the
central prop of the economic relationship between the United States
and Japanthe intertwining of the Japanese current account surplus
and the American decitexceeded what anyone had dreamed possible
before the fact, and while for the time being the damage appears to have
been contained, it was a very near thing. And of course the next such
shockand we have no way of knowing where it will come from or what
it will becould easily overwhelm the combined efforts of Tokyo and
Washington to cope. Meanwhile, unsustainable situationsparticularly
the rot at the core of Japanese nance, but also endless American exter-
nal decits, Japanese surpluses, and currency rates that bear no relation
to trade and investment owshave been sustained for so long that
many have been lulled into thinking they can continue forever. A rude
awakening may be in store. Finally, muddle through depends on the
ability of powerholders in Washington and Tokyo to strike exaggerated
poses of concern over reform, market opening and the construction
of level playing elds, while at the same time doing everything neces-
sary to maintain an order which is neither open, nor level, nor reformed,
but which is absolutely essential to existing power alignments and to he
political and nancial fortunes of ruling elites in both places.
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50 new left review 1 jan feb 2000
N
owadays, national literature doesnt mean much:
the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody
should contribute to hasten its advent. This was Goethe, of
course, talking to Eckermann in 1827; and these are Marx
and Engels, twenty years later, in 1848: National one-sidedness and nar-
row-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many
national and local literatures, a world literature arises. Weltliteratur: this
is what Goethe and Marx have in mind. Not comparative, but world
literature: the Chinese novel that Goethe was reading at the time of that
exchange, or the bourgeoisie of the Manifesto, which has given a cos-
mopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
Well, let me put it very simply: comparative literature has not lived up to
these beginnings. Its been a much more modest intellectual enterprise,
fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around
the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not
much more.
This is my own intellectual formation, and scientic work always has
limits. But limits change, and I think its time we returned to that old
ambition of Weltliteratur: after all, the literature around us is now unmis-
takably a planetary system. The question is not really what we should
franco moretti
CONJ ECTURES ON WORLD
LI TERATURE
My mission: to say it more simply than I understand it.

Schnberg, Moses and Aaron

moretti: Literature 51
dothe question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature?
How do we do it? I work on West European narrative between 1790
and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outside of Britain or France.
World literature?
Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still,
we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading
more seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because weve just
started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the great unread. I
work on West European narrative, etc. . . . Not really, I work on its canon-
ical fraction, which is not even one per cent of published literature. And
again, some people have read more, but the point is that there are thirty
thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fty, sixty
thousandno one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will.
And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American . . .
Reading more is always a good thing, but not the solution.
1
Perhaps its too much, tackling the world and the unread at the same
time. But I actually think that its our greatest chance, because the
sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot
be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has
to be different. The categories have to be different. It is not the actual
interconnection of things, Max Weber wrote, but the conceptual
interconnection of problems which dene the scope of the various
sciences. A new science emerges where a new problem is pursued by
a new method.
2
Thats the point: world literature is not an object, its
a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no
one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. Thats not how
theories come into being; they need a leap, a wagera hypothesis, to
get started.
World literature: one and unequal
I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-system school of
economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that
1
I address the problem of the great unread in a companion piece to this article, The
Slaughterhouse of Literature, forthcoming in a special issue of Modern Language
Quarterly on Formalism and Literary History, spring 2000.
2
Max Weber, Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, 1904, in The
Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York 1949, p. 68.
52 nlr 1
is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and
a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing
inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as
in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of
inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what
Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because its profoundly unequal.
Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other eld,
writes Roberto Schwarz in a splendid essay on The Importing of the
Novel to Brazil: its not simply an easily dispensable part of the work
in which it appears, but a complex feature of it;
3
and Itamar Even-
Zohar, reecting on Hebrew literature: Interference [is] a relationship
between literatures, whereby a . . . source literature may become a
source of direct or indirect loans [Importing of the novel, direct and
indirect loans, foreign debt: see how economic metaphors have been
subterraneously at work in literary history]a source of loans for . . . a
target literature . . . There is no symmetry in literary interference. A target
literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature
which completely ignores it.
4
This is what one and unequal means: the destiny of a culture (usually
a culture of the periphery, as Montserrat Iglesias Santos has specied)
5

is intersected and altered by another culture (from the core) that com-
pletely ignores it. A familiar scenario, this asymmetry in international
powerand later I will say more about Schwarzs foreign debt as a
complex literary feature. Right now, let me spell out the consequences of
taking an explanatory matrix from social history and applying it to liter-
ary history.
Distant reading
Writing about comparative social history, Marc Bloch once coined a
lovely slogan, as he himself called it: years of analysis for a day of syn-
3
Roberto Schwarz, The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in
the Work of Roberto Alencar, 1977, in Misplaced Ideas, London 1992, p. 50.
4
Itamar Even-Zohar, Laws of Literary Interference in Poetics Today, 1990, pp. 54,
62.
5
Montserrat Iglesias Santos, El sistema literario: teora emprica y teora de los
polisistemas, in Dario Villanueva (ed.), Avances en teora de la literatura, Santiago
de Compostela 1994, p. 339: It is important to emphasize that interferences occur
most often at the periphery of the system.
moretti: Literature 53
thesis;
6
and if you read Braudel or Wallerstein you immediately see
what Bloch had in mind. The text which is strictly Wallersteins, his
day of synthesis, occupies one third of a page, one fourth, maybe half;
the rest are quotations (fourteen hundred, in the rst volume of The
Modern World-System). Years of analysis; other peoples analysis, which
Wallersteins page synthesizes into a system.
Now, if we take this model seriously, the study of world literature will
somehow have to reproduce this pagewhich is to say: this relation-
ship between analysis and synthesisfor the literary eld. But in that
case, literary history will quickly become very different from what it
is now: it will become second hand: a patchwork of other peoples
research, without a single direct textual reading. Still ambitious, and actu-
ally even more so than before (world literature!); but the ambition is now
directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the
project, the greater must the distance be.
The United States is the country of close reading, so I dont expect
this idea to be particularly popular. But the trouble with close reading
(in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is
that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have
become an unconscious and invisible premiss by now, but it is an iron
one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think
that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesnt make sense.
And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature
will do so: it would be absurd if it didnt!) close reading will not do it.
Its not designed to do it, its designed to do the opposite. At bottom,
its a theological exercisevery solemn treatment of very few texts taken
very seriouslywhereas what we really need is a little pact with the
devil: we know how to read texts, now lets learn how not to read them.
Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowl-
edge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger
than the text: devices, themes, tropesor genres and systems. And if,
between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well,
it is one of those cases when one can justiably say, Less is more. If
we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing
something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is
6
Marc Bloch, Pour une histoire compare des socits europennes, Revue de
synthse historique, 1928.
54 nlr 1
innitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But its precisely this pov-
erty that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This
is why less is actually more.
7
The Western European novel: rule or exception?
Let me give you an example of the conjunction of distant reading and
world literature. An example, not a model; and of course my example,
based on the eld I know (elsewhere, things may be very different). A
few years ago, introducing Kojin Karatanis Origins of Modern Japanese
Literature, Fredric Jameson noticed that in the take-off of the modern
Japanese novel, the raw material of Japanese social experience and the
abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction cannot always be
welded together seamlessly; and he referred in this respect to Masao
Miyoshis Accomplices of Silence, and Meenakshi Mukherjees Realism
and Reality (a study of the early Indian novel).
8
And its true, these books
return quite often to the complicated problems (Mukherjees term)
arising from the encounter of western form and Japanese or Indian
reality.
Now, that the same conguration should occur in such different cul-
tures as India and Japanthis was curious; and it became even more
curious when I realized that Roberto Schwarz had independently discov-
ered very much the same pattern in Brazil. So, eventually, I started using
these pieces of evidence to reect on the relationship between markets
and forms; and then, without really knowing what I was doing, began to
treat Jamesons insight as if it wereone should always be cautious with
these claims, but there is really no other way to say itas if it were a law
of literary evolution: in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary
system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe),
the modern novel rst arises not as an autonomous development but as
a compromise between a western formal inuence (usually French or
English) and local materials.
7
Or to quote Weber again: concepts are primarily analytical instruments for the
intellectual mastery of empirical data. (Objectivity in Social Science and Social
Policy, p. 106.) Inevitably, the larger the eld one wants to study, the greater the
need for abstract instruments capable of mastering empirical reality.
8
Fredric Jameson, In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities, in Karatani Kojin,
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, DurhamLondon 1993, p. xiii.
moretti: Literature 55
This rst idea expanded into a little cluster of laws,
9
and it was all very
interesting, but . . . it was still just an idea; a conjecture that had to be
tested, possibly on a large scale, and so I decided to follow the wave of
diffusion of the modern novel (roughly: from 1750 to 1950) in the pages
of literary history. Gasperetti and Goscilo on late eighteenth-century
Eastern Europe;
10
Toschi and Mart-Lpez on early nineteenth-century
Southern Europe;
11
Franco and Sommer on mid-century Latin America;
12

Frieden on the Yiddish novels of the 1860s;
13
Moosa, Said and Allen on
9
I have begun to sketch them out in the last chapter of the Atlas of the European
Novel 1800-1900 (Verso: London 1998), and this is more or less how they sound:
second, the formal compromise is usually prepared by a massive wave of West
European translations; third, the compromise itself is generally unstable (Miyoshi
has a great image for this: the impossible programme of Japanese novels); but
fourth, in those rare instances when the impossible programme succeeds, we have
genuine formal revolutions.
10
Given the history of its formative stage, it is no surprise that the early Russian
novel contains a host of conventions popularized in French and British literature,
writes David Gasperetti in The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb 1998, p. 5).
And Helena Goscilo, in her Introduction to Krasickis Adventures of Mr. Nicholas
Wisdom: The Adventures is read most fruitfully in the context of the West European
literature on which it drew heavily for inspiration. (Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures
of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Evanston 1992, p. xv.)
11
There was a demand for foreign products, and production had to comply,
explains Luca Toschi speaking of the Italian narrative market around 1800 (Alle
origini della narrativa di romanzo in Italia, in Massimo Saltafuso (ed.), Il viaggio del
narrare, Florence 1989, p. 19). A generation later, in Spain, readers are not inter-
ested in the originality of the Spanish novel; their only desire is that it would adhere
to those foreign models with which they have become familiar: and so, concludes
Elisa Mart-Lpez, one may well say that between 1800 and 1850 the Spanish novel
is being written in France (Elisa Mart-Lpez, La orfandad de la novela espaola:
poltica editorial y creacin literaria a mediados del siglo XIX, Bulletin Hispanique,
1997).
12
Obviously, lofty ambitions were not enough. All too often the nineteenth century
Spanish-American novel is clumsy and inept, with a plot derived at second hand
from the contemporary European Romantic novel. (Jean Franco, Spanish-American
Literature, Cambridge 1969, p. 56.) If heroes and heroines in mid-nineteenth
century Latin American novels were passionately desiring one another across tra-
ditional lines . . . those passions might not have prospered a generation earlier. In
fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream their erotic fantasies by read-
ing the European romances they hoped to realize. (Doris Sommer, Foundational
Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, BerkeleyLos Angeles 1991, pp.
31-2.)
13
Yiddish writers parodiedappropriated, incorporated, and modieddiverse
elements from European novels and stories. (Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction,
Albany 1995, p. x.)
56 nlr 1
the Arabic novels of the 1870s;
14
Evin and Parla on the Turkish novels
of the same years;
15
Anderson on the Filipino Noli Me Tangere, of 1887;
Zhao and Wang on turn-of-the-century Qing ction;
16
Obiechina, Irele
and Quayson on West African novels between the 1920s and the 1950s
17

(plus of course Karatani, Miyoshi, Mukherjee, Even-Zohar and Schwarz).
Four continents, two hundred years, over twenty independent critical stud-
ies, and they all agreed: when a culture starts moving towards the modern
novel, its always as a compromise between foreign form and local materi-
als. Jamesons law had passed the testthe rst test, anyway.
18

19
And
actually more than that: it had completely reversed the received historical
explanation of these matters: because if the compromise between the for-
14
Matti Moosa quotes the novelist Yahya Haqqi: there is no harm in admitting
that the modern story came to us from the West. Those who laid down its founda-
tions were persons inuenced by European literature, particularly French literature.
Although masterpieces of English literature were translated into Arabic, French
literature was the fountain of our story. (Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic
Fiction, 1970, 2nd ed. 1997, p. 93.) For Edward Said, at some point writers in
Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like them
(Edward Said, Beginnings, 1975, New York 1985, p. 81). And Roger Allen: In more
literary terms, increasing contacts with Western literatures led to translations of
works of European ction into Arabic, followed by their adaptation and imitation,
and culminating in the appearance of an indigenous tradition of modern ction in
Arabic. (Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, Syracuse 1995, p. 12.)
15
The rst novels in Turkey were written by members of the new intelligentsia,
trained in government service and well-exposed to French literature, writes Ahmet
O. Evin (Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis 1983, p. 10);
and Jale Parla: the early Turkish novelists combined the traditional narrative forms
with the examples of the western novel (Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don
Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul, forthcoming).
16
The narrative dislocation of the sequential order of events is perhaps the most
outstanding impression late Qing writers received when they read or translated
Western ction. At rst, they tried to tidy up the sequence of the events back into
their pre-narrated order. When such tidying was not feasible during translation,
an apologetic note would be inserted . . . Paradoxically, when he alters rather than
follows the original, the translator does not feel it necessary to add an apologetic
note. (Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional
to the Modern, Oxford 1995, p. 150.) Late Qing writers enthusiastically renewed
their heritage with the help of foreign models, writes David Der-wei Wang: I see
the late Qing as the beginning of the Chinese literary modern because writers
pursuit of novelty was no longer contained within indigenously dened barriers
but was inextricably dened by the multilingual, crosscultural trafcking of ideas,
technologies, and powers in the wake of nineteenth-century Western expansion-
ism. (Fin-de-sicle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 18491911,
Stanford 1997, pp. 5, 19.)
moretti: Literature 57
eign and the local is so ubiquitous, then those independent paths that
are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the
French, and especially the British case)well, theyre not the rule at all,
theyre the exception. They come rst, yes, but theyre not at all typical. The
typical rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Marannot Defoe.
Experiments with history
See the beauty of distant reading plus world literature: they go against the
grain of national historiography. And they do so in the form of an experi-
ment. You dene a unit of analysis (like here, the formal compromise),
20

17
One essential factor shaping West African novels by indigenous writers was the
fact that they appeared after the novels on Africa written by non-Africans . . . the for-
eign novels embody elements which indigenous writers had to react against when
they set out to write. (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the
West African Novel, Cambridge 1975, p. 17.) The rst Dahomean novel, Doguicimi
. . . is interesting as an experiment in recasting the oral literature of Africa within
the form of a French novel. (Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and
Ideology, Bloomington 1990, p. 147.) It was the rationality of realism that seemed
adequate to the task of forging a national identity at the conjuncture of global
realities . . . the rationalism of realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers,
Onitsha market literature, and in the earliest titles of the African Writers Series that
dominated the discourses of the period. (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in
Nigerian Writing, Bloomington 1997, p. 162.)
18
In the seminar where I rst presented this second-hand criticism, Sarah Golstein
asked a very good, Candide-like question: You decide to rely on another critic. Fine.
But what if hes wrong? My reply: If hes wrong, you are wrong too, and you soon
know, because you dont nd any corroborationyou dont nd Goscilo, Mart-
Lpez, Sommer, Evin, Zhao, Irele . . . And its not just that you dont nd positive
corroboration; sooner or later you nd all sorts of facts you cannot explain, and your
hypothesis is falsied, in Poppers famous formulation, and you must throw it away.
Fortunately, this hasnt been the case so far, and Jamesons insight still stands.
19
OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these rst
novels in the end (Krasickis Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitschs
Little Man, Rizals Noli Me Tangere, Futabateis Ukigumo, Ren Marans Batouala,
Paul Hazoums Doguicimi). This kind of reading, however, no longer produces
interpretations but merely tests them: its not the beginning of the critical enter-
prise, but its appendix. And then, here you dont really read the text anymore, but
rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained
from the start; its a reading without freedom.
20
For practical purposes, the larger the geographical space one wants to study, the
smaller should the unit of analysis be: a concept (in our case), a device, a trope, a
limited narrative unitsomething like this. In a follow-up paper, I hope to sketch
out the diffusion of stylistic seriouness (Auerbachs keyword in Mimesis) in nine-
teenth and twentieth century novels.
58 nlr 1
and then follow its metamorphoses in a variety of environments
21

until, ideally, all of literary history becomes a long chain of related

experiments: a dialogue between fact and fancy, as Peter Medawar calls
it: between what could be true, and what is in fact the case.
22
Apt words
for this research, in the course of which, as I was reading my fellow his-
torians, it became clear that the encounter of western forms and local
reality did indeed produce everywhere a structural compromiseas the
law predictedbut also, that the compromise itself was taking rather
different forms. At times, especially in the second half of the nineteenth
century and in Asia, it tended to be very unstable:
23
an impossible pro-
21
How to set up a reliable samplethat is to say, what series of national litera-
tures and individual novels provide a satisfactory test of a theorys predictionsis
of course quite a complex issue. In this preliminary sketch, my sample (and its
justication) leave much to be desired.
22
Scientic research begins as a story about a Possible World, Medawar goes on,
and ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life. His words
are quoted by James Bird in The Changing World of Geography, Oxford 1993, p. 5.
Bird himself offers a very elegant version of the experimental model.
23
Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and
Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal
compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and
Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemals Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how the
merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other
on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the rst attempt in Turkish ction to
achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a
thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility
of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the
unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of
the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition
on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other. (Ahmet O. Evin,
Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parlas
evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: behind the inclination
towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast
the new ideas into a mould t for the Ottoman society. The mould, however,
was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable
axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or
another, reects the cracks. (Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides
Again, This Time in Istanbul, emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913
novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee
(it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the
student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as
those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question
of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have
always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside: The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis
moretti: Literature 59
mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very titleThe Uneasy Narrator: and see
the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the bookthe complications gen-
erated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: A salient feature
of late Qing ction, he writes, is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions
than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular ction . . . The huge amount
of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrators
uneasiness about the instability of his status . . . the narrator feels the threat of
interpretive diversication . . . moral commentaries become more tendentious to
make the judgments unequivocal, and at times the drift towards narratorial over-
kill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrice narrative suspense to show that
he is morally impeccable (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 6971).
24
In some cases, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of
incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchis translation of The Bride of
Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring breeze love story], and
Tsubouchi himself was not beyond excising the original text when the material
proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scotts imagery into expres-
sions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese literature
(Marleigh Grayer Ryan, Commentary to Futabatei Shimeis Ukigumo, New York
1967, pp. 412). In the Arabic world, writes Matti Moosa, in many instances the
translators of Western ction took extensive and sometimes unwarranted liberties
with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf not only changed the title of Scotts
Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The Lion Heart and Saladin), but also
admitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting, adding, and changing parts of
this romance to suit what he believed to be his audiences taste . . . Other translators
changed the titles and the names of the characters and the contents, in order, they
claimed, to make the translated work more acceptable to their readers and more
consistent with the native literary tradition. (The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction,
p. 106.) The same general pattern holds for late Qing literature, where translations
were almost without exception tampered with . . . the most serious way of tamper-
ing was to paraphrase the whole novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and
Chinese background . . . Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment
. . . Western novels became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese tra-
ditional ction. (Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229.)
25
Why this difference? Probably, because in Southern Europe the wave of French
translations encountered a local reality (and local narrative traditions) that werent
that different after all, and as a consequence, the composition of foreign form
and local material proved easy. In West Africa, the opposite situation: although
the novelists themselves had been inuenced by Western literature, the wave of
translations had been much weaker than elsewhere, and local narrative conven-
tions were for their part extremely different from European ones (just think of
orality); as the desire for the foreign technology was relatively blandand further
gram, as Miyoshi says of Japan.
24
At other times it was not so: at the
beginning and at the end of the wave, for instance (Poland, Italy and
Spain at one extreme; and West Africa on the other), historians describe
novels that had, certainly, their own problemsbut not problems aris-
ing from the clash of irreconcilable elements.
25
60 nlr 1
I hadnt expected such a spectrum of outcomes, so at rst I was taken
aback, and only later realized that this was probably the most valuable
nding of them all, because it showed that world literature was indeed
a systembut a system of variations. The system was one, not uniform.
The pressure from the Anglo-French core tried to make it uniform, but
it could never fully erase the reality of difference. (See here, by the way,
how the study of world literature isinevitablya study of the struggle
for symbolic hegemony across the world.) The system was one, not uni-
form. And, retrospectively, of course it had to be like this: if after 1750
the novel arises just about everywhere as a compromise between West
European patterns and local realitywell, local reality was different in
the various places, just as western inuence was also very uneven: much
stronger in Southern Europe around 1800, to return to my example,
than in West Africa around 1940. The forces in play kept changing, and
so did the compromise that resulted from their interaction. And this,
incidentally, opens a fantastic eld of inquiry for comparative morphol-
ogy (the systematic study of how forms vary in space and time, which is
also the only reason to keep the adjective comparative in comparative
literature): but comparative morphology is a complex issue, that deserves
its own paper.
Forms as abstracts of social relationships
Let me now add a few words on that term compromiseby which I
mean something a little different from what Jameson had in mind in his
introduction to Karatani. For him, the relationship is fundamentally a
discouraged, of course, by the anti-colonial politics of the 1950slocal conventions
could play their role relatively undisturbed. Obiechina and Quayson emphasize the
polemical relationship of early West African novels vis--vis European narrative:
The most noticeable difference between novels by native West Africans and those
by non-native using the West African setting, is the important position which the
representation of oral tradition is given by the rst, and its almost total absence
in the second. (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West
African Novel, p. 25.) Continuity in the literary strategic formation we have identi-
ed is best dened in term of the continuing afrmation of mythopeia rather than
of realism for the denition of identity . . . That this derives from a conceptual
opposition to what is perceived as a Western form of realism is difcult to doubt.
It is even pertinent to note in this regard that in the work of major African writers
such as Achebe, Armah, and Ngugi, the movement of their work has been from
protocols of realist representation to those of mythopeic experimentation. (Ato
Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, p. 164.)
moretti: Literature 61
binary one: the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction
and the raw material of Japanese social experience: form and content,
basically.
26
For me, its more of a triangle: foreign form, local mate-
rialand local form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters;
and then, local narrative voice: and its precisely in this third dimension
that these novels seem to be most unstablemost uneasy, as Zhao says
of the late Qing narrator. Which makes sense: the narrator is the pole
of comment, of explanation, of evaluation, and when foreign formal
patterns (or actual foreign presence, for that matter) make characters
behave in strange ways (like Bunzo, or Ibarra, or Brs Cubas), then of
course comment becomes uneasygarrulous, erratic, rudderless.
Interferences, Even-Zohar calls them: powerful literatures making life
hard for the othersmaking structure hard. And Schwarz: a part of the
original historical conditions reappears as a sociological form . . . In
this sense, forms are the abstract of specic social relationships.
27
Yes,
and in our case the historical conditions reappear as a sort of crack in
the form; as a faultline running between story and discourse, world and
worldview: the world goes in the strange direction dictated by an outside
power; the worldview tries to make sense of it, and is thrown off balance
all the time. Like Rizals voice (oscillating between Catholic melodrama
and Enlightenment sarcasm),
28
or Futabateis (caught between Bunzos
Russian behavior, and the Japanese audience inscribed in the text), or
Zhaos hypertrophic narrator, who has completely lost control of the
plot, but still tries to dominate it at all costs. This is what Schwarz meant
with that foreign debt that becomes a complex feature of the text: the
26
The same point is made in a great article by Antnio Cndido: We [Latin
American literatures] never create original expressive forms or basic expressive
techniques, in the sense that we mean by romanticism, on the level of literary
movements; the psychological novel, on the level of genres; free indirect style, on
that of writing . . . the various nativisms never rejected the use of the imported
literary forms . . . what was demanded was the choice of new themes, of different
sentiments. (Literature and Underdevelopment, in Csar Fernndez Moreno, Julio
Ortega, Ivan A. Shulman (eds), Latin America in Its Literature, New York 1980,
pp. 2723.)
27
The Importing of the Novel To Brazil, p. 53.
28
Rizals solution, or lack thereof, is probably also related to his extraordinarily
wide social spectrum (Noli Me Tangere, among other things, is the text that inspired
Benedict Anderson to link the novel and the nation-state): in a nation with no
independence, an ill-dened ruling class, no common language and hundreds of
disparate characters, its hard to speak for the whole, and the narrators voice
cracks under the effort.
62 nlr 1
foreign presence interferes with the very utterance of the novel.
29
The
one-and-unequal literary system is not just an external network here, it
doesnt remain outside the text: its embedded well into its form.
Trees, waves and cultural history
Forms are the abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its
own modest way an analysis of power. (Thats why comparative morphol-
ogy is such a fascinating eld: studying how forms vary, you discover
how symbolic power varies from place to place.) And indeed, sociologi-
cal formalism has always been my interpretive method, and I think that
its particularly appropriate for world literature . . . But, unfortunately, at
this point I must stop, because my competence stops. Once it became
clear that the key variable of the experiment was the narrators voice,
well, a genuine formal analysis was off limits for me, because it required
a linguistic competence that I couldnt even dream of (French, English,
Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese, just for the core
of the argument). And probably, no matter what the object of analysis
is, there will always be a point where the study of world literature must
yield to the specialist of the national literature, in a sort of cosmic and
inevitable division of labour. Inevitable not just for practical reasons, but
for theoretical ones. This is a large issue, but let me at least sketch its
outline.
When historians have analysed culture on a world scale (or on a large
scale anyway), they have tended to use two basic cognitive metaphors: the
tree and the wave. The tree, the phylogenetic tree derived from Darwin,
was the tool of comparative philology: language families branching off
from each otherSlavo-Germanic from Aryan-Greco-Italo-Celtic, then
29
In a few lucky cases, the structural weakness may turn into a strength, as in
Schwarzs interpretation of Machado, where the volatility of the narrator becomes
the stylization of the behaviour of the Brazilian ruling class: not a aw any longer,
but the very point of the novel: Everything in Machado de Assiss novels is coloured
by the volatilityused and abused in different degreesof their narrators. The crit-
ics usually look at it from the point of view of literary technique or of the authors
humour. There are great advantages in seeing it as the stylization of the behaviour
of the Brazilian ruling class. Instead of seeking disinterestedness, and the con-
dence provided by impartiality, Machados narrator shows off his impudence, in
a gamut which runs from cheap gibes, to literary exhibitionism, and even to criti-
cal acts. (Roberto Schwarz, The Poor Old Woman and Her Portraitist, 1983, in
Misplaced Ideas, p. 94.)
moretti: Literature 63
Balto-Slavic from Germanic, then Lithuanian from Slavic. And this kind
of tree allowed comparative philology to solve that great puzzle which
was also perhaps the rst world system of culture: Indo-European: a
family of languages spreading from India to Ireland (and perhaps not
just languages, a common cultural repertoire, too: but here the evidence
is notoriously shakier). The other metaphor, the wave, was also used in
historical linguistics (as in Schmidts wave hypothesis, that explained
certain overlaps among languages), but it played a role in many other
elds as well: the study of technological diffusion, for instance, or the fan-
tastic interdisciplinary theory of the wave of advance by Cavalli-Sforza
and Ammerman (a geneticist and an archaeologist), which explains how
agriculture spread from the fertile crescent in the Middle East towards
the North-West and then throughout Europe.
Now, trees and waves are both metaphorsbut except for this, they have
absolutely nothing in common. The tree describes the passage from
unity to diversity: one tree, with many branches: from Indo-European, to
dozens of different languages. The wave is the opposite: it observes uni-
formity engulng an initial diversity: Hollywood lms conquering one
market after another (or English swallowing language after language).
Trees need geographical discontinuity (in order to branch off from each
other, languages must rst be separated in space, just like animal spe-
cies); waves dislike barriers, and thrive on geographical continuity (from
the viewpoint of a wave, the ideal world is a pond). Trees and branches
are what nation-states cling to; waves are what markets do. And so on.
Nothing in common, between the two metaphors. Butthey both work.
Cultural history is made of trees and wavesthe wave of agricultural
advance supporting the tree of Indo-European languages, which is then
swept by new waves of linguistic and cultural contact . . . And as world
culture oscillates between the two mechanisms, its products are inevi-
tably composite ones. Compromises, as in Jamesons law. Thats why
the law works: because it intuitively captures the intersection of the two
mechanisms. Think of the modern novel: certainly a wave (and Ive actu-
ally called it a wave a few times)but a wave that runs into the branches
of local traditions,
30
and is always signicantly transformed by them.
30
Grafting processes, Miyoshi calls them; Schwarz speaks of the implantation of
the novel, and of its realist strand in particular, and Wang of transplanting Western
narrative typologies. And indeed, Belinsky had already described Russian literature
as a transplanted rather than indigenous growth in 1843.
64 nlr 1
This, then, is the basis for the division of labour between national and
world literature: national literature, for people who see trees; world litera-
ture, for people who see waves. Division of labour . . . and challenge;
because both metaphors work, yes, but that doesnt mean that they work
equally well. The products of cultural history are always composite ones:
but which is the dominant mechanism in their composition? The inter-
nal, or the external one? The nation or the world? The tree or the wave?
There is no way to settle this controversy once and for allfortunately:
because comparatists need controversy. They have always been too shy
in the presence of national literatures, too diplomatic: as if one had
English, American, German literatureand then, next door, a sort of
little parallel universe where comparatists studied a second set of litera-
tures, trying not to disturb the rst set. No; the universe is the same,
the literatures are the same, we just look at them from a different view-
point; and you become a comparatist for a very simple reason: because
you are convinced that that viewpoint is better. It has greater explanatory
power; its conceptually more elegant; it avoids that ugly one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness; whatever. The point is that there is no other
justication for the study of world literature (and for the existence of
departments of comparative literature) but this: to be a thorn in the side,
a permanent intellectual challenge to national literaturesespecially the
local literature. If comparative literature is not this, its nothing. Nothing.
Dont delude yourself, writes Stendhal of his favourite character: for
you, there is no middle road. The same is true for us.
new left review 1 jan feb 2000 65
tom nairn
UKANI A UNDER BLAI R
C
onstitutional alterations normally require an altera-
tion of the communal will: that is, a national or nationalist
identity motion of some kind, whether of resentment, ascend-
ancy, defeat or rebirth. Such a will might be stimulated and
led from above; this entails, however, the existence of a dissentient
ruling elite which thinks in constitutional terms, and puts state reform
resolutely ahead of social reform and economic policy. But such an
order of priorities is quite alien to the modern United Kingdom ruling
classindeed nothing has been more alien to it. Constitutionalism had
been familiar enough to its early-modern predecessors of the period
16401707. But the state constructed at that time was then recongured
primarily through contests against what appeared as the more aggres-
sive modernity shown in the revolutions of 1776 and 1789that is, the
modern constitutionalism out of which todays nation-state world has
mainly arisen. In those contests the pioneer itself had become tradition-
minded and custom-boundempirical in its philosophy and pragmatic
in its political attitudes. British parliamentarism grew perfectly insepa-
rable from such attitudes and Blairs New Labour victory of 1997 was
still far more an expression of them than a repudiation.
Without that more decisive breaka rupture on the level of grammar, as
it were, rather than rhetoricNew Labours political renaissance could
only be undertaken the wrong way round. It was fated by its own history
to move periphery-rst. Authority had to be conceded outwards without
the prior establishment of a new central framework capable of encom-
passing all the new energies and demands. When General de Gaulle
decided it was time that France married its own century, he set up a
new republican constitution to consummate the wedding. In Germany
and Italy, new federal or regional patterns of government were imposed
66 nlr 1
after Fascism, in order to modulate and conne the unitary state. In
Spain the post-Franco democracy designed and enabled the Catalan,
Basque, and other autonomous governments, by rst of all erecting a
radically novel political and juridical mainframe.
But in the United Kingdom the mainframe itself has remained sacro-
sanct. Behind a rework-display of zzling rhetoric about change and
modernization, it has simply been carried forward, and trusted to go on
evolving. Trust it, and therefore us: things will settle down and gener-
ally sort themselves out, while in the meantime (which could mean a
lifetime) things can go on in the comfortable, circular kind of way people
(i.e. Englands people) are used to, albeit with some changes round the
edges. In France and Spain new state constitutions were seen as the nec-
essary condition of a political break with the past. But after Thatcher,
only a new politics was demanded, not a new framework for political liv-
ingand that in order to redeem and continue the past, not to break
with it. Recent episodes of UK history may have come to be despised
and rejected; but not the longer perspective of Britishness, within which
success and world leadership had been for so long celebrated. Only on
the periphery had radical changes become unavoidable, in the more
European sense of ruptures or denite new departures. For Middle
England itself, these were reckoned to be superuousor at least indef-
initely postponable.
There were in fact interesting poll and survey indications in the later
1990s that English opinion may have been a lot more open to new
departures than party political leaders assumed. Unfortunately, it was
the assumptions of the latter which counted. They continued to believe
that dramatic departures of style and communication accompanied by
minimal, adaptive changes to the constitution were most in accord with
the subjacent mood. Hence some departures from the stick-insect rigid-
ity of Thatcherism were in orderbut not of such a kind as to frighten
the horses. Socialism had been exorcised in accordance with the same
supposed mood. After which, it would have seemed damnably un-Brit-
ish to start imposing a Hispanic-style revolution up top: surely some
modernization-touches would do instead? Enhanced (only cynics would
say disguised) by brilliant new ideas? Might not some thoroughly intel-
ligent bricolage, plus a strong dose of accelerationism, technicism (etc.)
restore the basis of Anglo-British statehood for long enough? And keep
the restorers in governmental business for long enough, too?
nairn: Britain 67
Vectors of archaism
The past does not simply survive. To be reproduced effectively within
modernity it requires vehicles, social devices and intentions. Through
these what would otherwise be fossils become allied to new interests and
passions, acquiring the style (even the fashionability) demanded by what
the Situationists originally called la socit du spectacle. One of the key
vectors for this is economics. It is still a common error to believe that the
Habsburg Empire so wonderfully captured in Robert Musils The Man
Without Qualities was economically hopeless or doomed. In fact it did
fairly well until killed off by war and defeat. David Good and other histo-
rians have shown how notably it was advancing by 1914, after a period in
which AustriaHungary had indeed lagged behind industrially. Society
there may have been unviable, and particularly the contradiction-riven
statebut this was not for reasons rooted in economic development
alone. Like other deplorable truisms of the time to come, Its the econ-
omy, stupid! was quite familiar in Vienna.
Was the Habsburg Empire an economic failure in the sense that it could
not engineer modern economic growth prior to its collapse? asks Good.
His answer is an unequivocal no. The Empire grew at a signicantly
faster rate than the United Kingdom over the period between 1570 and
1914, and its GNP per capita was by then equivalent to that of France.
Of course it straddled the ancient socio-economic gap between West
and East, and hence contained within its own borders a steep devel-
opment gradient. Yet the latter, Good points out, was less steep than
the one between the North and the South of the United States. The
latters impeccable credentials as a model of successful capitalist evolu-
tion have been largely the result of backward projection from post-1945.
Although it had not caught up with Belgium, the English Midlands or
the Ruhr, Franz-Josephs Empire stood comparison with Mediterranean
and peripheral Western Europe (which meant, with most of it). The
implication is plain, if disagreeable to economics-worshippers: there was
no straightforward relationship between development and political suc-
cess or stability. Modernization never fails to create contradictions and
stir things up. It provided Vienna (today, London) with greater resources
to buy off opposition, dangle bribes and be terribly broad-minded; but
at the same time, it made the unbribable, the resentful and the contrary
far more aware of their unequal, left-behind status. Not everyone can
be bought off equally. Any measure of successlike the arrival of a
68 nlr 1
railway, the opening of the rst supermarket, sudden access to college
educationgenerates an irascible appetite for more, and more quickly.
The broad-minded (blueprint in hand) perceive this as unreasonable:
impatient narrowness, egotism, jumping the queue. Thus a grander,
encompassing, controlling sort of identity comes to oppose more par-
ticular, self-assertive, Im-as-good-as-you identities. The sharper the
impact of socio-economic change, the more this clash turns towards
nationalismthe sense that life-or-death may be at stake here, unless
control of development is made to lie where it should (with us, not
them).
Success in statistical tables and growth-leagues does not automatically
favour a grateful, conserving philosophy of evensong, egotism and famil-
ial values. The British Conservatives discovered this in the late 1980s, not
long before they fell helplessly through the oor. Neither does stagna-
tion and the sense of retreat or connement encourage either revolution
or nationalism (except among tiny minorities who know in the abstract
that what people tolerate is actually intolerable, and inform them of
this). There may have been some formative periods of industrialization
when such combinations were possibletimes when modernity existed
only in pockets, as the privileged accident of one nation or another. But
its generalization has swept this away. Along with the debris has gone
what Emmanuel Todd has recently baptized as LIllusion conomique
the notion that economic development itself is the sufcient condition
of any specic political or state pattern, or of the triumph of any particu-
lar ideology. The universal necessary condition of all advance ceases to
be the special explanation of any one forward movement.
Modernity requiredand in its later evolution goes on requiringcer-
tain new economic and social circumstances. It does not follow that
these circumstances determine modernity in the concrete sense of its
lived and acculturized evolution. However one-sided, the socio-economic
renaissance of Thatcherism had more strongly undermined the class
basis of a traditionalist state than anything before it. Its deregulation and
attacks on corporatism corroded the familial sense of a societal order
whichlike that of the Habsburgshad evolved over time an arms
length rapprochement with an earlier phase of capitalism. After the
demolition of this structure, nation and state no longer retained their
long-established t. Yet at the same time Thatcherism worshipped and
propped up the state. On that level it was utterly philistine. Exaggerated
nairn: Britain 69
loyalism and hysteria over timelessness became a kind of compensation
for the regimes self-conscious economic radicalismas if only endorse-
ment of monarchic and other rituals, and of the states untouchable
unity, could prevent everything that was solid from melting into the air.
Much did melt, of course. But by no means everything. It was probably the
successfulor half-successfulside of Conservative economic regen-
eration which helped to carry forward the archaisms of Britishness into a
new age. Although at a heavy cost, that aspect of it furnished a compara-
tive advantage and stability which the 1997 change of political regime
then inherited and exploited. In striking contrast to all previous Labour
governments, Blair was able to undertake his devolutionary measures
against the background of an over-strong currency and signicant busi-
ness support. His pro-European stance and agreement (albeit mainly
in principle) to the common currency ensured a new level of City and
big-business toleranceor even approvalreected in the climate of a
famously Moosbruggerish British press.
Yet that same good fortune was bound also to rehabilitate some of the
anachronism carried forward with it. A half-revolution must constantly
insure itself against whatever has not been destroyedagainst the past
still there and in arms, as it were, against an identity discountenanced,
even humiliated, yet not really broken up and cast into the tail-race of his-
tory. Huge New Labour efforts had gone into presenting this insurance
policy between 1995 and 1997. It seemed the only way to win the kind of
electoral victory which the British system prescribed. Over-adaptation to
the economics of Thatcherism and deregulated liberalism, extreme can-
niness over all matters scal and nancial, and a convert-like disavowal
of Socialist money-throwing antics: these now became the surprising
preconditions of renewal and change. Yet it would obviously be quite
hard to avoid a general or blatant conservatism from arising around
foundations like these. Hence the absolute necessity for an ostenta-
tious, perfectly sincere and reproof form of radicalism to balance that
tendency. The Tories had counterposed a mummied statism against
their radical economic upheavals. The Labourites now had to offset their
mummied economics with an ostentatious display of verbosely political
radicalism. We have seen something of what this meantyouthism,
high-technicism, millennial and style-mania, and the accumulation of
think tanks and divining rods in appropriate ofcial, quasi-ofcial and
entirely spontaneous polyhedrons.
70 nlr 1
Rather than from plutocratic plotting and self-interest, it is important to
observe how this arose out of an objective dilemma. It derives from the
structural fate of a decrepit multinational polity whose inherited nature
renders it incapable of either solving its problems or dissolving them.
It can only pretend to do both, with a kind of mounting insouciance
and braggadocio. Ultra-prudent and custodial economics could not help
favouring an equivalent conservation of the stateand so the prolon-
gation of 16881707 anachronism. But at the same time, real changes
of state had become unavoidable on the periphery, as had a distinctly
unconservative style of ideas and public policy. Thus the Scots were
given back their Parliament, the Welsh were awarded a political voice,
and the Northern Irish were reconciled to a new and only half-British
Protectorateall amid a clamorous fanfare of radicalism suggesting that
these were but early installments of a gathering revolution.
At the centre of affairs, however, the revolution was meant from the start
to be far more decorous, indeed not revolutionary at all. Some changes
to Europes most grotesque political relic, the House of Lords; a mild
form of proportional representation (if approved by referendum); a half-
Freedom of Information Act; an upgraded style of monarchy, affected
(but not carried away) by Princess Dianas example; a proper place at
Europes heart (when economics permit, again via referendum)all
these decorous shifts were to occur within a comfortably indeterminate
time frame, implying further long cadences of stable British existence.
From its rst day in ofce, Blairism has planned to last longer than
Thatcherism did. Thus what counts most in the gathering revolution
is clearly the gathering part; execution will come later, as and when
opportunity allows (or quite possibly, fails to allow). And what if it gath-
ers only to clear away again, or to be politely refused in referenda?
Well, the deep assumption remains that Britain and Middle England
the imaginary repository of the national life-force, nowadays usually
assigned to southern suburbiawill survive that. Deeper down, in the
central processing unit (or as would once have been said, the controlling
instinct) of Britishness, this continuity is what matters most. Survival: in
whatever grandeur remains possible.
A prophecy of end-time
About the contradictions of Blairism one thing will never be said: they
could not have known. In fact the responsables of the New Order were
nairn: Britain 71
told, and it is already revealing to see how clearly they were told, that this
time survival, continuity and grandeur would no longer be enough, how-
ever ably modulated and publicized. Political revolution was required.
Only six months after Blairs electoral triumph, a study appeared with
precisely that title: Anthony Barnetts This Time: Our Constitutional
Revolution.
1
It had a cover picture showing the Union Jack at half mast
over Buckingham Palace, in a nostalgic September light. This was appro-
priate, for the books story is like Musils, only much more amazing:
the foundering of a crown-state recounted day by day, sometimes word
by word, in contrast to the long ironic retrospect of The Man Without
Qualities.
The British ag had only been raised over the royal London residence
by popular demand. Previously the royal standard had only ever own
there when the monarch was physically present, a demonstration that
regality was of greater importance than mere nationality. Kingdom was
the important half of United Kingdom, even if Parliament had made
inroads on the rest of it. However, the bare agpole now looked offen-
sive to the huge crowds mourning the death of the Princess of Wales. Its
indifferent nakedness seemed to accuse their grief, and their caringas
if Queen Elizabeth and her household (then on their annual holiday at
Balmoral) were also indifferent. Did they not careor might they even
be pleasedabout the loss of their outcast daughter? In death the latter
had acquired a title: the Peoples Princess. Prime Minister Blair con-
rmed this after the fatal crash in Paris, in what was immediately seen as
a stroke of public-relations genius. It was as if he scented from extremely
far off the odour of a revolution from below.
There was a lot of gooey sentiment and romanticism mixed up with the
resentment, of course, as both left- and right-wing critics of the mood
insisted. But what did they expect? A century and a half of patient effort
had gone into the formation of romantic-popular monarchism. It was
a broader elite project pursued by governments of both left and right,
which had long since cast national identity into this specic mould.
That mould had been a form of control. Yet now, briey, the same
force was out of control and in the streets, as a mass idolization of some-
body both inappropriate and dead. Yet there were both Socialists and
Reactionaries who found nothing to say but: This is a bit much! In
1
Vintage Books, December 1997.
72 nlr 1
truth nothing could have indicated more clearly the malaise of the elec-
torate which had voted so resoundingly for radical change four months
previously. Barnett was surely right to devote so much space to analys-
ing the incident. It showed the availability of public opinion for a sort
of change previously unthinkable. For all its sentimentality, he observes,
the Diana cult none the less expressed a form of the contemporary that
connects to the landslide of May 1st, and implied the possible normal-
ization of British political life. Under Thatcherism society had in an
almost literal sense become divorced from the old state, including its
petried monarchy. In the September Days of 1997 the divorce had been
spontaneously completed, in a vast movement of people who by their
very existence demonstrated that the premise of the 300-year-old British
Constitution had been swept away. The people are now independent-
minded and capable . . . The question now is whether the political elite
will allow the constitutional transformation to proceed.
His argument is of course that the renovated elite must not just allow but
compel it to proceed: this time is the only time likely to be available for
a widely popular reconstruction of the state, a genuine revolution from
above. Hence the urgency of tone in the book, and its sometimes hector-
ing manner. Behind it lies the sense (also the fear) of there being no
other time coming. Even if launched from above, a revolution can only
be genuine when it meets and is modied by some positive response
from below. The moments when such conjunction is possible are rare.
To let one go would be folly.
There was only one way of realizing that momentthe route described
in some detail over a number of years by Charter 88, the vigorous reform
group which Barnett helped to found in the 1980s, and for some time
led in the 1990s. It is not as if This Time were a lonely or eccentric
cry from somewhere beneath the stones. The message came right out
of the most signicant non-party campaign of the 1990s, and many
Labour Party leaders had professed warm sympathy with its aims. Since
the somewhat miserable 300th anniversary commemorations of 1688s
original revolutionary imposition, the Charter had pleaded passionately
that enough was enougheven a standard UNO-issue off-the-shelf con-
stitution would (some now thought) be better than William and Marys
quaint palimpsest of cod-feudal shards, early-modern scratchings and
bipartisan traditions reinvented so often that no one had the slightest
idea what purpose they originally served. And surely, with some imagi-
nairn: Britain 73
nation and national pride, wouldnt the unthinkable become possible?
A new British Constitution meriting its capital letter, inspired by the
approaching century rather than the one before the one before last?
Barnetts indictment of the ancien rgime takes up all the rst part of his
book (The Meaning of 1997) and overows constantly into the second
(Voicing the Constitution). The reader is left by it in a kind of trance,
like the suspension of belief that used to attack Ethiopian intellectuals
of the 1970s when they returned home from studying abroad to con-
front the court of Lion-King Haile Selassie: How is all this still possible? At
the end of the twentieth century? With the democratization of the globe
in full spate, and Nelson Mandela running South Africa? How dare it
endure one day longer on earth?
The least that could be expected after May 1997 was surely a statement
of some exit plans, and a sketch of the replacement. This need not be a
pronunciamento accompanied by a detailed blueprint: instead, what the
author recommended was something like Anthony Giddenss Utopian
realism. What this meant was articulating clear, principled goals and
then setting about them with practical measures that are given the space
necessary to be assessed in a context of consent.
2
On the other hand,
such a programme does have to be uttered. With all the respect due to
Karl Popper and George Soros (both suitably endorsed in This Time) even
a pragmatic, anti-grand-theory prospectus must at least be adumbrated,
since without that the country has no clear idea what the greatest con-
stitutional change for a century means and where it is supposed to
lead.
By the end of the year Blair took ofce, however, there was still no such
idea in place. As Barnett worriedly pointed out in December 1997, the
statement had been promised before the election, and then simply never
delivered. Now the democratic revival which had been so strongly in the
air of both 1 May and early September needed its momentum to be kept
going. The practical measures undertaken (like devolution) demanded a
sense of larger purpose ... In terms of the constitution, a clear statement
of principles and purpose. The sooner the better.
2
This Time, p. 273
74 nlr 1
Methodone kingdom
Alas, the sooner the better implies the later the worse. As winter turned
into spring, the governments rst anniversary was celebrated, and Mr
Blairs rst Cabinet reshufe of July 1998 ensconced New Labours
authority more rmly, it became steadily clearer that the rst install-
ment might well be the last. The maximal and daring might already have
collapsed into the minimal and safeguarding. No statement of grand
constitutional renewal was ever to come. Instead, there would be another
long-lived regime of decline-managementa generational reign, as
it were, comparable to that of Mrs Thatcher in 197997. Once more,
radicalism would boil down to staying aoat, albeit in an interestingly
different way.
As with the early concessions to Scotland, Wales and Ireland, some con-
stitutional changes were still needed to secure that way. One was a form
of proportionality in political elections, to qualify the desperate lurches
and landslide turnarounds of the past. The second was some change
to Great Britains revising chamber. Alongside the modernized monar-
chy rendered critical by the Diana affair, a more acceptable House of
Lords was also needed. These vectors of continuity had themselves to
be upgraded, simply to pursue the time-honoured role assigned them.
They certainly represented overdue episodes of modernization. But in
the hardening context of Blairs 2000 regime they could also be stability-
reforms. Thus the radical would be a realignment of the archaic, rather
than the straightforward replacement which Charter 88 and This Time
pleaded for. Electoral change was the more important of the two. The
fantastic lurches of 1979 and 1997 had become too dangerous for an
antique creaking across the threshold of the Third Millennium. In a
Europe and (soon) an archipelago regulated by proportional electoral-
ism, the boxing-ring pantomime of rst-past-the-post was no longer
easily sustainable. True, Blairs party had beneted from the old mecha-
nisms in May 1997, but only in the wake of prolonged adversity, during
which both the Left and the Centre of UK politics had been under-rep-
resented for nearly two decades. If the system was left intact, nothing
could be surer than an eventual surge in the other direction. The instinct
of Labourism (even the New sort) was that in Britain, and particularly in
England, this reversal action would happen sooner rather than later, and
was more liable to affect the Left than the Right.
nairn: Britain 75
The ancient theory had been that knock-outs ensured strong govern-
ment. This might have been all very well when the British Empire
possessed a fundamentally strong ruling classthe old patriciate, cul-
turally at one although ruling via different parties. But things had altered
fundamentally. The combination of decline and Mrs Thatcher had ruined
that elite. She started off her reign with a Cabinet of grandees and great
acreage, and ended with one of journalists, estate-agents and sleaze-mer-
chants. These put her out of business in 1990, then revealed themselves
as incapable of setting up on their own account. So the system now
came to mean nothing but inebriate parliamentary majorities based on
a minority of the votes cast, generating machismo-power, think-tank
mania, mediaeval staggering ts like the Poll Tax, unrestrained petty
bourgeois opportunism, and Sovereignty-delusions which the rest of the
world now sniggered at.
New Labour was second-born into this post-patrician world. Which
meant that its 1997 majority bore the wounds of four successive KOs,
and the scars from a prolonged agony of internal modernization. Was it
not due some compensation? That meant not just obtaining but staying
in ofce. On his rst day in power, Tony Blair launched an electoral cam-
paign for the post-millennium ballots of 2002 and 2007. What was most
new about reformed Labourism was this hardened and re-oriented
willthe determination to construct not merely a stand-in government,
but a different and more stably based British elite order.
Rapid assemblage of new ruling class
This meant in turn that New Labourism, unlike the Thatcherites, was
directly confronting what one must call the sociological problem of Great
Britain in extremis. That is, how to replace the former ruling class by a
plausible substitute. Britain, the empires rump-state, can only be kept
going by some new regulating and stabilizing cadre, one really capable of
taking over from the gentlemen. Hostile critics claimed from the outset
that Blairite radicalism is mere conservatism; but actually it is more like
conservationism. One should not judge it solely in terms of the former
Left-Right spectrum. Seen rather in terms of curatorship, as a form of
state survival-kit, it becomes more comprehensible. The Conservative
rst-born (natural party of government, etc.) had been smashed into
pitiful wreckage by the farce of Thatchers last days and the May 1997
landslide. It would be in a life-raft for years to come. To the second-in-
76 nlr 1
line now fell the spoils, but also the onerous duty, of preserving and
renewing one of historys outstanding politiesthe oldest existing state
in the world with any claim to modernity.
From 1997 onwards, much effort would be expended around a single
question. Just what is Tony Blairs project?asked many sceptical
minds, particularly on the Left. The replies have been curiously sparse
and unconvincing. But that may be because these inquirers have gener-
ally been searching for a socialism-substitutesome novel formula for
social-policy redemption and advance. Accompanying this quest went
a perfectly logical idea: the new government may as yet be professing
no such formula, but at least some Cabinet craniums (preferably those
in charge) must surely have one? Surely they must know what theyre
doing, if only they would tell us (and meanwhile, listen to our advice,
engage in dialogue, etc.).
However, what if the logic itself were erroneous, in the sense of misdi-
rected? What if, that is, there is neither a project of that kind, nor the
smallest chance of one being concealed in private ruminations anywhere
round the Cabinet table? Would it not then follow that the only effec-
tive project of end-Britain is diminuendo survivaltransition from the
management of decline into the management of disintegration, leading
eventually to a suitable testament and funeral arrangements? Both coun-
tering economic decline (Thatcherism) and re-engineering the political
control-system (Blairism) have naturally presented their aims as radi-
cal modernization. But both these words have become terms of bluster,
especially radical. After the eighteen years of Mrs Thatcher and Blairs
1997 election campaign, it has come to signify little more than Have a
nice day! in the United States.
The problems addressed may indeed be radical (basic, through-and-
through, fundamental, etc.) but the available or short-term answers are
really of a theme-park nature. There is no conceivable radical solution, in
the sense so much bruited about by Mr Blairs thinkies and cultural gos-
pellers. The unwritten goal of youthism is death, even thoughas in
Mexican ritual commemorationsits processions and exhibitions may
be lled with exuberant, even hysterical, life. The stage-management
and scripting of the interval can (naturally) only be the work of the party
in power. But the existential dilemma structuring its parade means that
the party must be (or anyway try to be) the Party. That is, it must be a
nairn: Britain 77
class-substitutea permanent-seeming elite which makes the end-time
bearable. New Labour had to justify its -ism by both being and showing
that it was much more than a movement in Tony Benns or Michael
Foots sensean ethical crusade occasionally permitted into ofce. It
had now mutated into a replacement patriciate, the armature of a farther
phase of British statehood, indelibly Great in both name and nature.
While manoeuvring towards election-worthiness in the years 199497
it had been in reality transforming itself into such a cadrean elite-sur-
rogate. So, state-worthiness turned out to be the wingd creature inside
the dull chrysalis of Old Labour, still so fatally encrusted by Clause Four
and the Socialist old-stagers of the historic Left.
As it showed at once, even before the liberation of 1 May, this creature
ies by different rules from the mouldy night-moth of the 1970s and
1980s. Having lost its ofcer-class, the drifting multinational ship of
state needed a new discipline and direction. The administration of these
demanded an equivalent discipline and brio from the replacements.
Their movement was assuming nothing less than the task of being
Britain. Promotion to long-range heritage-governance was sustainable
only via ostentatious rigidity and uniformitythrough discipline in
an enhanced and visibly enforced mode, much greater than that usu-
ally associated with political parties (except in the former Communist
countries). The result was that totalitarianism of public relations and
the predominance of censors and message-watchers which has been
so much satirized by critics. Sometimes such Blairite symptoms have
been explained in terms of malevolence, or the sheer egotism of a new
Machiavellian Prince. But to some extent, surely, they can be seen as
arising from quite objective constraints. Are they not also a response to
the prolonged withdrawal symptoms of collapsing Britishness?
It is simply not possible to grow a new political elite overnight, or even
in a few years. Revolution alone could accomplish that. Blairism is not
revolutionary, and not even a revolution from above. It is the cautious
avoidance of revolution-from-above by a whipped-on evolution-from-
above (interspersed, of course, with colourful appeals to the populace).
Under the conditions of Ukanian decay, evolutionary stability and sang-
froid are demanded even of the undertakers. Trust us! remains the law
of surrogacy as it was that of empirein some ways possibly even more
so than during the preceding history of the British elite.
78 nlr 1
New ruling class considers options
The simulation of caste-power is a miserable affair, whose hollowness
can only be concealed by a lordly affectation of utter unity and inex-
ible will. For some years Mrs Thatcher had provided a personal version
of this, until it became insupportable to both her own party and the
system. She had demonstrated both the force and the limitations of per-
sonal charisma as a compensation for decline. Hence a more systemic
approach was now needed, which the corporate traditions of Labourism
naturally strove to furnish (once Socialism had been purged). The tradi-
tional corpus of Labour offered a more collective ethos and organization
to build on, in conjunction with the personal rayonnement of Blair.
However, that combination needed ideological reinforcement of the
developing cadre-structurediscipline, daily ideal methodone, unre-
mitting morale-boostingplus a minimal political plan for permanence.
On this side, Thatcher had banked simply on prayer-book endorsement
of the old Ukanian apparatus. Blairs intuition saw the folly of this,
above all in the light of New Labours inescapable commitments to the
periphery. The sole advance-route possible was one of adaptation to
the new-old dilemma, through minimal remodelling of the Westminster
machinery. In the House of Commons, this implied a coalition policy
the replacement (or modication) of simple-majority aberrancy via the
construction of a more sustainable centre ground. The material was
present, in the shape of the traditional centre-ground movement, the
Liberal Democrats. The latter had been a permanent minority since
the 1920s, but one with strong regional foundations as well as a pow-
erful historical presence going back to the 1688 foundation of Britain.
Traumatized like the Labour Party by the Thatcher-Major decades,
the Liberal Democrats were also now more aligned with post-Socialist
Labourism in ideological terms. This provided the conditions for a more
enduring power-alliancebut only if the electoral system was reformed
to give the Liberal Democrats a more reasonable representation in the
Commons. For half a century they had been protesting against the
unfairness of two partyism, a system which had condemned them to
representative limbo.
Thus an empirical way forward presented itself to New Labour: mini-
mal changes to the unwritten constitution which would simultaneously
avoid the perils of Charter 88s projected shake-up and conrm them
nairn: Britain 79
in power as a long-term elite of redemption. Would they not eventually
seem the natural party of government, the conservatives of a century to
come? In the rst year of Blair a Commission was set up to recommend
the new election system, headed by former Labour Minister Roy Jenkins
(now a Liberal Democrat, as well as a Lord). There was little doubt from
the day of its inception that his committees recommendation would be
for a minimally proportional voting system. Nor that the New Labour
majority would, after the humphing and haaa-ing time demanded by
abandonment of any tri-secular ritual, endorse the changes. Then the
public relations bravura associated with Blairism would surely win a ref-
erendum on the proposal?
Or would it? In the summer of 1998 some doubt must have developed
over even these modest proposals. Lord Jenkinss suggestions would
certainly be reasonable. But would they be Project-worthy, and safe?
How else may one understand the strange affair of The Constitutional
Declaration, and its even stranger aftermath? Dated 11 June, the full
title of this statement was: Constitutional Declaration Agreed by the
Government and the Liberal Democrat Party at a Meeting of the Joint
Consultative Committee. That committee was founded before the 1997
election, to discuss and coordinate Labour and Liberal Democratic policy
on reforming government. After an age of total immobility on this plane,
it had been felt that the main opposition parties should combine on
a broader platform, and help win popular support (probably by refer-
endum) for changes to the sacred device. But its fth meeting was to
be more than simple reafrmation of previous joint-party aims. It was
a declaration, presumably to the people, and presumably intended to
affect them in some way. Also it was launched, not just put out: Blair
and Ashdown Launch Constitutional Declaration. As it happened, I
was at around that time called on to present evidence to a House of
Commons Select Committee, the one on Scottish Affairs. It was inves-
tigating future relations between Westminster and the new Edinburgh
Parliament, and the new pronouncement seemed likely to have some
bearing on its deliberations. I tried to get a copy.
This sounds simple. And so it should, surely, for the citizens to whom
(in Declaration-speak) power is being brought day by day closer, and
whose rights to Information (etc.) are now so regularly endorsed. In
the week after 11 June 1998 I made three calls to the No. 10 Downing
Street Press Ofce. The rst surprise was how difcult it proved to
80 nlr 1
identify just which Declaration/Appeal/Statement was being requested.
On each occasion the assumption at the other end was that callers
would want copies of Chancellor Gordon Browns announcement about
privatizationlaunched at the same moment. Constitutional declara-
tion? Ah . . . just a minute please was each time followed by a pause, and
on one occasion by: Oh . . . you mean the Party declaration . . . got you,
right! There followed the standard name-and-address ritual, plus assur-
ance it would be in the post. But a week later, nothing had come in the
post.
In one of the few press comments on the Constitutional Declaration,
Matthew DAncona suggested in the Sunday Telegraph on 14 June that
its timing was no accident: On an ordinary day the long-planned Blair
Ashdown statementa poorly-written pledge to put power closer to
the peoplewould have been subjected to much sterner scrutiny. In
practice, it was all but forgotten in the excitement surrounding the
Chancellors auction of state assets. The last thing we want at the
moment is a big debate about the constitution, one Minister had told
him. The Declaration was in truth a consoling gesture towards the
Liberal Democrats, who had begun to suffer from growing suspicion
about the governments reforming intentions. It was the sort of thing
which would once have crept out of smoke-lled rooms, rather than
been launcheda party stand-off, as it were, curiously disguised as a
ringing pronunciamento to the farthest corners of the land.
Still, DAnconas comments made me yet more anxious to see the
document. I phoned again, carefully repressing any hint of outraged
citizenship. The Select Committee was meeting the next day, so time
was short. Would it not be possible for Downing Street to deliver a
copy of the Declaration to the Houses of Parliament, where I could pick
it up by hand? Ah, well, I suppose so . . . came the answer, but I
dont think thats a good idea. No. Things just tend to get lost down
there. Wait a minute . . . Out-of-earshot confabulation followed, and
then: Tell you what. Just go to the police box at the Downing Street
gates tomorrow morning on your way to the Commons. Well make
sure its waiting for you. And so it came about that on a ne June
morning, strolling down Whitehall to my seat of government, I turned
into Downing Street for guidance. Two iconic policemen were indeed
there, in shirtsleeves, and carefully inscribed the request in a large note-
book. But they had no Declaration. Just hang on there, Sir! said one of
nairn: Britain 81
the ofcers, picking up the phone. Ten minutes went by. And then at
last a lady secretary emerged out of the famous glossy black door carry-
ing a large brown envelope. She hastened up to the police cabin. The
Constitutional Declaration was mine. Ten minutes remained to read it
before the Committee was due to convene.
They were more than enough. Even allowing for the ve-minute walk to
Parliament Square, seconds sufced for a three-page document of such
nerve-stunning banality. DAncona had been exaggerating: the pledge
was not written at all, but ground out of a word-processor programmed
entirely with exhumed clichs and rubber-stamp exhortations. At the end
came the Declaration: We ask for the support of the British people in
putting power where it belongs, in their hands. But what the Declaration
meant was something like this: the gladsome torrent of constitutional
modernization has subsided into a stagnant puddle in which, none the
less, appearances have to be kept up.
Options have to be kept open; but only just. Lord Jenkinss Report was
always likely to be accepted; but once accepted, it was also at once per-
ceived as likely to benet from some farther years of contemplation and
reconsideration. Yearsor even parliamentary sessions? Two months
later it was repeatedly rumoured that the changes, and the referendum,
would be put off until after the next General Election. By September,
we nd Matthew DAncona noting how opposition has mounted to the
reform within Blairs own party, while the experience of power has
simultaneously diminished the enthusiasm of its modernizers. Hence
the most probable compromise may postpone the changes until, at
the earliest, the election after next (that is, until 2006 or 2007). He
may have been exaggerating again. The likely timetables cited after pub-
lication of the Jenkins document were that it might be realizable in
eight years or so. On the other hand, one never knew. All things consid-
ered (Boundary Commission changes, elections) eleven years might be
a more realistic prospect. Thus old-fashioned reform had been trium-
phantly replaced by virtual reform, a mantle for inertia and will-lessness.
Robert Musil would have been delighted by such ingenious procrastina-
tion, the gymnastics of sincere deceit. He never invented anything half
as Byzantine.
Another of the truisms in the 11 June Declaration does admit:
Constitutional change requires the widest possible consensus, and that
82 nlr 1
will take time to deliver in full . . . But more signicant (especially for
Liberal Democrats) was the fact that it was not against anything. It was
not (for instance) opposed to time-wasting, unnecessary delay, or futile
postponement in the hope that the issue itself would somehow vanish
from human ken. No, for collaborators of the new regime the only real
enemy loitering out there is separatism. As Peter MacMahon pointed out
in The Scotsman, one nds the documents solitary tooth on page one.
It turns out to be sunk into Plaid Cymru and the SNPthose wreckers,
out to destroy the old thing, even before it has a chance to get itself mod-
ernized. Years or even decades are ne for reforming (or perhaps after
all, not reforming) things British. But what counts now is to stop the
separatist scoundrels in their tracks. Among all the other bromides, a
faint whiff of Third Way chloroform also arises from this test: This is
the new politics: between an old-fashioned centralized state and disinte-
gration. . .
The fate of Lordship
Secondly there is the problem of aristocracy. Reform of the UKs second
chamber was needed to underwrite the new classs tenser and more
focused authority. When Blair came into ofce he and his nation were
still confronting a genuinely astonishing possibility: that the globes
oldest democracy, Mother of Parliaments (etc.) might soon be embark-
ing upon the Third Millennium AD with a still-functioning hereditary
system. In the nineteenth century Radicals had sometimes made tacti-
cal pacts with the nobility, usually against what are now called market
forces. But in the twenty-rst century? Reborn as youthism, could
House of Commons radicalism really cut some unprecedented deal
with bloodline voting and genetic entitlement? Under Thatchers econ-
omistic version of the radical credo, Lordship had counted for little.
Her political philistinism occluded the anomaly, assisted by the crude
bloodline fact that most Lords were Conservatives, and did whatever the
government told them between 1979 and 1997.
Clearly this would change. But there was also the question of status and
ideal appearancemuch more signicant for a regime forced forward
on to a terrain of political salience and constitutional adjustments. It
would simply be ridiculous for any new-style hegemony to try and coexist
with the worlds outstanding reliquary of feudalism. The national theme-
park implications would be intolerable. Howeveras with the electoral
nairn: Britain 83
reform quandarycertain features of the ancient regimes prodigious
accumulation of bric--brac helped in the formulation of a compromise.
In the course of the previous half-century pseudo-Lordship had been
added on to the real bedline product. Each Honours List (New Year and
Midsummer) now announced a number of Life Peersnon-hereditary
baronages granted solely for the individuals lifespan. These are like
non-elective Senatorships, terminable only by decease. Nomination is
via a committee system concerned both with proper party representa-
tion (mostly rewarding veteran MPs) and with supposed civic or social
meritoutstanding achievement, preferably in some politically harm-
less arena. Life Peerages carry the same voting rights as those inherited
from the Norman Conquest, but are still far fewer in number. The rise
in sinecure and patronage since Harold Wilsons (subsequently Lord
Wilsons) period of ofce has not sufciently outpaced the breeding
power of lineage.
The House of Lords is these days restricted to censure and recommen-
dations on the legislation passed by the Lower Chamber (as it is still
called). Since the latter has now appropriated United Kingdom sover-
eignty, or crown-power, a convention had since World War One ensured
that the Upper Chamber would never nally refuse to pass Commons
laws. However, they could still delay legislation as well as query it, and
sometimes spoke of disregarding the gentlemans convention and revert-
ing to earlier practice. One such episode had left a particularly deep mark
on the consciousness of both the Labour Party and the general public. In
1988 the Life Peers who mostly attend to the business of todays House
of Lords had become alarmed by Mrs Thatchers Poll Tax. Even time-
serving has-beens could sense the likelihood of mutiny over this. Thus
an alliance of pseudo-feudal off-scourings with popular resentment was
briey threatened, which might have rejected the infamous law. It was
to prevent this that the true-Brit Peerage was called forth from its hinter-
lands to ensure passage of the measure.
What ensued was unforgettable. Even a Man quite Without Qualities
could not have failed to be impressed. It was a fully Ethiopian spectacle
worthy of some Benjamin Disraeli novel. Bentleys and ambulances laden
with Thatcher-worshippers converged upon St Stephens Palace from
every decayed estate in the kingdom, so that the undead might vote
through the centurys most unspeakably stupid legislation. A kind of
hole was burned into the climate of opinion by the event, which still left
84 nlr 1
strong traces a decade later. That episode alone (one might have thought)
should have been enough to guarantee straightforward and instant abol-
ition of this institution by any government with the faintest claim to
being radical in any older and more honourable sense.
Not, however, by a government whose pretensions were to virtual rad-
icalism alone. Or (more precisely) to virtuality fused with profound
caution and a mounting sense of stately duty. The Blairites decided to
abolish hereditary-right voting, while retaining the institution. Instead
of moving over to an elected Senate in the classical pattern, the life-peer
principle was to be evolved farther. These Lords-for-a-day would become,
in effect, like a working extension of the monarchya ceremonial politi-
cal guard-room, permitted to tut-tut about legislation and counsel to
their hearts content, but without even vestigial powers of interference.
Governments would in this way retain the valuable authority of senior-
ity-reward and status-endowment, plus that sense of stable continuity
which even grotesque traditions are keen to fosterthe feeling of social
life going on, unanxious and time-honoured. Time-honoured is an
important conceptnot on any account to be confused with time-worn,
exhausted or as-good-as-dead. Nor should the uniforms, furniture and
wigs be overlooked. While absurd in themselves, they have never func-
tioned in themselves: they exist invariably in an intimate alliance with
quite interesting and gossip-worthy matterslike who gets what, why,
in recompense for which favour or in compensation for which injury or
failure? This sort of thing is less awesome than descent from Normans
and Plantagenets, but also more interesting and more appropriate to a
pot-noodle regime seeking (against obvious odds) to evolve a new courtly
style of its own.
In late July 1998, one of the most sparkling representatives of Labour
Newness was appointed to superintend Lords reform: Baroness Jay. I
cite the term sparkling simply because it was employed in all newspa-
per accounts of the event. The Independent on Sunday of 2 August 1998
(for example) described her promotion under the headline: How Labour
aristocrat Jay walked effortlessly to the top. Margaret Jay happens to
be the daughter of ex-Premier James (now Lord) Callaghan, and was
formerly married to journalist and one-time diplomat Peter Jay, son of
another Labour Ministerial eminence, Douglas Jay. The Baroness had
perfect credentials for the job, and was known for her formidable talent
nairn: Britain 85
for networking . . . as a key member of the Prime Ministers trusted
inner circle. Another Baroness is quoted as declaring: Margaret Jay is
the ideal person to quell any discord in the House of Lords over Labour
reform . . . She is a discreet gossip, and not in the least bit pompous.
Much of the rest of the article is devoted to amplifying this point. As was
invariably said in the past of all genuine blue-bloods (including Queen
Elizabeth II) Mrs Jay turns out to be full of human warmth, has a sense
of humour, and will have time left over to cook for you even when ter-
ribly busy. The new life-peer ruling class is surprisingly like the old.
I merely quote this account without elaboration, lest any reader should
think that elements of misplaced irony may have intruded upon some
of my earlier arguments. The Independent on Sunday story was accompa-
nied, incidentally, by a preposterous diagram of the new elite network
around Mrs Jay, which apparently extends from Cherie Blair to Meryl
Streep, via the BBCs John Birt, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the Seventh
Duke of Marlborough, Barry Humphries, Anna Ford and Sir Stephen
SpenderPoet, now deceased. In the contemplation of Blairism, no
irony can be misplaced and satire grows daily more redundant. A Musil
of todays United Kingdom would have to pit himself against a self-satire
now routinely built into the system, and unavoidably replicated in even
the most straightforward or pedestrian accounts of it.
Following abolition of the shameful body, a further logical move might
have been to replace Lordship with regional or national representation
that is, with a second chamber on German or Spanish lines, in which
the different populations and territories of the UK could voice distinct
opinions and interests. After devolution one might have thought in fact
the case for such a body was stronger. The very existence of assemblies
in Wales, Scotland and Ulster will in any case generate demand for some
new representation at the centre. Would it not be better to give such
voices formal status within the renewed framework of state?
But of course this cannot be, for reasons already noted. Such logic would
still be suicidal for Britain, and no smooth talk of federalism, or even
of asymmetrical pseudo- or semi-federalism, will make any difference
to this fact. The English would have to nd representation in such a
body, surely. And there is no obvious way that could happen without
their being automatically over-represented. The potential conicts of a
non-unitary state, unregulated by a new constitution, could not really be
86 nlr 1
arranged by a crypto-lordly surrogate for such a statute and law. Far safer,
therefore, to stick to pseudo-nobility and Mrs Jays networking. The ter-
mination of mere Inheritance is now required in order to safeguard and
rebuild Heritage. It is time bloodline gave way to focus group. Fibreglass
Lords and Ladies (suitably extended in terms of recruitment) will pro-
vide a stronger buttress for the still-crystallizing new elite. The latters
interests now require that Middle England be appeased and comforted
on this important level of the old imagined communitynot stirred up
and worried by new and quite needless challenges.
3
A prophet ignored
Barnetts This Time had the misfortune to be proposing the non-availa-
ble answer: revolution. Its whole tone was damnably and deliberately
un-British, even thoughas the author patiently explains a number of
timeshe is actually trying to save Britain in a more serious sense,
by acting pre-emptively against threats of secessionist or exclusionary
nationalism. Such a noble wish still leaves out something indispensable.
To be recast in twenty-rst century constitutional mode, Britain must
rst be saved from the British. Unfortunately, Blairism is at bottom last-
ditch Britishness, and this turning was rapidly dening itself during the
very months when Barnetts clarion call was making its way through
the presses. By the time it was published, the current of renovation had
already clearly gone into contraow.
During the decades of the Right, when Charter 88 got going, radicalizing
Britain had seemed to mean saving Ukania from demented economists,
fake Americanizers and astrological misreadings of Adam Smith. After
May 1997, its sense abruptly shifted: Britain had now to be saved by
the Left. But no longer by the stalwart old Left, still vaguely comparable
to the Austrian Social Democratspatrician to the heart, liberal-impe-
3
The worst fears of critics were to be boundlessly exceeded by what surfaced in
early 2000: an A5 summary of the Royal Commissions report (A House for the
Future, 99-5271/0001/D160; cd-rom attached). As if in deliberate mimicry of the
contents, the cover shows ghostly images of the Britannic landmass fading away
into an ochreous middle distance. The proposal is for an appointee body selected
by other appointees, plus an unspeakably bathetic regional component elected
through some model yet to be decided. The spirit of the whole collapsed souf
is best conveyed by Recommendation 128 (Chapter 18, p. 27): The question of
the name of the second chamber and the titles of its members should be left to
evolve . . .
nairn: Britain 87
rial, Protestant, morality-encrusted. Such had been the party of Attlee,
Stafford Cripps, Lord Callaghan and (ultimately) of John Smith. But that
lay now in the grave alongside these gentlemen.
In its place there stood general disorientation in search of legitimacy.
The new Blairite Left remained so by historic descent and afliation,
and yet had cast aside almost everything related to previous British left-
wing ideology, in order to gain power. There was no successor ideology
to British Socialism. No one could have accomplished such a feat in
the short time following John Smiths death in 1994least of all in a
world where State Socialism was still in accelerating and general retreat.
Thus the idea-free inheritor could only be a vanguard of hungry but
somewhat empty modernizers . . . still in search of their own blueprint
of modernity. It stood condemned to compose such modernity on the
hoof. Many of its policies were simply appropriated from the earlier,
popular phase of Thatcherismlessons wisely if ungratefully learnt, and
accompanied by the rm intention of never returning to Old-Left corpo-
ratism and dependency. But this alone would never a New Age make. A
stronger display-identity was needed: hence the virtual revolution, and
the cacophony of polyhedrons and post-modern circus-actsthe uncon-
scious mimicry of Britains great Central European predecessor.
Even in decline, however, a social and state fabric remains far stronger
than those who would change it by incantation. It is likely to reimpose
itself, or most of itself. This is exactly what Anthony Barnett sensed
might happen, if the will faltered, and what he was publishing his
eloquent sermon against. The one guarantee against such underlying
continuity (he maintained) was a new state, based upon a new constitu-
tion; which entailed, for a time, an absolute priority of constitutional
over other issues; which implied a government that would assert this
priority over the economic and social-policy questions customarily cen-
tral to British politics; which demanded that reform be made the sort of
popular-national cause that Charter 88 had fought for.
These imperatives hang together. But if they failed to hang together, he
could see they might all be defeated separately. And in such a defeat,
even the positive piecemeal reforms applauded in the pages of This
Timedevolution, Ireland, electoral reform, the opening to Europe, the
Lordswould end up as survival-rafts rather than new departures. The
British constitutional revolution had to cohere; the trouble is that the
88 nlr 1
ancien rgime coheres as well, even after the battering it took during the
1980s, even so close to its quietus.
The collapse of party-political Conservatism in 1997 meant there was
little for it to cling to but the new raw would-be elite. Which meant
that in a quite novel sense (as we have seen) the way was open for New
Labourism to at least temporarily become Britainthat is, a replace-
ment for the ruling class broken and demoralized by the grim abrasion
and failures of the two decades since the late seventies. Much in the regi-
mentation and rigidity of New Labour may have from the start responded
to this challenge. Was its famous mobilization of the post-1994 period
just to win an election? Or was it (as I have argued) about power in
a much profounder, more salvationist sensethe stiffening of a now
struggling collective instinct to keep the British polity going? Would
modernization come to mean basic survival, rather than the creative
choice of futures which so much future-oriented rhetoric suggests?
The subsequent fate of Barnetts polemic surely supports a gloomier
interpretation of events. His book fell straight into a black hole of indif-
ference bordering on hostility. Its assumption had been a continuing,
even a rising, tide of support for planned central changefor constitu-
tionalism as the coherent and determined raison dtre of the new power.
But what the books reception showed was the almost total absence of
such a tide. Far from captaining the onward momentum, Charter 88
was marginalized into a vaguely supporting role, a gady to the Left.
Critics on the conventional Left denounced the governments failure or
capitulation on social or economic matters, and particularly on welfare.
But their emphasis was already the contrary of Barnetts. Governmental
faltering over constitutional issues came to be perceived as secondary
even forgiveable. What was a written constitution, after all, compared to
the past achievements of Liberal-Left Britain or the grim necessities of
welfare shrinkage and an underclass being attacked from above?
Thus in the early-Blairite cultural atmosphere there was a deadly mix-
ture of toxic inuences, all already hostile to plain Painite radicalism. On
one hand a wing of nostalgics, voicing elegiac regret for past Socialist
achievement, which they considered betrayed by the new administra-
tion. But their factional answer was self-evidently useless: resuscitation
of the world now lost, or else invention of a new-model doctrine which
could hardly help smelling and feeling awfully like the old one. Or,
nairn: Britain 89
on the other hand, there was public-relations postmodernism: smart
devices and conceptual ways around outmoded problems or attitudes.
The latter could, all too easily, be made to include dreary old nation-
state constitutionalism. If everything solid is melting into the air in that
sense, why bother trying to pin it down again into an old-fangled consti-
tution?
The prophetic admonition of This Time fell exactly between these cur-
rent streams of thought. It clearly despised the tomb-cults of nostalgic
Leftism, yet insisted that real novelty depended upon pushing through a
few plain-talking, old-fashioned reformsthe sort eschewed historically
by the Britishness of both Left and Right. As if by slide-rule design, there-
fore, Barnett managed to utter what almost nobody at that moment of
time wanted to hear. The most signicant political diagnosis of Ukanias
n de sicle passed practically unnoticed amid the court gossip, the hand-
wringing of defunct Socialism, and the deranged sance-mentality of
William Hagues refugee Toryism.
One gets the sense from reading This Time that it will be small conso-
lation to the author to have his prophecies fullled. While exhorting a
new regime to get it right, he could not help cataloguing the ways it
could go wrong. As he was writing, those ways piled up around him. By
December 1997, when the book appeared, they loomed over him: the
spectre of a less-than-half revolution, already contracting into its own
compromises and conceits. Thatcher also had brought about a less-than-
half redemption, which had ruined both her and her party. But this
was even more serious. If, as I have argued, Blairism is really a last-
ditch attempt at maintaining the United Kingdom by the formation of a
pot-noodle ruling class, then nothing much can be visible beyond it. In
different ways the nations of the old composite state are likely to end by
throwing it off; and afterwards, they will evolve into differing selvesthe
identities for so long occluded by the superimposition of Britishness.
The fall from such an apotheosis can only be into depths as yet unp-
lumbed. Whether or not the great renewal prospected in This Time was
possible, its failure must leave us after Britain, in a genuinely post-
imperial condition.
90 nlr 1
Corporate populism
In the summer of 1998 Blairs government submitted an Annual Report
to the people. The business-style title was deliberate. It began with a ten-
point contract, and a full page portrait of the Leader in his boardroom
(the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street). Changing a government is
like sweeping away the entire senior management of a company, he
announced. In spite of critics saying this Government is more con-
cerned with style than substance, he insisted it had made a good start.
To underline boardroom condence the Annual Report was full of full-
colour illustrations of customers, with improbable messages scrawled
over themfor example, a girl sitting in front of the Bank of England
saying: I am pleased with changes that have been made and am looking
forward to the improvements in the transport system.
Barnett followed up This Time with an incisive account of the Reports
assumptions. Unable to implement a new conception of the state,
Blairism had defaulted to the model of a business company. Great
Britain had in all earnest become what journalists had so often dubbed
it in the pastGreat Britain plc, the image of agency provided by big
companies. So socialism had lapsed nally into corporate populism.
This is neither ancient subjecthood nor modern constitutional citizen-
ship. It is more like a weak identity-hybrid, at a curious tangent to both.
Voters are seen as customers (like the girl at the Bank of England), while
the Party Executive manages party, cabinet and civil service as if they
were parts of a single giant company whose aim is to persuade voters
that they are happy customers who want to return Labour to ofce.
This is certainly better than mere deference. After all, customers are
expected to object and criticize a bit (even if most dont, most of the
time). But then, by taking their protests into account, the management
normally expects to reinforce its own market share. It is the moderni-
zation of subjecthood, rather than a replacement for it. The sovereign
crown gives way to the Managing Director and his unanimous executive
board, devoted at once to protability and (again in the Annual Report
language) to Britain regaining its pride and ambition, at home and
abroad and telling the right story at all times: we are a great nation,
lled with creative, innovative, compassionate people. A great nation,
but much more emphatically a capitalist one. Where the Poll Tax had
failed, an Annual Report now appeared to be signalling success.
nairn: Britain 91
So here was the economic vector of archaism, seriously at work. Mrs
Thatchers economic revolution was still advancing, and no longer
beneath the level of the state. Thanks to the English economys tra-
ditional strengththe global force of the City of London and nance
capitaleconomic modernization was still possible, and still compara-
tively effective. Manufacturing modernization was far less attainable,
and in fact had been largely abandoned under Thatcher. But the remain-
der was capable of taking over the ideological garb of statehood at least
for a timea business nation if no longer an industrial one, appeal-
ing to a business-minded folk. Cost-effective-conscious to the core,
New-Labour Britishers no longer needed un plbiscite de tous les jours,
Ernest Renans formula for civic nationalismdaily reafrmation of the
French, American or other dream through moments of pride and aspira-
tion. Now a daily visit to the supermarket would do just as well, coupled
with reminders of sterlings strength and the foreign conquests of our
world-class business. Blair was right: style is substance, it sells things
in the global supermarket and guarantees cybernetic prosperity. This is
also why the Millennium Dome is identied with the national interest.
Corporate populism is absolute philistinism. Another reason for the
business class to support New Labour, of course, but one which seems
inseparable from a frightful risk. Its apparatus of consumers and stake-
holders mimics democracy, substituting brand loyalty and ordinariness
for hope and glory. This can seem possible, even attractive, while things
go well in the narrowly economic terms to which the creed awards prior-
ity. Even then there may be a resentful underclass that has no stake, and
public sector or non-commercial enterprises which fall behind; but rapid
growth for the majority cushions and conceals these downsides. When
the growth momentum ceases, however, such compensatory effects are
likely to vanish totally.
People will then have to fall back on the non-corporate, less than cost-
effective nationon a national community and state as Renan (and so
many others) have perceived them. That is, on communal faith and jus-
tice, the extended family of egalitarian dreams. Everyone knows that
a corporation will not support customers in any comparable sense,
beyond the limits of protability; but everyone feels that is exactly what a
nation should do. Brand-loyalty is precisely not belonging in the more
visceral sense associated with national identity. Indeed it easily becomes
the opposite of belonging: sell-out, Devil take the hindmost, moving on
92 nlr 1
(or out) to maintain protability. Since the national factor cannot really
be costed, it is easily caricatured as a question of soulful romanticism
or delusion. However, such commonsense is itself philistine. It fails to
recognize something crucial. When Marks and Spencer betrays its cus-
tomers the result is an annoyance; for a nation-state to let its citizens
down can be a question of life or death, and not in wartime alone.
Peoples have not imagined such communities by chance, or out of irra-
tional impulsions from the soul. Identities are not aesthetic choices
but ways of existing, or of trying to exist better. This is the nation
which has counted in modern, nationalist times, and it is not very like
the portraits in Blairs Annual Report. The national-popular has gen-
erally been not-so-great, hard done by, struggling, threatened, at war,
lled with not always creative and sometimes angry people who think
they cant afford so much compassion, and look around for redemptive
leadership. They turn to the nation of war memorials, oaths, poetry,
sacrice and mythic blood. It is the coiner of the phrase imagined com-
munity, Benedict Anderson, who has himself underlined the contrast
between these two worlds in a recent essay, The Goodness of Nations.
Democracies must feel themselves more than the data of annual reports,
even euphoric ones. He uses an odd selection of things to make the
pointthe war memorial at New Haven, Connecticut; an episode of The
Simpsons; the North Indian celibacy movementbut since he wrote,
post-1997 Britain may already have supplied a more telling one.
It lay in the contrast mentioned earlier, between the popular reaction to
the death of the Princess of Wales and New Labours responsethe reac-
tion typied, about a year later, by this Annual Report. In late August
to September 1997 the living (in Andersons terminology) were in the
streets and trying, however sentimentally and confusedly, to secure the
Rightness of the country and reorient it away from the shame of a rotten
decade. A year later, they had become ridiculous illustrations in a kind of
annual sales report. Populism had been recuperated and rendered respect-
able, and also given this small-minded and neo-liberal cast. Somehow
business as usual had resumed, and normalcy been enhanced as never
before, carrying forward much of Mrs Thatchers Geist but with the added
panache and excitement of a new sales drive. Britain was buzzing once
more, but the sound was a reassuring one: safety-rst redressement rather
than the unsettling music of republican constitutionalism.
nairn: Britain 93
England-and-. . .
Just how safe the Annual Report country is meant to become was con-
vincingly shown in early 1999. Although Scotland is the biggest problem
for Blairland, Wales remains its closest neighbour. As well as the physi-
cal intimacy of a long north-south marchland, the two countries were
historically united by early conquest and absorption. In the modern era
that union of unequals has normally been awarded a strange name of its
own, which appears in all legal documents where it is necessary to treat
Scotland, Northern Ireland or other dependencies separately: England-
and-Wales. The term conveys a bare modicum of recognition with an
associated stress on functional unity. Whatever gestures may be needed
elsewhere, here we have two who are truly as one.
The post-imperial return of Wales has therefore been very distinct
from that of Scotland. It has resembled much more closely the typical
ethno-linguistic trajectory of repressed nationhoodcultural mobiliza-
tion directed towards nation-building and the eventual formation of a
state. After Blairs electoral victory of 1997 a rst Welsh Parliament
was part of the pay-off. This was conceived quite differently from the
Edinburgh oneas a rst-installment, non-legislative body with execu-
tive control over the existing Welsh Ofce budget but otherwise limited
to debating and offering advice. When it came to power, the Cardiff
National Assembly members were to be consumers indeed. In the Year
2000 Annual Report they will no doubt have their own colour-spread and
appropriate pseudo-critique, most likely along the lines ofSo far so
good in Wales, but give us more . . . (something or other . . . roads;
language facilities; Life Peers).
But six months before the National Assembly met, the New England-
and-Wales was already in trouble. The Assembly was conceived as a
voice. But the trouble with allowing a national voice to speak up is that
it may say something. Alas, speech can indeed be a form of action. It
may even say (do) something disagreeable or (as in this case) something
vexingly Welsh. Blairs reading of the old Austro-Marxist runes made
cultural Welshness a blessing, naturally. But only provided it did not
impinge upon the deeper peace signalled by the and of England-and-
Wales, whereby England will go on conducting the orchestra to which
choir and harp would continue to make their traditional contribution.
94 nlr 1
In 1997 and early 1998 the Welsh Assembly plan was guided by the
Welsh Secretary of State (and leader of the Welsh Labour Party) Ron
Davies. He led the successful cross-party campaign for a Yes vote which
reversed the decision of a previous referendum in 1979. Critics com-
mented on the narrowness of the victory, compared to Scotland, but
usually overlooked the huge shift in opinion it represented. Mr Davies
himself never made this mistake. He frequently emphasized the con-
tinuing trend, as distinct from the arrangements of any one moment.
Devolution is a process, not an event, was his way of putting this. Such
an attitude might in time have boded ill for London but we shall never
know, for Davies was prematurely struck down in the summer of 1998.
It was not a London omnibus or a fatal illness that did for him, but scan-
dal. The after-effects of an ill-understood fracas on Clapham Common
forced his resignation as government minister, party leaderand almost
certainly rst Prime Minister of the new Assembly in 1999. A successor
had unexpectedly to be elected. And this accident of history cast a reveal-
ing light on how devolution was now regarded at Westminster.
For Blair and his Cabinet, devolution is emphatically an event, not a
process. Nothing could have been done about Ron Davies. He came
with the territory and had been responsible for the referendum success.
But after his disgrace they were determined no other process-merchant
would take his place: only the safest and most pliable of leaders would
dopreferably someone impeccably British, and not too keen on the
whole autonomy project. They had already had to change the British
Constitution in Northern Ireland for the sake of a peace process, and
were extremely disinclined to do so again to placate a new form of local
government in Englands oldest internal colony. A line had now to be
drawn.
Once more, the actual phenomenon of Blairism at work preempts any
conceivable satire. Suppose a hostile Tory commentator had written
something like this, for example: Power-freak Blair, like the tinpot dic-
tator he actually is, has chosen the most notoriously supine, cardboard
gure in the Welsh Party to do his bidding, using every rotten trick in
the old Party rulebook to get his own way while continuing to rant about
reform and third-way democracyjust the way Eastern Europe used to
be! He would, alas, only have been saying in tabloid-speak what every
other journalist was then to write in his or her own fashion. In The Times
William Rees-Mogg put it this way:
nairn: Britain 95
Wales has been insulted . . . by the way in which the choice of Leader
for the Assembly has been manipulated. When Tony Blair was chosen
as Leader of the Labour Party, the trade union section of the electoral
college operated one man, one vote. When Alun Michael was chosen
Labour Leader for Wales, the majority of the trade unions returned to
the old block vote principle. Three trade union leaders were sufcient to
cast the votes which gave Alun Michael his victory.
Thus in the end a resounding majority of actual Welsh members voted
for Rhodri Morgan, a well-educated dissident with trouble written all
over him; and Mr Michael was wheeled on to centre-stage by traditional
Old Corruption, amid a tropical downpour of Radical and New-Life prot-
estations. As Rees-Mogg concluded, a great number of those whose vote
was scorned in this way were likely to think devolution to Wales is a
sham, a cover for the maintenance of English supremacy, enforced by
the Blairite rigging of the leadership election, and turn to Plaid Cymru.
Six months later, at the rst elections, they did so turn.
It was not as if the governments attitude was conned to Wales. Although
less crassly, analogous pressures were being applied in Scotland as well,
and also in London, around the selection of Labours candidate for the
new Mayor. At the same time, a BBC Panorama documentary was broad-
cast on just this wider theme, and gave a convincing picture of a regime
backpedalling furiously to undo, or at least restrain, some of the awk-
ward political consequences of devolution. A general counter-revolution
was under way designed to preserve England-and-. . . everywhere else
too, in approximately their traditional roles within the mystery play of
Britishness. Too many voters had been taken in, concluded Rees-Mogg.
They had thought the rhetoric was authentic and believed that the three
D wordsDevolution, Diversity and Democracymeant something,
were more than mere slogans . . . Neither in Wales, Scotland nor in
London does that now appear to be true. Peter Preston arrived at a simi-
lar verdict in the same days Guardian: The troubles that begin to ow
in irksome abundanceresurgent Scots Nationalists, roaring Rhodri,
taunting Kenare not, it is becoming clear, isolated events. They are
part of a structure. They wont go away.
96 nlr 1
Englands England
The structure Preston complains of is Britain or, more accurately,
Englands Britain. Unshed save in emptily radical terms, this armature
of fate was bound to reassert itself after the shocks of 1997. The core
of the problem is that behind Englands Britain there lies Englands
England, the country which has not merely not spoken yet but, in effect,
refrained from speaking because a British-imperial class and ethos have
been in possession for so long of its vocal cords. A class has spoken
for it. This is the evident sense in which England has been even more
affected and deformed by imperial globalization than other parts of the
archipelago.
What might come after England? In Julian Barness fantasy novel
England, England the whole sclerotic culture is transplanted in theme-
park form to the Isle of Wight. Sir Jack Pitman, a business and media
tycoon reminiscent of Robert Maxwell, reconstructs Englishness on the
island, complete with a downsized Westminster, Windsor, Manchester
United, White Cliffs, Imperialism, Harrods, whingeing, etc. Invented
tradition is everywhere, like the old English custom of downing a pint
of Old Skullsplitter with a twiglet up each nostril. We are not talking
heritage centre, he rumbles, we are offering the thing itself. This project
is disastrously successful, and declares independence as a microstate of
truly corporate populism. Meanwhile, the real real England, a mainland
thus deprived of its essence, sinks slowly backwards into time. Anglia
takes over from Britain. Quaintness, diminution, failure create a differ-
ent landscape, possessed by a new-old innocence and goodness:
Chemicals drained from the land, the colours grew gentler, and the light
untainted; the moon, with less competition, now rose more dominantly.
In the enlarged countryside, wildlife bred freely. Hares multiplied; deer
and boar were released into the woods from game farms; the urban
fox returned to a healthier diet of bloodied, pulsing esh. Common
land was re-established; elds and farms grewsmaller; hedgerows were
replanted.
Martha Cochrane, who has abandoned Isle-of-Wight England for this
arcadia, asks herself if a nation could reverse its course and its habits,
but of course the answer is her own life in this country isolated from
Europe and the world, in which items are again sold by the hundred-
weight, stone and pound for amounts expressed in pounds, shillings
nairn: Britain 97
and pence, where four-lane motorways peter out into woodland, with a
gypsy caravan titupping over the lurched, volcanic tarmac, and thunder
has regained its divinity.
In This Time Anthony Barnett acknowledged the necessity of English
reafrmation as part of the new constitutional process. It has to be
more than the rebranding advocated by Mark Leonards Demos pam-
phlet Britain
TM
(1997), which would amount to acquiescing in Jack
Pitmans futurescape. Such modernization of the theme park wont do,
even given the rayonnement of the Millennium Dome. Nor is mongreli-
zation a solutionthat is, a self-conscious embracing of multicultural
diversity in preference to ethnic majority nativism. That was argued for
in Philip Dodds The Battle Over Britain (1996), where ethnic minorities
and regional identities capture the dissolved essence of the nation and
remanifest it as an inherently variegated democracy. But such a prefer-
ence has to be expressed. How can it be shown, without a constitutional
mode of expression, and a prior redenition of sovereignty? Democracy
is not popular instinct or the simple prevalence of a majority: it is a con-
stitution, or nothing. If this is not put rst, then it will come lastand
quite possibly too late.
In The Times of 12 February 1998 (coinciding with the devolutionary
debacle in Wales) Political Editor Philip Webster announced something
else. It was like a cloud the size of mans hand, in a diminutive box on
page ten. But behind lies a great storm, gathering below the horizon:
Beckett to give England a Voice. Mrs Becketts ministerial plan is to
give England a distinct voice in Parliament after Scottish and Welsh
devolution by setting up a committee of English MPs. Although humbly
named the Standing Committee on Regional Affairs, there is no one
in Scotland, Wales or Ireland who will be deceived for a second by this:
it would be the de facto English Parliament, convened on its own for
the rst time since 1546 (when Wales was formally incorporated). Since
no provision was made for the majority in Blairs radical project, it will
be forced to make its own, erupting bit by bit, using disguise and alias,
proceeding through an obstacle course of tactical accidents and after-
thoughts. The Governments Modernization Select Committee was
supposed to agree Mrs Becketts scheme and (the report concluded) will
almost certainly back the idea.
98 nlr 1
Whether it does or not, evolution in that sense is unavoidable. On that
plane, Tam Dalyells old West Lothian Question was certainly not mis-
taken, even if he himself drew so many mistaken conclusions from it.
The impact of Scottish and Welsh self-government upon the former
constitution of the United Kingdom is bound to be signicant. The
Parliamentary elite will be disrupted in its business, even if the majority
of voters remains indifferent. A disruption of the establishment will be
translated into a concern, even a scandal, for the masses. All issues will
be seen as aggravated, if not provoked, by ill-considered changes on the
periphery. Since these cannot be undone, the centre itself will have to act,
and afrm its own rights. The Standing Committee of English Members
will be called upon to speak, and not in a hushed Select-Committee
monotone. It will speak for England, the people and nation, and its
very informalityits air of having arisen from the regional ranksmay
bestow upon the body a spontaneous, even revolutionary appearance:
Its time someone spoke out! and stopped them having things all
their own way.
Populism like this nds its own way to nationalism, and there is nothing
new or inherently harmful in that. However, it would have been better
to plan for it, by putting a coherent, overall constitutional change rst,
rather than leaving it in this way to the uncertain and possibly uncontrol-
lable last. An intelligible Grundgesetz would at least have paved part of
the way towards equality of representation and treatment. In Austria-
Hungary the Germans may not have wanted such equality, but at least
they had the choice: nobody pretended they were not there, or took
them for granted in that curious sense which has dogged Englishness
throughout the long decline of Britain. It is from this occlusion that
the dominant scenarios of English futurity seem to have come. On one
hand, the idea of reversion to an irrecoverable ruralitythe natural wil-
derness or village condition of a post-British culture. On the other, the
more advanced (but also more negative) longing for a virtual dissolution
of identity into multiculturalism or Europemeaning here a broader
identity-format within which nations somehow disperse or painlessly
cease to matter.
There is no available formula for a post-British England: the issue has
simply been avoided in these ways. It would have been better tackled
straightforwardly, as Charter 88 demandedand yet this was impossi-
ble, because of the very nature of the old system to which the Charterites
nairn: Britain 99
were forced to appeal. Hence it can only be done in a crabwise, half-
avowed and belated fashion. Blairs project makes it likely that England
will return on the street corner, rather than via a maternity room with
appropriate care and facilities. Croaking tabloids, saloon-bar resentment
and backbench populism are likely to attend the birth and to have their
say. Democracy is constitutional or nothing. Without a systematic form,
its ugly cousins will be tempted to move in and demand their rights
their nation, the one always sat upon and then at last betrayed by an elite
of faint-hearts, half-breeds and alien interests.
100 new left review 1 jan feb 2000
V
isiting Brussels three years ago, to see the centennial
exhibition of Magritte, I was amused to nd the city fes-
tooned with images of bowler hats, on banners, posters; old
placards. There were even real bowler hats in window dis-
plays. Magritte had become, so to speak, the patron saint of Brussels and
the bowler hat had been chosen as his emblem. It was an apt choice.
Magritte painted several dozen images of bowler hats, as well as a large
sheaf of drawings and a quantity of recycled versions of the paintings
as gouaches. Moreover, Magritte himself was frequently photographed,
and lmed, wearing a bowler hat. It seems quite plausible to consider
many of these paintings as self-portraits, as his dealer, Alexandre Iolas,
did. In that sense, Magritte chose his own emblematic attribute, his own
trademark headgear. He consciously became The Master of the Bowler
Hat. Why? And what did it mean? Most accounts stress the ordinariness
of the man in the bowler hat, his unindividuated character as Everyman,
his classlessness or perhaps, more precisely, his petit-bourgeois charac-
ter, neither cloth-capped nor top-hatted, nor even trilbied or homburged
or boatered. I would like to approach the meaning of the bowler hat in
a different way, stressing its rich semantic complexity rather than its
banality or its blankness.
Magrittes rst major work to feature a bowler hat was The Musings of
A Solitary Walker which dates from 1926, when the artist was in his
late twenties. It is dusk. A bowler-hatted man stands with his back to
the viewer, silhouetted against a cloudy greeny-blue sky, looking out
across the gloomy landscape towards the horizon. To his (and our) left
MAGRI TTE AND THE
BOWLER HAT
peter wollen
wollen: Magritte 101
runs a river, the same colour and tone as the sky, with light glinting
off its surface. Some distance down, there is a simple wooden bridge,
just where a clear view is broken by some trees, illuminated by some
hidden source of light. In the foreground, at the level where the bowler-
hatted mans hands have delved into his pockets, oats the naked torso
of an androgynous man, rigidly horizontal, his ribs clearly marked and
his long neck leading to a shaven head. He has no hair. His eyes are
closed and only the lips show any colour. He appears to be oating or
levitating, with no visible means of support. His pallid form appears top-
lit by some unknown source of illumination, possibly even from within,
since it does not affect the ground beneath him, which remains dark.
Some commentators have wondered whether this painting might not be
related to Magrittes memory of the night his mother committed suicide
by jumping from a bridge into the river Sambre and drowning; but he
himself always denied any reference of this sort. This is the rst appear-
ance of the man in a bowler hat, the characteristic gure, back turned,
face invisible, eyes gazing into the distance.
His next appearance is in The Meaning of Night, painted the following
year. This time there are two gures, one facing away, the other towards
us, standing with exactly the same posture, as though they were twins
or doubles. Again it is dark. They are standing on a cliff, a few yards
from the edge, overlooking the sea, whose white-crested waves are catch-
ing the light, like the surface of the river in the previous painting. Fluffy
clouds litter the ground, which is illuminated from a light source high
up to the left, casting shadows diagonally to the righttowards the sea.
In the foreground is what I can only describe as an erotic apparition,
oating at knee height above the ground, all fur and lace, feminine, with
a single white glove, ngers outstretched, reaching towards the top of
two pale silk-stockinged thighs, pulling back the fur to reveal the lace.
The silhouette turned away from us, gazing away, is more or less the
same as the one in the previous painting. The double, the one turned
towards us, is more or less as we might have expected, almost like a
fashion plate: hands in pockets, overcoat with ve buttons fastened, stiff
white collar with neatly knotted dark tie. It is the face which is striking
mask-like, white with no trace of colour, completely symmetrical; a
long narrow nose, eyes shut tight beneath arching eyebrows. It is the
gure of a dreamer or a somnambulist. If his eyes are closed, we might
presume, so are those of his double. He is not gazing out over the cliff
and the waves towards the horizon. He is dreaming.
102 nlr 1
We will never see this face again. It is the only image we have. In this
painting, we have been privileged to see the dreamer and the dream.
In all the many that follow, we shall have to imagine the dream for our-
selves. The next painting with bowler-hatted men is very different. In
The Threatened Assassin, painted the same year, 1927, we see a murder
scene. This time, it is an interior. A womans body lies stretched out on
a couch, naked, blood streaming from her mouth. A man, presumably
her murderer, is standing idly, at his ease, one hand in his pocket, listen-
ing to a record being played on a phonograph with a horn. His overcoat
and hat (not a bowler) are draped over a chair. In the distance, through
an open frame, we can see a mountainous landscape and three identical
faces, witnesses, peering over a balcony into the room. In the foreground
there is a similar proscenium frame opening onto the room, somehow
as if it were a stage-set. Lurking, pressed up against the wall on either
side, are two bowler-hatted men, dressed exactly like the somnambulist,
but with eyes open, looking at an angle in our direction, unable to see
the murder scene. One is carrying a cudgel, the other a heavy net. It is
often remarked that these two men are detectives of some kind, waiting
to apprehend the killer, positioned as if they already knew he had com-
mitted the crime, although he still remains hidden from their eyes.
Polyvalence
Also in 1927, or possibly the next year, 1928, Magritte painted The
Reckless Sleeper, another painting with a bowler hat, related to those I
have described but different in that the bowler hat is depicted as an
isolated object, enclosed in a bowler-hat-shaped hollow in what is gener-
ally described as a lead tablet, with an irregular curved shape of a kind
Magritte often favoured. There are a number of other objects enclosed
in hollows in a similar waya bird, a lit candle, an apple and so on.
The lead tablet takes up about two thirds of the picture. Above it, in
the remaining third, separated by a clean horizontal line is a wooden
box, rather like a cofn, marked in whorls and stripes by dark wood-
graining. Inside the box, a man with a bald head is lying asleep under
a blanket, his head resting on a pillow. Most viewers have assumed that
the objects beneath are somehow elements of his dream or, at least,
objects we might imagine as such. In fact, a bowler hat soon reappears
in an oneiric context in the 1930 painting, The Key To Dreams, a reprise
of a 1927 painting with the same title and structure, but no hat. This
time, the canvas is divided into six equal rectangular spaces, two across
wollen: Magritte 103
by three down, in which six objects are representedan egg, labeled the
Acacia; a womans high-heeled shoe, labeled the Moon; a bowler hat,
labeled the Snow; a lit candle, labeled the Ceiling; a glass, labeled the
Storm; and a mallet, labeled the Desert.
Magritte did not paint another bowler hat for eight yearsa work in
which the hat is worn by a horseman, followed by one in his Renoir
or Plein Soleil period, another horseman and then three, I think, in
his Vache period. All the rest, the overwhelming majority, were painted
in the fties and sixties. The foundations, however, were laid in the
works I have just described, all executed between 1926 and 1930. In
my view, the bowler hats in these crucial early paintings can already be
interpreted within ve different frames of cultural meaning. In using
the phrase, cultural meaning, I am talking not about reference or deno-
tationobviously an image of a bowler hat refers to the everyday object
we call a bowler hat, even if it is labeled, disjunctively, as the Snow.
Nor am I talking about connotation, in Roland Barthess sense, of the
way in which an image can support a rhetorical or mythological con-
struction. I am more sympathetic to Carlo Ginzburgs controversial idea,
outlined in his account of the hat worn by the Emperor Constantine in
Piero Della Francescas fresco cycle of the Legend of the True Cross,
in Arezzo, that we should look for a trail of clues in the historical and
social context which will enable us to establish a specic interpretation,
rather than treating it as an abstract emblem. It is a happy coincidence,
of course, that Ginzburgs iconographic analysis concerns a hat.
In his essay on the Arezzo cycle, Ginzburg seeks to explain the signi-
cance of the Emperors white hat coming to a point in front by relating
it to the very similar hat worn by Pope John VIII Paleologus as depicted
on two commemorative medals designed by Pisanello. This connection,
in turn, serves as a clue that enables Ginzburg to develop a train of
argument leading to an overall re-interpretation, via the hat, of the mean-
ing of the cycle. Rather than seeking a single, precise signication for
Magrittes use of the image of the bowler hat, I want to suggest that
he drew on a variety of different sources from different discoursesdis-
courses which we could see as being compressed, like the rabbit fur and
shellac which are the raw materials of a bowler hat, in order to make the
dense amalgam which we know as felt. This amalgam carries a polyva-
lent cultural meaning, not so much a delimited signied in Saussure
or Barthess sense, as a complex eld of signication. There are ve
104 nlr 1
quite different discursive sources that I want to discuss, each of which,
I believe, fed into Magrittes iconography of the bowler hat. These are
the discourse of detective ction; the discourse of the performing arts;
the discourse of Purism; the discourse of fashion; and the discourse of
patriarchy. The relevance of these particular sources should come as no
surprise when we consider Magrittes own valuation of mystery; his
abiding interest in lm, both as a viewer and as a performer; the impor-
tance of his family background; his origins as a modernist artist; and the
impact of his commercial work as an illustrator.
Detectives
First, detective ction. Magritte, it is well established, was a fan of
crime mysteries. He was an avid reader of the adventures of Judex and
Fantomas and a viewer of Feuillades serial lm versions, the explicit
source of his The Flame Rekindled and The Barbarian, alongside which
he posed to be photographed wearing his bowler hat. He also treasured
the Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton stories, which were neighbours of
Poe, Lautramont and Breton on his bookshelves. Magritte must have
been aware that the detectives in both the Fantomas and Judex cycles
wore bowler hats, as was customary for ctional detectives in general.
Back in 1908, A. A. Milne, author of Wind In The Willows, described
the party chasing Toad of Toad Hall after his escape from prison as
led by shabbily dressed men in pot-hats, obvious and unmistakable
plain-clothes detectives even at this distance, waving revolvers and walk-
ing-sticks. Ernest Shepards vivid illustration of the scene clearly shows
that the pot-hats were, in fact, bowlers. The bowler-hatted gures in
The Threatened Assassin are just such a pair of plain-clothes men, armed
not with revolver and walking-stick but cudgel and net, denizens of an
uncanny and mysterious realm whose unsettling and dreamlike quality
Magritte hoped to emulate in his own art.
In this context, it is also worth mentioning another pair of bowler-hat-
ted Belgian detectivesDupont and Dupond (or, in English translation,
Thomson and Thompson) who rst made their appearance, as yet un-
named, in Hergs second Tintin story, Tintin In The Congo, published in
1930, just three years after Magritte had painted The Murderer Threatened.
Albert Algoud, in his entertaining survey of the Dupondts career, traces
the ancestry of Hergs pair back to Jules Vernes novel of 1879, The
Tribulations of A Chinese in China, with its twin pair of lookalike and
wollen: Magritte 105
bowler-hatted agents, Craig and Fry. He also mentions the possible inu-
ence of Laurel and Hardy, whose rst lms together in bowler hats
were actually made in 1928, two years before Herg launched his farci-
cal double act, but one year after Magrittes painting. Hercule Poirot,
another Belgian detective, who made his rst appearance in 1931, is also
represented in visual images as wearing a bowler hat, although I have
not yet been able to nd any textual warrant for thisthe rst book in
which he appears, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, conrms that he was
something of a dandy and indeed wore a hat, but never species pre-
cisely what sort of hat it was. The tradition of the detective in a bowler
hat, I am glad to note, lasted right through to the 1960s, with Steed in
the British television serial, The Avengers, a kind of latter-day Fantomas
fully in the Feuillade tradition.
Comedians
Dupond and Dupont themselves combined the discourse of the detective
with that of the performing arts, specically the knockabout comedian.
Their hats are jammed down over their eyes, sat upon, knocked into
the water, exchanged by accident, dissolved into glop and repeatedly
subjected to ludicrous disaster. The great precursor of the comic use of
the bowler hat, of course, was Charles Chaplin, who rst donned his
Tramp or Little Fellow costume in February 1914, either for Mabels
Strange Predicament, as Chaplin himself recalled, or for Kid Auto Races
In Venice, which was released earlier, but probably shot later. Chaplin
had often worn a bowler hat, on and off stagethere is a photograph
of him sporting one in 1906, a young man appearing in Caseys Court
Circus, a knockabout musical act, and he certainly wore one when he was
featured in Fred Karnoss troupe. But the 1914 costume went beyond
just wearing a bowler hat as a comic accessory. It created a character. As
Chaplin remarked, it was based on the formal idea of contrastat the
extremities, a hat which was too small and boots which were too large,
in the middle, a tight jacket and a pair of baggy trousers, all topped off
with a hooky malacca cane. Chaplin is important, not so much because
we can demonstrate any specic inuence on Magritte, but because he
dominated the iconography of the bowler hat in general. Perhaps if there
was a direct relationship, it lies with the importance of the back-view
silhouette that became Magrittes favoured pose for his own bowler-hat-
ted man, with the difference that Chaplins silhouette was dramatically
mobile whereas Magritte favoured the ponderously static.
106 nlr 1
Most important of all, Chaplin xed the image of the bowler hat rmly in
the public consciousness in a number of contradictory ways, reecting
the paradoxical character of Chaplins own screen persona. Chaplin com-
bined knockabout comedy with pathos and childlike innocence. He could
be both cruel and sentimental. His behaviour was often futile and ludi-
crous, but he retained a threadbare dignity and stubborn self-condence
throughout. Chaplins antics had both an ethical and a nihilist dimen-
sion. He appealed to intellectuals as well as to vulgarians. Magritte, like
almost everybody else, was an admirer of Chaplin, as well as Laurel and
Hardy, whose lms he collected on Super-8 and whose bowler-hatted
comedy routines he enthusiastically imitated in his own home movies.
Old music hall routines like the exchange of bowler hats re-surface in
Magrittes lms just as they do in Becketts Waiting for Godotand at
roughly the same time, too. Bowler hats, umbrellas, tubas and pipes are
all repeated elements in his lm farceshe mimics his paintings by
putting a bowler hat on a shrouded head, he puts a series of hats on a
bust, he uses the shadow silhouette of a bowler hat. In one sequence,
his wife Georgette (wearing a von Stroheim-style spiky military helmet)
salutes a painting of a bowler-hatted man standing with his back to us.
Magrittes art is often treated as though it was always basically serious.
We should not forget that it was often ludicrous and absurd, even stu-
pidly so. As his close friend Louis Scutenaire put it, his genius lies in
his imbecility.
Chaplins inuence also penetrated the artistic avant garde, particularly
after the success of The Kid. Moreover, it was in France that the rst
recognition camein Cocteaus script for the ballet Parade, his Little
American Girl did a Charlie Chaplin imitation as well as dancing a
ragtime, composed by Satie. But Picassos pantomime horse took the
theme further than Cocteau had intendedinstead of being a thunder-
ing charger, it turned out to be a dilapidated beast that only provoked
hilarity. In Cocteaus words it was a fantomas taxi horse mounted by
Charlie Chaplin. At Picassos insistence the horse stayed. (A footnote:
Picasso had already painted a Still Life With Bowler Hat back in 1910,
usually construed as a joking reference to Georges Braque, who habitu-
ally wore a bowler at that time (in its turn a homage to Czanne whose
own tall bowler, known as a Kronstadt, gured in his self-portrait of
188385). Then, in 1921, Louis Dellucs book Charlot came out, applaud-
ing Chaplin for turning the cinema into a modern art form. It was
translated into English the following year and its inuence spread world-
wollen: Magritte 107
wide. In 1923, Fernand Lger made his famous drawing of Charlot for
Ivan Golls Chaplinade and, the same year, bowler hats gured promi-
nently in his lm, Ballet Mcanique, as they also did in another 1923
avant-garde lm, Hans Richters Imps Before Breakfast (Vormittagspuk),
with its bewitched bowlers ying through the air, tormenting their
would-be wearers. Soon after came two more major Lger still lifes fea-
turing bowlers, and the rst of his life-long series of Three Musicians,
with the tuba player always bowler hatted. Lgers original Chaplin is
clearly puppet-like, not simply a gure for a modern commedia dellarte,
as in Parade, but rather more like Mr Punch.
The same is true of the bowler-hatted stick gures that inhabit the
Lancashire mill towns painted by L. S. Lowry. Lowry, too, was a great
music hall fan, a particular admirer of Chaplins mentor, Fred Karno,
whose troupe made him laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks.
His bowler-hatted gures, he agreed, were like marionettes and if you
pulled the strings they would cock their legs up, as Chaplin did, of
course, when he skeetered round a corner. I look upon human beings
as automatons, Lowry once observed. They all think they can do what
they want, but they cant you know, which makes them funny beyond
belief. At the same time, he liked the working-class bowler hats, the big
boots and shawls. Lowry was a great admirer of Magrittes work, espe-
cially the bowler-hatted gures, because they all looked so ordinary,
as John Rothenstem recalled. About his own work, he noted that all
the people in my pictures, they are all alone, you know. They have all
got their private sorrows, their own absorption. But they cant contact
one another. We are all of us alonecut off. All my people are lonely.
Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. He could almost be discussing
Magrittes gures. Lger represented Chaplin with this same object-like
quality, turning him into a marionette, just as Magrittes gures often
remind us of tailors dummies. In his 1953 Golconda, serried ranks of
bowler-hatted men oat in front of an urban backdrop, all staring for-
ward. Golconda, Magritte explained, is a magical city. The bowler, on
the other hand, poses no surprises. It is a head-dress that is not original.
The man with the bowler is just bourgeois man in his anonymity. And
I wear it. I am not eager to singularize myself. Wiganworking class
anonymity and somnambulism. Brusselsbourgeois. The same lonely
crowd, each imprisoned by self-absorption, free only in their dreams.
108 nlr 1
Purists
In his early pre-Surrealist years as an artist, Magritte went successively
through the inuence rst of Purism and then of Dadaism. During the
Purist period, he became a close colleague of a fellow painter, Victor
Servranckx. Servranckx was artistic director of a wallpaper manufac-
turing rm in Brussels, Peeters-Lacroix, and obtained a job there for
Magritte, work which supported him for a number of years. Servranckx
considered himself a Purist and contributed to the central journal of
the movementLe Corbusier and Ozenfants LEsprit nouveau, as well
as co-writing an unpublished Purist manifesto with Magritte, Pure Art,
in Defence of Aesthetics. Perhaps the primary tenet of Purism was its
insistence that everyday manufactured objects were the proper subject
for modern artand indeed were aesthetic objects in their own right.
Lgers Purist works of this period are full of such objectskeys, ball-
bearings, jugs, balusters, bowler hats, bottles, pipes and so on. In this
context, it is worth looking, too, at Le Corbusiers impact on Magritte.
Not only did Le Corbusier programmatically wear a bowler hat, as a good
Purist should, but he wrote a crucial manifesto celebrating it as an aes-
thetic object. The point I wish to make is that Magrittes later use of the
bowler hat owed a great deal to Purism, as indeed did Surrealism in gen-
eral, although Bretons cult of the poetic object may seem, at rst sight,
the polar opposite of Le Corbusiers rationalism and functionalism. The
crucial point of shared reference was their interest in everyday objects,
rst as evolved types and then as sites of magical power.
In Le Corbusiers polemical book, The Decorative Art of Today, a collection
of essays written in response to the massive 1924 Paris Decorative Arts
Exhibition, a crucial chapter was headed Other IconsThe Museums.
Le Corbusiers purpose was to attack the underlying assumptions of
contemporary Decorative Arts museums and suggest an alternative aes-
thetic programme that they should adopt forthwith. I quote:
Let us imagine a true museum, one that contains everything, one that
could present a complete picture after the passage of time, after the
destruction by time (and how well it knows how to destroy! So well, so
completely, that almost nothing remains except objects of great show,
of great vanity, of great fancy, which always survive disasters, testify-
ing to vanitys indestructible powers). In order to esh out our idea,
let us put together a museum of our own day with objects of our own
day; to begin:
wollen: Magritte 109
A plain jacket, a bowler hat, a well-made shoe. An electric light bulb
with bayonet xing; a radiator, a table cloth of white linen; our everyday
drinking glasses, and bottles of various shapes, in which we keep our
Mercurey, our Graves, or simply our ordinaire . . . A number of bentwood
chairs with caned seats like those invented by Thornet of Viennaand
then on to the wash-basin, the watch, the suitcase, the ling cabinet and
the illustration of a pipe.
The importance of Le Corbusiers manifesto, of course, in the context
of Magrittes development as an artist, lies in its unremitting stress on
the signicance and aesthetic value of the ordinary and its distaste for
show, for vanity and for fancy, all things which Magritte strongly dis-
trustedincluding surrealist fancy, like that of Delvaux. In fact, towards
the end of The Decorative Art of Today, Le Corbusier goes on to discuss
the Surrealists attitude to the object. He comments that the supremely
elegant relationships of their metaphorsas they impress one who is
not such a high dreamerare all the time very clearly dependent on
the products of straightforward conscious effort, sustained and logical,
cross-checked by the necessary mathematics and geometrythe neces-
sary exactitude for the functioning of mechanisms, etc. Magritte, too,
ercely resisted automatism and always insisted that he worked con-
sciously and precisely. Le Corbusier went on to conclude:
So the poets of Surrealism can only base their poetics on realism, this
realism which is the magnicent fruit of the machine age and of which
we are still so far from tired that they themselves hook onto it in the
skein of their dreams. The product of the machine age is a realist object
capable of high poetry. We approve so much of this object, we are so
fond of it, we would so much like to live with it, that our desire adds to
its utility the higher dignity! The realist object of utility is beautiful. Such is
the nal conclusion of the spirit forged in the labours of the age. So we
have to reconsider what is beautiful for us, to recognize what is beautiful
for us. A beauty that is made from objects whose relationships exalt us.
Magrittes conversion to Surrealism did not require as great a rupture
with Purism as one might have imagined. He took from Purism, of
course, only those elements necessary to the new vision that Surrealism
imparted, but among those images that crossed the divide was that of the
bowler hat. From the start, the bowler was intended to be functionalit
was designed at the request of an English landowner as protective head-
wear for his gamekeepers, made of compressed felt and tting snugly,
110 nlr 1
so that it was securely xed on the head. (He was worried it might
be dislodged during an encounter with a poacher.) As such it was a
model of simple, puried design, a hemisphere resting on an annular
brim shaped in a symmetrical wave pattern. At the same time, this
masterpiece of functionalism was open to a multitude of metaphoric
expansions of meaning. The hard, shaped, static, black object could
be labeled as snow: soft, shapeless, mobile, white. Its very ordinari-
ness could become mysterious. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Magritte
painted the great majority of his bowler-hatted gures, their poetic
beauty emerged from their being, as Le Corbusier put it, hooked on to
the skein of their dreamsdreams which themselves involved everyday
objectsthe moon, the glass, the loaf of bread, and even the Primavera
of Botticelli, which Magritte preferred as a mass-produced image on a
postcard, rather than as a great painting, a unique masterpiece. He was
not impressed when he saw the showy original in Florence.
Fashion
From early on, through his work as a fashion illustrator, Magritte must
have thought of the bowler hat as a functional and commercial object.
While he never designed posters simply for bowler hats as such, he did
work on advertisements for a wide range of everyday products, which
are represented in a precise geometrical Purist stylecigarette packs,
glasses, bottles. In 1924 he had left his job at the wallpaper company and
begun to work for the fashion designer, Norine, the wife of Paul-Gustave
Van Hecke, an art dealer and close friend of Magrittes own friend E.
L. T. Mesens. As Carine Fol has pointed out, a number of Magrittes
familiar motifs are rst introduced in his Norine fashion plates, such
as the picture within a picture and the stage curtain framing a scene.
We might add the Stockman form or display dummy, often converg-
ing with Magrittes familiar bilboquet shape. Then, in 1926, he also
began to work for the Samuels fur company. His images, at that time,
became much more realistic, moving away from the last, lingering post-
Cubist inuencesAround 1925, I decided only to paint objects with all
their visible details because this was the only way in which my research
could develop. In the second Samuels catalogue, on which Magritte
worked closely with Paul Nouge, he collaged a photographic image of
himself with eyes closed, playing the somnambulistic dreamer, while,
in the background, we see a model wearing a fur coat, foreshadowing
wollen: Magritte 111
The Meaning of the Night. And in 1928 he illustrated a Norine gown for
Psych, le miroir des belles choses, while on the directly opposite page there
is an ad for Maison Basile, Piccadillys Hatters (sic), featuring a bowler
hat.
The confusion of dummy, bilboquet and human gure can also be seen
in Magrittes 1926 painting, Nocturne, in which a man dressed in black
and white, with a high collar and black tie, leans over a female gure sit-
ting up in bedeach of them with the familiar, spherical bilboquet head,
like a chess piece. In The Conqueror, also from 1926, a dummy with
white shirt, stiff high collar, black tie and black jacket occupies the fore-
ground of the painting. In the place of his head there is a simple wooden
plank, protruding up from the collar. The Denizens of the River, painted
in 1927, also features a clothed headless dummy. These amalgams of
fashion plate with surrealist scene lead directly on to the very rst bowler
hat paintings, in which mannequin and human gure merge in the
bowler-hatted man. I would like to suggest that Magritte favoured the
bowler hat precisely because of its hemispherical shape, rhyming, so to
speak, with that of the head of the chesspiece, itself a stylized anthro-
pomorphic form of the bilboquet. It is, after all, the natural hat to place
snugly on a mannequins bald headlike those in The Face of Genius
or An End to Contemplation, both works from 1927, which was also the
year in which groups of isolated objects rst appeared in Magrittes rep-
ertoire, as in the suggestively named One Night Museum.
Fathers
It is signicant, too, that Magrittes parents were both employed in the
garment business. His grandfather had been a tailor and his father,
Lopold, was described as a commercial traveller, thought to mean that
he was a garment salesman, since on Magrittes birth certicate he is
described, more grandly, as a merchant tailor. On the marriage certif-
icate, Magrittes mother, Rgina, was designated a modiste and other
sources characterize her as a specialist in hats. His father was even pho-
tographed in a shirt with a stiff, high collar and an overcoat, carrying
what could be either an umbrella or a cane and wearing, of course, a
bowler hat. This brings us, in turn, to the fth form of the discourse of
the bowler hatthe patriarchal. A surprising number of artists who used
the bowler hat in their work themselves had fathers who wore bowler
hatsnot only Magritte, but also Beckett, Lowry and Herg, for example.
112 nlr 1
(Hergs father was actually one of a pair of bowler-hatted twins.) The
wearing of the bowler was passed on from father to son and failure to
comply could lead to family drama, as Samuel Beckett discovered when
he returned home from Paris wearing a beret. Among Irish Protestants,
of course, the bowler hat had long carried a particularly strong emo-
tional charge, as we are still reminded every year by the ritual marches
of bowler-hatted Orangemen through the streets of Ulster. Beckett was
also expected to undertake the denitive act of lial piety, of full incor-
poration into the world of bowler hat, by going into the family business.
In a way, Magritte did just that, if we can interpret his fashion illustra-
tion for Norine, Samuels and the others as entering the fashion trade.
He had fullled his duty and earned the right to wear his bowler hat.
In Becketts story First Love, the narrating monologuist recalls that they
gave me . . . a hat. Now the truth is they never gave me a hat, I have
always had my own hat, the one my father gave me, and I have never had
any other hat than that hat. I may add it has followed me to the grave.
In another story, The Expelled, the monologuist asks, How describe
this hat? And why? When my head had attained I shall not say its deni-
tive but its maximum dimensions, my father said to me, Come, son,
we are going to buy your hat, as though it had pre-existed from time
immemorial in a pre-established place. He went straight to the hat. I
personally had no say in the matter, nor had the hatter. I have often
wondered if my fathers purpose was not to humiliate me, if he was not
jealous of me who was young and handsome, fresh at least, while he
was already old and all bloated and purple. It was a sign of premature
aging, of loss of freedom. Hats for Beckett, and particularly bowler hats,
are also associated with civility (straightening, adjusting, tipping, touch-
ing, albeit gingerly, dofng, removing, the urrying of hats at funerals),
with separation (grabbed, seized, snatched, fallen to the ground, tram-
pled on, sailing through the air, ying off but not getting far because
of the string), with protection (against stones, against rain, against the
roof of the cab), with exchange (for the phial of calmative which will
ease eventual death, for a kiss, for another hat or series of hats, tendered
and taken), for study (peering into, examining, contemplating, feeling
into, judging), for emptying (shaken, knocked on the crown, blown into)
and nally, for display (mincingly, like a mannequin). Becketts hats also
suffer from refunctioning, practical or metaphoricas begging bowl, as
milk pail, as helmet, as chamber pot, as frisbee (shades of Oddjob!), as
cathedral dome, as a second pustular skull.
wollen: Magritte 113
Modernity
Magrittes hats, in contrast, are usually just bowlers, sitting on the head
or exhibited as simple objects. The only exceptions I have noticed were
the 1952 Everyday Magic, showing a smouldering bowler hat with a baby
suspended above it in the smoke, two works from the Vache period,
one featuring a hat with an eye looking out on the world, the other
with a protruding tap as if from a cistern. Then there is The Patch
of Night, a bearded bowler hat from 1965 and The Horrendous Stopper
(1966), a single bowler labeled For External Use Only, as though it
were the stopper for a container lled with something dangerousfor a
mind, perhaps, lled with dreams or subversive thoughts. (After he was
crowned, Babar, the elephant king, gave his bowler hat to his chief min-
ister Cornelius because Cornelius was good at thinking.) The Horrendous
Stopper is the same Magritte work, incidentally, which the Young British
Artist Gavin Turk, best known for his waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious,
included in his slide piece on the theme of Britishness, a cascade of met-
aphoric British objectsthe bowler hat following logically after a cup
of milky tea, Stonehenge, sh and chips, William Morriss Red House
and so forth. Magritte, however, eschewed metaphor. He always claimed
that his objects were just ordinary things, like his gures who were not
characters or individuals but generic human beingsand yet there
are still many afnities between Magritte and Beckett. Primarily, I think,
this is because their sense of the bowler hat as typically a patriarchal
object leads both of them to associate it with the traditionalthe singu-
lar, after all, is usually associated with the new, the commonplace with
the old.
In his 1938 work, The Endless Chain, painted for Edward James, Magritte
depicted three riders on a single horse, each representing, as he explained
to his patron, one of three historical epochsthe rst, a curly-headed
rider in a short tunic, representing antiquity; the second, a gallant mus-
keteer, all top-boots and plumed hat; the third, our modern cavalier,
with bowler hat and owing cravat. Here, in contrast, Magritte explic-
itly assigns the bowler hat to modernity, to the period since 1850 when
Locks of St James sold their very rst bowler to William Coke. Yet
already, even at that time, the bowler was inscribed into the register of
tradition. William Coke, after all, was a landed aristocrat, the future Earl
of Leicester. Gradually the bowler hat seeped down through the social
114 nlr 1
order, from aristocracy to gentry, to bourgeoisie, to petty bourgeoisie,
to proletarian, to underclass. In this sense, as Fred Miller Robinson
argues in his pioneering book on The Man In The Bowler Hat, it became
the universal classless hat of modern times. Yet, from another point
of view, it began and remained a traditional hat, a hat which always
aspired upwards, towards the world of the aristocracy, with its timeless,
unchanging, fetishized values. A dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist like King
Edward VII of England would expostulate with rage when he saw a
bowler hat being worn in London. He considered it a country hat. In the
country it began and there it certainly should remain, on the heads of
the gentry and their gamekeepers. In the late nineteenth century, so the
story goes, a traditionalist French lawyer would wear his bowler on the
train into Paris. At the station he would hand it to a servant, who would
hand him his top hat in exchange. All day, he would wear the top hat
and then in the evening, at the station, the exchange would be repeated
in reverse and he would return to the country in his bowler. On the side
of the future, Lenin himself wore a bowler hat as he played chess with
Gorky in Capri. Yet, thirty years on, the actor Maxim Straukh would
wear another bowler hat as period costume when he portrayed Lenin in
Stalinist lms. The bowler could never quite shake off the echoes of the
past and, in the end, it was fated, once again, to be seen as traditional.
George Melly tells a story of how, while Magritte was in England, paint-
ing for Edward James, Mesens tried to persuade him to buy a superior
bowler hat from Locks in St Jamess Street, but that Magritte had indig-
nantly refused on the grounds (which the choice of objects in his work
makes obvious) that he preferred a mass-produced model. Magritte,
Melly notes, was forced to shop at cheap gents outtters from poverty,
but then made a virtue of necessity by turning his clerk-like off-the-peg
appearance into a trademark. When Magritte became richer, in the
1950s, as a result of his increasing fame and the exertions of his dealer,
he stuck with the trademark. But by now the bowler hat was no longer
the anonymous headgear of Everyman. On the contrary, it stuck out.
It signalled an allegiance to retro traditionalism, whether for deantly
reactionary or for studiously parodic, even camp reasons. Bowler hats
disappeared from the Simpsons catalogue but clerks in the City of
London still went on wearing them, as Pooters colleagues had worn
them in the Grossmiths Diary of A Nobody, as T. S. Eliot had worn
a bowler when he worked for Lloyds Bank at 17 Cornhill and later at
Faber and Faber, just as MacHeath in The Threepenny Opera had worn a
wollen: Magritte 115
bowler to show his ambition to become a banker. British Guards ofcers
were instructed to wear bowler hats and carry rolled umbrellas when in
mufti. In the sixties, outrageous reactionaries like Lucky Lucan, with
his closets full of identical Saville Row suits, and Evelyn Waugh, in his
loud checked-tweed and Gilbert Pinfold period, both affected fetishistic
bowlers. At the same time, reactionary Edwardianism was parodied by
the dandied wave of mods. Across the street, so to speak, the trad
fans of revivalist jazz musicians like Acker Bilk wore bowlers as a cult
item, harking back nostalgically to the great black musicians who had
clowned their way into the affection of whites by using their derby hat as
a mute.
Fetish
The bowler hat was now entering the period when it became an erotic
fetish-wear for womendancers and singers in Bob Fosse movies,
Madonna on the stage, Armani models on the catwalk. The key artistic
reference here is to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, rst published
in 1984, but largely set in the 1960s, when Magrittes assembly-line
production of bowler hat paintings was reaching its greatest intensity.
It is a book which centres around two symbolic womenTereza, the
protagonists wife, and Sabina, his mistress, standing respectively for
the heaviness and lightness which mark the extreme poles of being.
Tereza returns to eke out her days in her native village. Sabinas ashes
are scattered into the Pacic off the California coast. It is Sabina, of
course, who wears the bowler hat, as an erotic come-on and a fetishistic
prop in her sex life. Tereza is unfamiliar with bowler hats. Kundera
notes, writing of her rst encounter with the hat on a fraught visit to
Sabinas apartment, that it was the kind of hatblack, hard, round
that Tereza had seen only on the screen, the kind of hat Chaplin wore.
It takes her far back over the years, back to what now seems like a golden
age, those happy but distant Chaplinesque times. For Sabina, in con-
trast, the hat has a number of very personal meanings, which Kundera
carefully expounds for us:
First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a
small Bohemian town during the nineteenth century.
Second, it was a memento of her father. After the funeral her brother
appropriated all their parents property, and she, refusing out of sover-
116 nlr 1
eign contempt to ght for her rights, announced sarcastically that she
was taking the bowler hat as her sole inheritance.
Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.
Fourth, it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated.
She could not take much with her when she emigrated, and taking this
bulky, impractical thing meant giving up other, more practical ones.
Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When
she went to visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her
head when she opened the hotel room door. But then something she
had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy,
turned into a monument to time past.
In an uncanny way, all ve of these meanings apply also to Magritte
the bowler as patriarchal heirloom, the bowler as fetishized object,
the bowler as witness of dandyism, the bowler as sign of eccentricity
and, last but not least, the bowler as monument to time. The bowler
hat, Kundera notes, was a motif in the musical composition that was
Sabinas life. It returned again and again, each time with a different
meaning and all the meanings owed through the bowler hat like water
through a river-bed. Each semantic river, Kundera explains, would give
rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate, like
an echo, like a parade of echoes, with the new ones. It is with this meta-
phor in mind that we can best understand the complex meanings which
the bowler hat acquired for Magritte. The different echoes were often
incongruous and, as time went by, their resonance would change. The
rst time Magrittes bowler-hatted man stared out over the landscape he
was light, in Kunderas terms, mysterious and mobile. But by the time
that Magrittes repetition compulsion had worked its way through year
after year and image after image, he had become heavy, recognizable
and rooted.
For Seurat, Lautrec, Czanne or Caillebotte, the bowler hats they painted
were simply part of everyday life, the leisure wear of a Sunday tripper
at Asnires or the habitu of a Montmartre dance-hall. For the Cubists,
for Picasso and Braque, painting a bowler hat involved an element of
homage. For Le Corbusier and Lowry and Chaplin, all born at the end
of the 1880s, it had become an everyday type, a commonplace. For
Ernst and Raderscheidt and Magritte, it could be invested with a certain
mysterious melancholy. For Beckett, the Chaplinesque was re-invented,
wollen: Magritte 117
imbued with melancholy and even abject despair. For Kundera, the
bowler hat had become a monument. By now it was useless rather than
useful, eccentric rather than universal, fetishistic rather than poetic.
Magritte entered the chain in the 1920s, but unlike his coevals he was
still stubbornly painting bowler-hatted men forty years later, at the end of
the 1960s. In the very last paintings of this lifelong series, their gures
have become completely transparent. In each, only the familiar outline
silhouette is left, cut into a monochrome background, with stormy sea or
moonlit night or mountainous landscape inscribed luminously within.
It is as if the bowler-hatted man himself has vanished clean away. He is
less than a phantom now. He is an empty screen.
118 new left review 1 jan feb 2000
T
he starting point of Robin Blackburns study of Grey
Capitalism, published in New Left Review 233, is unimpeach-
able. He is right to say that the complex and anarchic world
of contemporary capitalism cannot be tamed either by the
Keynesian welfare state or traditional, autarchic communism. This is
an argument all the more welcome for resisting the siren song of a New
Age in which the distinction between Left and Right has ceased to be
relevant, and a Third Way lies ahead, trumpeted nowhere more than
in the land of Blair and Giddens. If we wish to keep faith with the his-
toric aspirations of the Left, we must begin with a critical analysis of
the new conguration of global capitalism. A merely practical opposi-
tion to the present drive of neo-liberalism, of the kind represented by
current social or ecological movements, is not enough. A new vision of
a society founded on the values of social and political equality, public
intervention and democratic control of the economy will not emerge
spontaneously. We cannot depend merely on more or less instinctive
condemnations of individualism and the free market. Our task must
be, as Marx would have said, to penetrate the secret laboratory of pro-
duction, to capture the inmost nature of this society and nd ways of
mastering it. Blackburn is therefore quite right to focus on problems of
socializing the process of accumulation, as the ground on which social,
civic and ecological movements should converge.
Is Blackburn correct, however, to suggest that what he dubs our current
grey capitalism might be reformed into a new collectivism through
popular control of pension funds? This recalls a line of argument already
henri jacot
AN UNSUSPECTED
COLLECTI VI SM?
jacot: Pensions 119
strongly advanced in France by Michel Aglietta, to whom he refers in
his introduction.
1
Blackburn employs the term grey capitalism to indi-
cate both that the nancial structure of contemporary capitalism now
rests essentially on the pension and insurance funds of those in or
approaching retirement, and that the exercise of property rights in this
sort of capitalism is delegated to managers who act according to nan-
cial criteria of their own, rather than in the interests of the supposed
fundholders.
In the US and Britain, pension and insurance funds hold about half of
the value of shares and bonds quoted on Wall Street and in the City;
but these pseudo-collective property rights are in fact playthings in the
hands of managers whose only goal is to outperform average returns in
a footloose international nancial system. It is just here, however, that
Blackburn thinks the vulnerability of this sort of capitalism lies. His thesis
is that these funds, the driving force behind the present casino capitalism,
could be transformed into the nucleus of a new collectivism if a number
of conditions were met. These he spells out as follows: rstly, all citizens
must be covered by such funds; secondly, they must be able to have a direct
say in their management; and thirdly, there must be a scal and legal
framework for such funds which emobodies a new denition of the general
interest. Certainly, these conditions are far from being met in either the
United States or Britain, the cases Blackburn considers in detail.
Thus the proportion of wage-earners covered by a pension fund in the
United States, far from increasing, actually fell between 1987 and 1995,
from 53 to 40 per cent. Moreover, these employees are now covered
increasingly by funds with dened contributions (DC) and decreasingly by
funds with dened benets (DB)the proprtion of the latter falling from
28 to 19 per cent between 1989 and 1995.
2
The difference between the
two systems is very pointed. Under DB, the size of the retirement pension
is determined in advance and guaranteed by the employer and/or state;
under DC, the size of the pension depends on the speculative perform-
ance of the funds, so that the pensioner bears the entire nancial risk.
1
See Michel Agliettas afterword to the new Verso edition of his Regulation and
Capitalist Crisis, to appear in the spring of 2000, rst published in English as
Capitalism at the Turn of the Century: Regulation Theory and the Challenge of
Social Change, NLR 232, NovemberDecember 1998; and his brochure Le capital-
isme de demain, Fondation Saint-Simon, Paris November 1998.
2
See in particular Jacques Nikonoff, La comdie des fonds de pension, Paris 1999.
120 nlr 1
So far as collective intervention by wage-earners or their representatives in
the management of these funds is concerned, we can scarcely speak of any-
thing more than vague ideas. Since 1996, when John Sweeney became leader
of the AFLCIO, there has been some talk within the unions of attempting
to shift such fundsespecially those with dened contributionsfrom
the downward competitive pressures of short-termism to a more long-
termist approach where competitive pressures would be upwards, with
the trade-unions taking a more active hand in their management.
3
But so
far it is only talk. As for a scal system capable of making pension funds
an instrument of egalitarian progress, with redistributive measures to assist
the working poor, the unemployed and under-employed, no such thing is
even remotely on the horizon. On the contrary, as Blackburn himself rightly
points out, all that exists today is a system of tax relief designed to hand most
advantage to those who have most money to save.
Thus, even if we conne ourselves to Anglo-American capitalism, the
notion that a new collectivism is on any plausible agenda seems highly
questionable, so distant are current realities from the conditions it sup-
poses. There is an element of paradox, at the very least, in the mention
of Clintons suggestion to Congress that a proportion of public retirement
funds be invested on the stock exchange as a way of increasing their yield.
Even Greenspan pointed out that this would expose them to the risks of
already very inated share prices. We need, moreover, to make more of
a distinction between the United States and the United Kingdom. For
British capitalism is even more thoroughly nancialized than its American
counterpart. In the US, unlike the UK, there are local pension funds run by
public bodiesteachers, municipal employees, remen, policemen, and
so onwhich play a not insignicant role in nancing small and medium
enterprises in the locality, by investing below the market.
4

Pension funds are a reality in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and it does
not look as if they are going to go away; so any proposal that social or
trade-union forces take part in their management seems welcome. It is
another matter altogether, however, to extend this concept to other coun-
3
See for example Regina Markey, Workers Pension Funds and the Low Road
to Protability: the Downsizing Dilemma, AFLCIO Public Employee Department,
www.uswa.org
4
This is rightly pointed out by Nikonoff, La comdie des fonds de pension. For the
now highly nancial character of British capitalism, see notably Richard Farnetti,
Le Royaume dsuni, Paris 1995.
jacot: Pensions 121
tries where the retirement system is not already based on them. This
brings us to the particular case of France, and in a more general way to
continental Europe.
The French example
Blackburn at one point rightly remarks that the precise form a hypo-
thetical passage from grey capitalism to a new collectivism might take
would depend heavily on existing arrangements in each country or
regionbut then proceeds to argue as if the various capitalisms were
more or less identical in the way they link pension systems to capital
accumulation. In fact, however, it is plain that in the Anglo-American
model the heavythough not exclusive
5
reliance of the pension system
on capitalization is related to a process of accumulation principally based
on nancial markets in the true sense of the term, whereas in conti-
nental Europe an essentially pay-as-you-go pension system
6
is associated
with an accumulation process organized, at least to date, mainly around
nancial centres, to use F. Morins suggestive distinction.
7
Although, of
course, there are many differences of detail between the French model
of holding companies with overlapping directorships and the Rhenish
system of industrial banks, both have been relatively independent of
nancial markets, and both have been coupled with pension systems
based almost exclusively on pay-as-you-go principles. It is just this pat-
tern that is now under threat from the twin pressures of liberalization
and globalization, so it is no surprise that in both France and Germany
public debate has started to focus, albeit in confused fashion, on pension
funds.
5
In his exhaustive survey Retraites et fonds de pensiontat de la question en France
et ltranger, Paris 1997, E. Charpentier rightly emphasizes that in every country,
with the single exception of Chile, but including the US, a considerable part of
the pension system remains based on general taxation, in acknowledgement of the
extent to which all citizens belong to the same society.
6
Translators note: Pensions paid out on a pay-as-you-go basis are covered by cur-
rent contributions from employees, employers and the state. In the French system,
this scheme is jointly administered by representatives of employees, employers and
the state, and pensions have been set a comparatvely generous rate, linked to nal
salary.
7
Morins more recent works include his Report to the Ministry of Finance on Le
modle franais de dtention et de gestion du capital, April 1998, and his article La
rupture du modle franais de dtention et gestion des capitaux, in La Revue dEco-
nomie Financire, November 1998.
122 nlr 1
In Germany, despite the joint Blair-Schrder manifesto, proposals for
compulsory contributions to complementary retirement pensionsdrawn
up by the Minister of Social Affairs Walter Riester, formerly deputy head
of IGMetallhave had to be abandoned by the government in the face
of strong hostility from Klaus Zwickel, the leader of IGMetall, not to
speak of opposition within the SPD itself. In France the Commissioner
for Planning, Jean-Michel Charpin, has submitted a report to Jospin on
the future of the French pension system.
8
One of its weaknesses is that
it fails to distinguish two problems that need to be separated before they
can usefully be related: nancing of pensions and nancing of the econ-
omy.
9
In the French discussion, most of what needs to be said about
pension funds as a false solution to the rst question has been widely
aired. Indeed, the whole notion of demographic ageing has come under
sharp re, with its associated social panic at the prospect of increasing
levels of dependence or declining participation in the labour force, based
on often dubious assumptions concerning real rates of unemployment,
growth and productivity. The bogus superiority of capitalized over pay-as-
you-go schemes, the lack of realism in proposals to extend contributions
in periods of under-employment and so forth, have been thoroughly criti-
cized.
10
In my view, there is little more to be said. It is perfectly clear that
the only reasonable future for the French pensions system is a strength-
ening, if also perhaps recasting, of its pay-as-you-go principles.
There is, however, a further argument to be heard for the introduction
of private pension funds in France. It maintains that French capitalism
is vulnerable in its structures of capitalization. Because France lacks
powerful institutional investors able to dominate stock markets, so the
argument goes, France may be in the process of losing control of its
own productive enterprises, as British or American pension funds sup-
plant traditional French banking complexes as principal players on
the Paris Bourse. The sudden collapse in the share price of Alcatel
in September 1998, triggered by the partial divestment of its stock by
American Fidelity, was a vivid reminder of this danger.
8
See Pierre Khalfa and Pierre-Yves Chanu (eds), LAvenir de nos retraites au pril du
libralisme, Fondation Copernic, Paris 1999.
9
See the chapter on the rise of pension funds in the annual report of ISERES, the
CGTs institute for economic and social research, la croise des chemins, Paris 1999.
10
See notably A. Lechevelier, Les retraites: ides fausses et vrais enjeux,
Mouvements, 3, MarchApril 1999. I would also mention Retraitesles enjeux
de lemploi et de la solidarit, Analyse et Documents conomiques, 79, May 1999.
jacot: Pensions 123
For those who believe that the structure of ownership in a capitalist econ-
omy is of vital importance, this is an argument that cannot be simply
dismissed.
11
But the solution is not to substitute Anglo-American pen-
sion funds pursuing maximum speculative targets (yields of 15 per cent)
with French versions which in practice would have to operate on the
same lines. The logic of individual enrichment through nancial assets
is plainly incompatible with social solidarity between wage earners. Even
the partial introduction of a so-called third source of retirement benet
through pension funds, additional to the basic and supplementary ben-
ets that exist at present, would pave the way for a cannibalization of
pay-as-you-go schemes by capitalization.
Savings from salary: the real problem
But that is not all there is to it. For there is another problem that needs
to be directly addressed in contemporary capitalist societies, in which
ninety per cent of the population are wage or salary earners. This is the
ownership and management of the disposable savings from salary. In
earlier times, during the Keynesian or Fordist phase of capitalism, saving
was something the non-wage-earning classes did. Wage-earners con-
sume what they earn, and capitalists earn what they invest, as Kalecki
put it. This dictum is now out of date. It no longer describes the situation
in France or any other West European country today.
At the end of 1997, for the rst time since reliable gures became avail-
able, the value of nancial assets held by French households (in various
formscash, securities, and so on) exceeded their material assets (essen-
tially land and buildings): 15,900 billion against 14,790 billion francs.
Their total assets, at 31,690 billion francs, were about four times GNP,
and constituted 84 per cent of national wealth.
12
Stocks accounted for
5,200 billion; life insurance policies for 3,100 billion; contractual sav-
ings schemes (mortgages et al) for 1,600 billion; saving accounts in
public banks (livrets A, etc.) for 800 billion; and savings as salary in the
true sense
13
(prot-sharing schemes, share options, company savings
11
Something too easily donealthough other aspects of the problem are covered
wellin LAvenir de nos retraites au pril du libralisme.
12
For all these gures, see Inse Premire, no. 595, July 1998.
13
To avoid any ambiguity, one must distinguish clearly between what I call savings
from salary (that is, the total savings of employees) and what is usually called sav-
ings as salary (in other words, savings as a supplement to salary).
124 nlr 1
plans, and so on) for 260 billion. The distribution of these assets is, of
course, yet more unequal even than that of incomes, calling for drastic
scal reform.
Michel Aglietta properly addresses these aspects of contemporary cap-
italism. We can set aside here the dubious vocabulary to which he
sometimes resortsterms like labour society and heritance capital-
ism. The actual question he raises is this: what forms of savings from
salary should be encouraged if we want to preserve or enhance the
rights of employees to participate as savers in the management of their
nancial assets, and to exercise the inuencein both workplace and
societythat such large collective investment funds should give them?
The obvious contexts for an answer are local development and small
and medium enterprises, but others are the social economy and public
service enterprises which have been partially privatized. Would not all of
these permit experiments with management criteria other than simple
nancial protability?
It should be clear enough that this issuethe mobilization and collec-
tive control of savings from salaryhas no direct link with the question
of whether retirement pensions ought to be based on capitalization,
as in the US, or pay-as-you-go, as in France. Two separate problems
exist, which it would be dangerous to try to solve at a single stroke by
the introduction of funded pensions. On the one hand, there is the
problem of nancing retirement and the character of the right to a
pension (whether by pay-as-you-go or by capitalization); on the other,
the problem of nancing economic development and of the owner-
ship structure of productive enterprises (on which their management
depends). In my view the second problem becomes more tractableif
still by no means easyto resolve in the interests of employees, if the
rst is already settled on a pay-as-you-go basis that guarantees a pension
at least equivalent to that in France today (about 70 per cent of salary at
retirement). There is much to be done if we are to move in this direction,
against the tide of decisions to date, not to speak of the recommenda-
tions of the Charpin Report.
But if pension schemes should give priority to the unity and solidarity
of employees, this does not mean falling back on any narrow or immu-
table denition of the working population.
14
To use Marxs terminology,
it is necessary to take at least as much interest in the side of the wage
jacot: Pensions 125
contract that gives rise to the creation and accumulation of wealth as
to the side that ensures the reproduction of the labour force. This calls
for resolute interventions in the control and management of capital.
Where an earlier collectivism conceived the solution to be nationaliza-
tion of the means of production at the level of society as a whole, what is
needed today is a gradual and multiform process of socialization, whose
rst steps have yet to be taken. Robin Blackburn remarks that Marx
was surely right to insist on the fact that the structure of social rela-
tions is crucially determined by what happens to the economic surplus.
Just so. He neglects, however, the determining prior question of how the
economic surplus is produced in the rst place. Nevertheless, his stimu-
lating essay has the merit of drawing attention to some decisive aspects
of contemporary capitalism.
14
See the contributions by J. P. Gaudillire, N. Murad and A. Lechevalier on B.
Friots book Puissance du salariat: emploi et protection sociale la franaise, in
Mouvements, 4, MayJuly 1999.
126 new left review 1 jan feb 2000
I
am grateful to Henri Jacot for his critical reections on my
proposals for pension reform. Pension funds are a form of cap-
italist property, albeit a rather strange one. It might seem to
some socialists that such funds should simply be abolished and
that there is therefore something paltry about a mere programme for
their reform. I am therefore pleased that Jacot notes the radical nature
of the package I recommend. It aims to create a quite new pension
fund regimeone entirely distinct from that associated with pension
funds as we know them today, whether in the UK, the US, Chile or the
Netherlands. In these countries, and a widening circle of imitators, large
tax breaks are given to pension funds and professional fund managers,
subject to the narrowest commercial objectives, supplant both policy-
holders and any wider notion of the public interest.
My proposals start from the recognition that pension funds represent
a problematic and anomalous kind of property, which has great weight
within the global capitalist order. Though he does not atly deny their
importance, Jacot may still underestimate it. He points out, for exam-
ple, that in the United States those covered by personal or occupational
schemes are a declining proportion of the workforce. This is true, but
not because the absolute numbers of those covered by such schemes are
in decline. The recent expansion of employment in the US has mainly
swelled the ranks of temporary, part-time or short-term contract employ-
ees who do not qualify for occupational pensions and whose modest
earnings do not furnish them with the resources to take out personal
pension plans. The number of employees participating in occupational
pension plans based on dened benets has dipped from slightly over
to slightly under 40 million, while those in so-called dened contribu-
tion or money purchase schemes have risen from 40 to 45 million over
robin blackburn
REPLY TO HENRI J ACOT
blackburn: Reply 127
the last decade.
1
The total value of these funds has grown dramatically
during the bull market of the nineties.
The dened benet type of pension, with its guaranteed link to salary
levels, has fallen out of favour with employers, who have sought to
replace such schemes with so-called dened contribution or money
purchase pensions, which pay the contributor only what their pot will
buy as an annuity at retirement. The trend away from dened benets
should probably be seen as a gain to employers, though it may also
reect the fact that the dened contribution system is more adaptable to
job mobility. But it remains the case that funded provision as a whole is
hugely important. White collar and managerial strata do well out of such
schemes, of course, but so do most public employees and union mem-
bers. The majority of such workers are covered by occupational schemes
and their trade unions would strongly resist any plan to wind them up.
On the other hand proposals that gave policy-holders and their repre-
sentatives a real say in the running of the schemes, and which rewarded
funds which comply with wider social objectives, could be attractive to
this constituency as well as to social movements.
In Britain, it is true, the widespread sale of individualized personal pen-
sion plans led one and a half million employees to become victims of
a gigantic mis-selling scandal. This experience itself demonstrated the
need for far-reaching reform. But note that the victims were those who
had bought an individual plan, not those joining occupational schemes;
indeed many had been tempted to desert the latter for the former.
The bad personal schemes are bad because of the heavy administrative
charges and marketing costs associated with them, and not because they
invest in equities. The generality of occupational schemes also play the
stock market.

Henri Jacots comments are not entirely free from a paradoxor even
self-contradictionoften displayed by left critics of proposals to extend
funded pension provision. On the one hand, it is objected that funded
provision is the preserve of the more privileged; on the other, it is argued
that it would be wrong to bring the excluded into such arrangements, on
the grounds that they are supposedly expensive and risky. While many
schemes could indeed be improved, the holders of occupational pension
1
The Economist, 27 November 1999.
128 nlr 1
funds of all types nd them generally a good investment. Middle-class
and professional people generally take good care to enrol themselves in
such occupational pension schemes. This would be perverse behaviour
if the idea of pensions invested in equities were really as dubious as their
critics claim. Social movements, more reasonably, tend to object to spe-
cic investments but not to the very notion of investment as such.
As a socialist I look forward to a society in which stock markets no
longer hold society in thrall. But so long as social relations are organized
in a capitalist way then it is surely unlikely that holding stakes in capi-
talist private property will be ill-advised in a purely economic sense, as
Jacot implies when he cites Greenspans objections to ideas of investing
public pension funds in Wall Street (Greenspan also, of course, com-
plained that it would lead to political interference in the market).
If one is quite sure that socialism will already have arrived by the time
one reaches retirement age, then there is no point in joining a pension
scheme since, almost by denition, a socialist society will give decent
pensions to all. But those condent of this have dwindled to insigni-
cance. Paradoxicallyand this time it is a paradox embraced by my own
approachit could well be that it is only when all employees acquire a
collective stake in capitalist private property through retirement provi-
sion that they will nd themselves probing the limits of capitalism as a
social regime. What I envisage here is, of course, not a smooth escala-
tor to social responsibility and justice, but a new type of social and class
struggle over the nature of the regulations and institutions which dene
the regime of accumulation.
My argument in NLR 233 was framed by the observation that any hope of
imposing a socially progressive logic on European monetary union would
be lost without vigorous measures of macro-regulation, for which a new
pensions regime would furnish a powerful lever (as Keynes pointed out
in his essay on How to Pay for the War). Soon afterwards, the fate of
Oscar Lafontaine offered us a vivid illustration of the obstacles to such
macro-management, and in part it is the climate of general drift since
then that has led to lack of condence in the euro. Events have already
shown the dangers of neglecting a potential tool of macroeconomic reg-
ulation that is peculiarly adapted to conditions of globalization.
blackburn: Reply 129
Instabilities
Jacot refers scathingly to the alarmist projections so often broadcast by
advocates of pension privatization. In societies still aficted by mass
unemployment they try to make our esh creep at the idea that there
will not be enough workers to do the jobs available; while in countries
with restrictive immigration codes they ignore the ease with which
more generous policies towards immigrants could make up for any
eventual shortfall. But such valid criticisms should not lead us to neglect
the advantages of foresight and planning. Thus China should certainly
ponder the implications of a future demographic structure in which the
proportion of older people is rising steeply while that of younger people
shrinks. Nearly everywhere, socially-regulated investment funds would
help to reduce the burden of public debt on future generations while fos-
tering a more progressive and sustainable pattern of economic growth.
In the West, a combination of demographic shift and commercialized
pension provision could aggravate economic instability, in ways to which
proponents of pension privatization are blind. For the rise of pension
funds sets in motion tidal waves of cash owing through them, with
hugely distorting effects on share-prices. In one demographic phase
a surplus of contributions over payments is likely to foster a stock-
market bubble. But once baby-boomers begin reaching retirement age,
fund managers will need to become net sellers to nance their pension
commitments. Thus unless vigorous steps are taken to counter-act this
automatism, demographic shocks will be fed through into the nancial
system, adding a further layer of instability to it. In my original article
I cited the anxiety of an experienced former fund manager at this pros-
pect.
2
More recently Jan Toporovski, studying the institutional basis
of todays asset ination, found that pension funds have contributed
greatly to Ponzi dynamics in capital markets, which now abound in spec-
ulative constructions that resemble pyramid selling schemes.
3
There is
also now a considerable literature tracking the evidence of a clear link
between demographics and stock market prices, mediated by pension
funds. Thus Mosebach and Najand estimate that in February 1997, 65
per cent of all US full-time employees participated in a 401 (k) plan or its
2
Malcolm Crawford, The Big Pensions Lie, New Economy, Spring 1997, pp. 3844.
3
See Jan Toporovski, The End of Finance: Capital Market Ination, Financial
Derivatives and Pension Fund Capitalism, London 2000.
130 nlr 1
equivalent, and that this implied a total investment of some $266 billion
annually with penalties for any early withdrawal, a level at which there
was a signicant inationary impact on share prices.
4
Equities and bonds
While there is a strong case for pension funds investing in equitiesa
case that could be very strong in the aftermath of a crashthe current
dearth of alternatives in the UK is pushing the fund managers to over-
reliance on this type of asset, even on standard assumptions. Gerald
Holtham, economic adviser to the Norwich Union, has lamented the
scarcity of long-term public bonds and has proposed that the British gov-
ernment oat a series of bonds maturing in 25 or 30 years to underwrite
improvements in health and education.
5
Billions of needed investment
in the railway system could be raised in the same way, and such bonds
could be sold at preferential rates to pension funds which were owned
by their members, which gave formal representation to them, accepted
social priorities, and held most of their assets for, say, at least ve years.
Naturally, such arrangements are not going to be contemplated by the
Blair government. But it is enough to sketch them to see that social prop-
erty could be used as a lightning rod to earth otherwise menacing storm
clouds of speculative capital. The element of public subsidy would be
designed to ensure that those funds shouldering the burden of social
investment were not penalized by lower returns.
Jacot points to similarities between my proposals and those made by
Michel Aglietta. I was happy to acknowledge a degree of overlap because
I was well aware that my proposals could be thought naively to underes-
timate the systemic logic of capital. Thus so-called ethical investment
funds, which abstain from speculating in corporations which produce
arms, or practice discriminatory hiring practices, or condone danger-
ous industrial processes, could still nd themselves complicit in other
social evils or even in these very same practices further down the supply
chain. Or they could even nd their initiatives counter-productive, simply
4
Michael Mosebach and Mohammed Najand, Are structural changes in mutual
funds investing driving the US stock market to its curent level?, Journal of Financial
Research, Fall 1999, p. 318.
5
Gerald Holtham, Why the government needs to borrow more, not less, Guardian,
16 August 1999. I have further thoughts on Britain in How to Restore Collectivism,
New Statesman, 14 January 2000.
blackburn: Reply 131
opening up opportunities for less scrupulous investors. What interested
me in Agliettas argument was that he thought it realistic to propose
new principles which might structure the market as a whole while not
being subordinate to its logic. As it happens, the measures I propose
are more far-reaching than any actually specied by Aglietta and they
are not bound, as perhaps his are, by an insistence that capitalist insti-
tutions are now impregnable and can only be restrained rather than
replaced. The institutional innovations envisaged would be consider-
able, so I am likewise encouraged by the fact that an authority such as
Peter Self has proposed that superannuation funds should be made
available for longer-term investments which would yield environmental
benets (such as more durable products or energy savings), or which
would make a socially informed use of the many new and disturbing
inventions (such as genetic engineering) which would otherwise be left
to commercial exploitation.
6
I am glad that Henri Jacot noted my observation that any reform of pen-
sion funds aimed at making them engines of self-management should
take heed of the experiences of each country and in particular of the
different historic forms of its social achivements. It would be absurd
to introduce Anglo-Saxon-style individualized pension plans to a coun-
try where they were unknown, only to reform towards a more collective
model. One of the strengths of Meidners famous plan for wage-earner
funds was that it grew out of Swedish conditions. An interesting aspect
of current debates in Venezuela about the role of pension funds is the
way they are seen as appropriate vehicles for channelling the countrys
oil wealth into social reconstruction.
7
It is usually not difcult to see how
a funded approach to retirement provision can be used to strengthen
existing public or social systems of administration. These issues are now
sharply posed in France, where the employers have announced that they
are withdrawing from a pension system they have jointly administered
with the trade unions since 1945.
8
The French trade unions will certainly
wish to defend the gains represented by this system. But if the joint
commissions had the backing of an accumulated social fund with its
6
Peter Self, Rolling Back the Market: Economic Dogma and Political Choice,
Basingstoke 2000, pp. 2156.
7
For this, see Richard Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator (forthcoming), Verso:
London 2000.
8
For a laudatory report in the business press, se Robert Graham, An End to
Patronage, Financial Times, 20 January 2000.
132 nlr 1
own pattern of investments, this would surely strengthen their ability to
withstand threats from the employers.
When faced with such direct challenges to todays pension provision,
it may seem a luxury to dream up schemes for funds which will only
deliver in the medium or long term. But actually the tying together of
pension funds, social objectives and scal reforms has a logic that would
help us not only to honour current pledges for retirement, but also to
provide decent pensions to those, like many women, who do not qualify
for even the supposedly universal full state pensions because they lack
the requisite contribution records. Obviously state pensions should be
paid at proper ratessay at least 50 per cent of average earningsto all
those over 65 or 70, regardless of their contributions. But henceforth
contributions should be placed in a special fund and not diverted, as is
presently the case in both the UK and the US, to general government
expenditure. Since such contributions would then count as savings they
would leave room in the public nances for more generous treatment of
todays pensioners; and while expanding current options, they would at
the same time reduce claims on future streams of wealth from rentiers
and capitalists. Thus agging aspirations to redistribute income can be
revived by redistributing capital. Jacot worries that this means neglect-
ing the sphere of production. But what it actually means is recognizing,
as Harry Shutt and Jim Stanford have argued so persuasively, that in
an era of globalization the sphere of production is mortgaged to that of
global nance.
9
The implication is that without a socialization of invest-
ment mechanisms there can be no socialization of production.
9
See The Trouble with Capitalism, London 1998; and Paper Boom, Toronto 1999.
new left review 1 jan feb 2000 133
luisa passerini
DI SCONTI NUI TY OF HI STORY
AND DI ASPORA OF
LANGUAGES
Eve in the garden of Eden, after unnaming the animals Adam had
named: I had only just realized how hard it would have been to explain
myself. Ursula LeGuin, She Unnames Them
T
imothy Bewess review of my book Europe in Love, Love in
Europe in NLR 236 has helped me to rethink some of the
presuppositions and implications of my work, against a back-
ground of ego-histoire. I am grateful for this. Having been a
pupil of Norberto Bobbio in my youth, and followed his work more or
less consistently thereafter, I have learnt that no historian can avoid
incorporating a philosophy of history, tacit or explicit, into their work.
This philosophy can be unsystematic and eclectic, but it will inform the
architecture and approach of the historian, and dene what is consid-
ered historically signicant.
Let me make explicit what is often, although not always, implicit in my
own recent work. I willingly admit that it is guided by a belief in the
discontinuity of history. For I am convinced that a primary task of the
historian today is to avoid the exclusive pretensions to continuity of tra-
ditional narratives, which lled in all gaps and ignored everything that
did not t the writers paradigmwithout acknowledging its omissions.
This kind of continuous narrative is still with us today. It purports to
establish or explain sequences of events in terms dominated by politi-
134 nlr 1
cal and economic forces, while excluding aspects that matter a great
dealto some of ussuch as subjectivity or daily life, and subaltern
gures such as women. Claims to continuity between present and past
have often been the basis for ideological appropriation of terms and con-
cepts, and the self-legitimation of the historian. A recent example is the
presumption by some members of the French intellectual Right of an
unbroken continuity of values from Aristotle to Maastricht. But even
innovative and progressive historiography still often relies on traditional
continuous narratives, which do justice neither to leaps in history, nor
to the new domains and subjects studied by historians.
Discontinuities and temporalities
The idea of discontinuity of history means in the rst place an alter-
nation of repetitions, developments and sudden complete breaks. It is
also a methodological safeguard of the distance between history and
historiographyin other words, between the experience of humanity
and the itineraries of the historian. I believe that in the writing of his-
tory the representation or Darstellung never reproduces the Genesis of
the phenomena to be studieda lesson learnt from Marx. Discontinuity
further suggests the distance between the intentions of subjects and
the outcomes of history, which notoriously proceeds by its bad side. It
denotes, too, the coexistence of the times of the particular (as studied
by micro-history) and of the general (macro-history). That the particular
cannot be reduced to an example of the general is something most his-
torians have yet to understand or accept. Finally, discontinuity indicates
the dialectical way in which the same phenomenon may possess two
opposite values and implications in the same period, of conservation
and subversionan example would be groups in the 1930s like Ordre
Nouveau or New Europe. I have reached these conclusions from my
practice as a historian, but also from my reading of philosophers of his-
tory such as Horkheimer or Benjamin.
Hence too the crucial importance, in my view, of psychoanalysis. Its
ndingsor more accurately, the ndings of some Freudians, some
Lacanians and some Jungiansenlarge and deepen the possible range of
historical research. They remind us that many processes have semi-con-
scious or unconscious dimensions; that diachronic forms of development
are marked by all kinds of associations and circularities; and that the
link between historical events and processes is often not at all that of a
passerini: Discontinuity 135
cause to an effect, but of a symptom to an illnessthat is, of a sign
whose relation to what it hides or reveals is indirect and oblique. Similar
presuppositions are, of course, shared by other disciplines such as semi-
oticsno wonder, since language is here the common focus of attention.
In fact, it is strange that historians have so often forgotten that they deal
largely with words and not immediately with facts. Acknowledgement
of the unconscious dimensions of history involves not only a more com-
plex view of issues of subjectivity, but also procedures of interpretation
that try to nd the hidden substrata of source-textsthe ground where
psychoanalysis meets literary criticism. In this sense, the gaps, voids and
discontinuities of history are also the risks that subjects take in attempt-
ing to become masters of their lives and times, or interpreters of them.
The continuity of the subject is neither guaranteed nor givenit is a
possibility that is always in question; and this element of risk should be
reected in a historical narrative. We need to take account of the silences
and oblivions of history, its ironies as well its tragedies. Irony, like laugh-
ter, is a royal road to the unconscious.
Generational shift
It should be clear, then, that the task of the kind of historical writing
to which I am committed is not to pursueor constructdirect links
between past and present, but to study traces of various kinds of the
past with the utmost philological attention to them and their contexts, in
search of strands which have gone unseen or ignored, or become forgot-
ten. Our aim will be new visions of the past, founded certainly on primary
and secondary sources, but likely to be at odds with current opinions
of what is historically signicant. It should also be plain why cultural
processes are of such crucial interest. The shift of so many historians of
my generation from social to cultural historyit includes myselfdoes
not necessarily imply lack of interest in older questions, such as: what
is a revolutionary subject, or how can we help it towards self-awareness
and recognition. But it reformulates them drastically. The questions
now become: what is subjectivity, as agency of decision and as inher-
ited legacy? How do individuals and groups constitute such subjectivity
and become constituted by it? What are the relations between subjectiv-
ity and change, and which were the points in history at which different
choices could have been madeif we understand the past, in Croces
formula, as the history of freedom, which in my translation is another
way of denying the absolute privilege of what actually happened.
136 nlr 1
I thought that much of this was implicit in Europe in Love. Why did I not
make it explicit? Partly because much of this is familiar, if not widely
accepted, and partly because we still lack a collective understanding of
the reasons why a generation of scholars on the Left moved from Marx
to Bakhtin, from Sartre or de Beauvoir to Camus, from the instruments
of political economy to the eclecticism of cultural studies, with its vari-
ous methods and techniques, including textual analyses that owe much
to structuralism. Reciprocal accusations of renegacy or pan-politicism
bring no light to this problem. But reading Timothy Bewes I realize how
extreme the diaspora of languages has become within what was once
the Left, even the New Left. What we seem to face is a break-down of
any common tradition or transmission of meanings between political
generations. That suggests not only a multiplication of different intel-
lectual languages, but great difculty in translation between them.
Burckhardt and Hobsbawm
I say this, since Timothy Bewes at one point argues that I put the great-
est possible distance between myself and the philosophy of history, the
grandest, and malest, of historical approaches, yet at another taxes me
with historicismhere, supposedly, a position outside history. He goes
on to propose Burckhardt (puzzlingly cited from a secondary source) as
an inspiration for my thinking about history and culture: Burckhardt, for
whom the origins of European modernity lay not in Provenal culture
but the Renaissance, who rejected the impressionism of the Romantics,
and insisted that historians must make moral judgement. As it happens,
despite all this, I would not reject Burckhardt as an antecedent in every
respect, since he did after all refuse to consider the present as the con-
summation of all times. On the other hand, one historian I have taken
as an inspiration is Eric Hobsbawm, whose attitude to the past Bewes
counterposes to mine. Si parva licet componere magnis, I can say that
while there is indeed a great gulf between my kind of expositiondelib-
erately fragmentary in Europe in Love: it does not (for example) offer
any new interpretation of the Spanish Civil Warand Hobsbawms,
since he does construct the sort of continuous analytic narrative I was
referring to, this should not obscure the fact that his work was very
important in my own formation. I not only read his books, but translated
one of themthe Italian edition of Labouring Men. Between such work
and mine, or that of some of my contemporaries, I see the mixture of
continuity and discontinuity that typically unites and divides different
passerini: Discontinuity 137
intellectual generations. Changing forms of historical expression are an
important aspect of such conictual bonds.
Among dozens of examples of the lack of congruence between the mean-
ings I attach to words, and those given them by Timothy Bewes, let me
simply cite a few. I do not read the journal New Age as spiritualist. I
do not dene Burckhardt as ahistoricist. I do not advance a gendered
distinction between a feminine Europe of life and a masculine Europe of
death. I would never use phrases like purely historical, purely theoreti-
cal or purely political, since they strike me as illusory and prejudicial.
I deny that culture in any of my books means poetry, although it cer-
tainly includes itbut what about psychoanalysis, which Bewes does not
mention at all?let alone that politics means Mosley and Hitler. I will
not attempt to refute any of this. I am simply pointing out radical differ-
ences in understanding between two well-intentioned subjects, cast in
the respective roles of author and reviewer.
So far as historicism goes, what I mean by this term is either the line
of thought that connects Gramsci with Croce and Hegel, or that which
runs from Ranke and Droysen to Dilthey and Meinecke. For Bewes, by
contrast, historicism seems to indicate just a refusal to draw compari-
sons between the Europe of 1939 and that of 1999. Once dened in
this way, it easily turns into something called ahistoricism, that Bewes
then equates with Eurocentrism. He forgets the attack by the Annales
schoolin some ways an inspiration for my workon historicism and
its characteristic forms of narrative; and ignores what is actually the
dening feature of historicism, the assumption that any particular aspect
of reality can always be subsumed under higher forms that place it within
some vaster conception of reality as a whole. This procedure strikes me
as the exact opposite of the charge Bewes lays against me in Europe in
Love.
Bewess alternative to historicism, as he understands it, would yoke
together history and politics, past and present, subject and the object of
discourse. We can see this from the way he often assumes that I share the
views of those whom I study. Thus he can write: Blair shares Passerinis
vision for the future of international relationships, as couched in the
rhetoric of the New Europe Group. The NEG, she writes, preferred to
visualize Europe as a great political and cultural family. It is a novelty
for me to be suspected of taking the family as a model for anything.
138 nlr 1
Where we do agree factually, if from opposite judgements of value, is
at the point when Timothy Bewes remarks that in the way I read my
sources, there is no possibility of mobilizing them as any sort of solu-
tion to our own political malaise, for the stories I tell in Europe in Love
seem to have no persuasive purpose, and are, in effect, required to be
their own justication. I would, indeed, never think of mobilizing the
individuals and groups I study in my historical work in the service of
any solution for my own political malaisewhich in some way I per-
haps share with Timothy Bewes. I do not consider this to be a task of
the historian. In fact, I see it as dangerously close to the attualizzazione
updatingof history by philosophy advocated by Giovanni Gentile,
which inevitably leads to ahistorical, if not outright anti-historical, ver-
sions of the past.
Utopians and good Europeans
Bewes is therefore right that I accord no priority to current political
concerns, such as might be posed by the Labour Party in Britain, in
my historical work. Actually, I believe that a certain engagement in
the cultural eld is a way of contesting current forms ofespecially
Europeanpolitics, of keeping alive a memory of what politics might
be, and a hope that something worthy of its name may reappear in other
forms. In that sense, I can see no similarityrather, the deepest of dif-
ferencesbetween the lovers discourse conceived by Roland Barthes,
which I try to translate into historical terms, and the sentimental jargon
of the media employed by the British Prime Minister. Barthess dis-
course has nothing to do with the cult of life- (or death-) styles of pop
stars. It is fragmented and solitary, and untimely in a Nietzschean
sense: unfashionable and possible only in the interstices of the existing
order. It is not identical with the Provenal discourse of love, although it
has a memory of it. It projects itself towards a possible future, that can
at any step be check-mated. Frank Thompson, by the way, understood
both. He had experienced a traditional form of impossible love, and
expected in a future Europe to be able to nd a different kinda hope
shared by some poets of the Spanish Civil War. Yes, this was utopian.
But it was so not in the sense of a ready-made scheme projected onto
the real world, but rather as a criticism of existing conditions springing
from an intuition of changes potentially immanent in the present.
passerini: Discontinuity 139
1
I take the liberty of referring to two essays of mine: The Last Identication: Why
Some of Us Would Like to Call Ourselves Europeans and What We Mean by This,
in Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, edited by Bo Strath, Brussels 1999;
and From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony, in The Idea of Europe.
The Politics of Identity from Antiquity to the European Union, edited by Anthony
Pagden, Cambridge forthcoming.
So too today, I see a great difference between the ofcial rhetoric of
humanitarian Europeanism espoused by our leaders, and my suggestion
that we try to sketch an identication with Europe that passes through a
critique of all forms of Eurocentrism. There is no space here to develop
arguments I have set out elsewhere,
1
but let me indicate a few basic
points. The generation of 1968 has begun, slowly and unsteadily, to
move towards what I call a last identication with Europe. The reasons
for this are complex, but I believe they include the following:
t a discovery of the cultural dimensions of public action, beyond or apart
from strictly political engagement, and a recovery, through works of
cultural history, of the utopian dimensions of the idea of Europe, which
were strong in the inter-war period, and then temporarily annihilated by
the Second World War;
t a lasting attachment to internationalism, now aware of the need to move
one step at a time in search of intermediate forms, between the sorts of
belonging possible today, and a future horizon conjured up by that lovely
metaphor, citizens of the world;
t a sense of reconciliation with the generation of the Resistance, and above
all with its liberal-socialist wing, represented in Italy by Gobetti and
the Rosselli brothersa tradition with a very strong sense of European
culture and identity (Communism, apart from a few slogans in Lenin
and isolated Trotskyist currents, was never Europeanist).
In my own research, I seek to trace elements that have determined
identity in Europe, in a recent or remote past, on the left or the right,
by reconstructing historically what people have believed it meant to
be European. My intention is to pass through these determining ele-
ments and to abandon them, drawing awareness from them along the
way, not as examples, but as terms of comparison. In this itinerary I
am determined to give up continuity. It is impossible to derive a linear
path from the Greeks to Maastricht without counter-productive violence
140 nlr 1
to the record. It is better to think of Europe primarily as a space whose
coordinates have shifted in different directions in different periods, and
in which there lies between one cultural phenomenon and another, or
one historical idea and another (each to be understood as premisses,
even if ex negativo, of our quest), a Kierkegaardian abyss and leap, both
in the short and long run. What we nd in our research are points punc-
tuated by ruptures, contradicted by what is other than themselves,
without xture.
In this respect, I would like to recall one of the thinkers who has most
inuenced my view of these questions. Nietzsches ironic portrait of
the good Europeanwandering, clownish, unstable, without father-
landstill saw this gure as stumbling somewhere beyond the men of
fatherland, obsessed by their own nations and nationalisms. It is such
ambiguities a historian should respect. Rather than generating simple
dichotomies, my hope is to propose new congurations and connexions.
I will gladly put on my billif I may use an Italian phrasethe possibil-
ity of failing in this task.
So although I believe we must not understate the distances between his-
torical and political discourses, this does not mean I wish to be distant
from todays Europe and its wars. Incidentally, we cannot speak of the
conict in Kosovo as the rst European war for fty years, since wars
have been raging in what was once Yugoslavia for ten years now. In these,
I refuse to consider only Blair and not Milo&evic too as responsible for
massacring fellow Europeans. Within the framework of an international
womens organization against the censorship of womens voices, I have
begun a project to collect the life-stories of women in Kosovofrom
every group: Albanian, Montenegrin, Rom, Serbianto help create an
archive of their memories. What has struck me is how many of them,
while they express scepticism or bitterness at the long immobilism of
Europe towards their region, also give voice to a desire to be recognized
as Europeans themselves, in a full sense. It is this desireand not only
the warsthat reminds us we are a long way from being all Europeans
now.

new left review 1 jan feb 2000 141

L
uisa Passerini is committed to a method that looks at the
silences and the oblivions of history as closely as, or more
closely than, the manifest continuities. Her response to my
review of her book Europe in Love, Love in Europe, like the
book itself, is fascinating and illuminating as much for what it omits as
for what it states explicitly. The clarication that she offers of the meth-
odological assumptions of her style of cultural history is very welcome,
and I am glad to have this opportunity to respond to it. Passerini is an
authentic and rigorous scholar; her theoretical consistency is unques-
tionable, as demonstrated in her reply above; and her refusal to wrench
the subjects of her research violently out of context is irreproachable.
Scholarly propriety is, in fact, the principal theme of her response; thus
her puzzlement at my quotation of Burckhardt from a secondary source
should certainly be read as a polite reproach.
Less nuanced is the charge that I have ascribed to the author views held
by the objects of her study. Interestingly, I am not the only reviewer of
Europe in Love to have been criticized by Passerini for this.
1
Furthermore,
she claims, I have ignored the importance to her work of psychoanalysis,
which enables, indeed obliges us to read historical phenomena less
in terms of cause and effect than as symptoms of metaphorical ill-
ness. Finally, she objects to my use of the terms historicism and
ahistoricismin particular, to my suggestion that her diligence in treat-
ing historical traces with the utmost philological attention to them and
their contexts is pursued with such excessive rigour that it leads, in effect,
to ahistoricism, that is, to the presumption to speak from a position
outside history. Such an idea, Passerini intimates, testies to the break-
timothy bewes
SQUEAMI SHNESS
AND SCHOLARLY RI GOUR
142 nlr 1
down of a common tradition which, with characteristic generosityor
is it excessive historicism?she attributes to the diaspora of languages
within different generations of the Left.
The term historicism, as is clear from her response, is indeed used by
Passerini and myself in quite different senses. Raymond Williams dis-
tinguishes (at least) two usages: the rst, positive, denotes a deliberate
emphasis on variable historical conditions and contexts, through which
all specic events must be interpreted. This is the sense in which I have
used it, in relation to cultural history in general and what I take to be
Passerinis methodology in particular. The second, hostile sense, associ-
ated with Karl Poppers assault on Marx and Hegel, refers to forms of
interpretation or prediction by historical necessity or the discovery of
general laws of historical development.
2
As Passerini notes, it is the
opposite of this that I criticize in Europe in Love. Thussi parva licet
etc.I am not at all sure that the discontinuities between Passerini and
myself, a generational break and/or different intellectual traditions, are
as signicant as she thinks they are.
The rationale for resuscitation
After all, Passerini virtually concedes that Europe in Love advances no
explicit argument as such, adding that to mobilize characters from his-
tory as political solutions in the present is potentially dangerous. I would
agree that such caution is justied, as is her reluctance to condemn, with
casual hindsight, the fascist sympathies of her subjects. What then is
the role of the historian for Passerini? What, in particular, could be the
rationale behind her scholarly interest in a collection of largely forgot-
ten, often unattractive or even politically reprehensible gures? This is
a question I posed in my original review, but the only answer Passerini
offers here is entirely negative, no less so for its symptomatic use of the
indenite article: a primary task of any historian today she writes, is
to avoid the exclusive pretensions to continuity of traditional narratives.
The reason for resuscitating Mitrinovic et al., in other words, is nothing
other than the fact of their current obscurity. Is it any wonder that review-
1
See for example Robert Tombss review of Europe in Love, Love in Europe in the
Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1999, and the subsequent exchange between
Passerini and Tombs, 22 October 1999 and 29 October 1999.
2
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London 1983,
p. 147.
bewes: Squeamishness 143
ers, desperate to locate a position inor a point toPasserinis project,
have assumed that her vision for the future, unstated and implicit as her
methodology requires it to be, might nevertheless have something to do
with the views of the characters whom she champions in the book? The
rediscovery and sympathetic portrait of the little known communist par-
tisan Frank Thompson, executed in Bulgaria in 1944the elder brother
of the historian E. P. Thompsonis one of the real achievements of
Passerinis book. With her refusal to harness Thompson for our times,
however, one is led to conclude that the real object of her study is the
fetishized methodology itself.
In this respect, I would argue, Passerinis anxious concern for meth-
odological propriety verges on the squeamish. She is dismayed at
the prospect of what Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit, literally readi-
ness-to-hand, instrumentality, or (Lucien Goldmanns translation) la
manipulabilit.
3
Yet this revulsion, theoretically founded as it is, leads
her towards an intellectual position disconcertingly similar to what is
called, in non-academic circles, hedging.
This is most apparent in the question of Passerinis antecedents. She
objects strongly to my comparison of her work to Burckhardt (a com-
parison which is heavily qualied in the original review), as well as to
my contrast of her perspective with that of Eric Hobsbawmyet she
then goes on to qualify her own rejection of Burckhardt, on precisely the
grounds that I compared them, and to distance herself from Hobsbawm,
on precisely the grounds that I counterposed them! I cannot remember
ever reading a sentence that hedges more than the following: between
such work and mine, or that of some of my contemporaries, I see the
mixture of continuity and discontinuity that typically unites and divides
different intellectual generations.
This is a point that was central to the concerns of my review. Passerinis
book is an ideal object to read symptomaticallyas a text spooked by its
own contemporaneity. She reacts with distaste when she is mentioned in
the same sub-clause as Blairyet her preferred lovers discourse, trans-
lated into historical terms, gives her, and us, no tools to think politically
that are distinguishable from suspect ofcial discourses. As Roland
3
Lucien Goldmann, Lukcs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, London 1977,
p. xviii.
144 nlr 1
Barthes writes, the lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not
integrate these sentences on a higher level, into a work.
4
Passerini is
faithful to this method of proceeding. The problem is simply the dif-
culty of invoking her fragmentary narratives in the developments of an
accessible political position. That it is impossible to derive a linear path
from the Greeks to Maastricht is undeniable. But need this mean aban-
doning every historical determination of European identity, leaping
across an abyss between all certainties? It seems a politically defeatist
conclusion.
In her reply, Passerini mentions Nietzsche as another of her anteced-
ents. Yet Nietzsche too, in his essay on history, warns us against a trap
into which Passerini risks falling. An excess of the historical sense, he
writes, makes its servants passive and retrospective; and almost the only
time the sufferer from the fever of history becomes active is when this
sense is in abeyance through momentary forgetfulness.
5
There comes a
point, he says earlier in the same text, when the past has to be forgotten
if one is not to become the gravedigger of the present.
6
For all its theo-
retical rigour, Passerinis work cannot bring itself to pronounce on the
present, nor indeed on the past. Her parsimony, which refuses to gener-
ate dichotomies, ends up by underwriting the very world she wants to
question, on the basis of possible new congurations and connexions.
Her decision to leave these implicit is a corollary of her methodfor
there are no new congurations to emerge out of the morbid solitude of
the lover.
It may be, of course, that our disagreements can be put down, as Luisa
Passerini seems to wish, to mistranslations, heterogeneous intellectual
traditions or different, well-intentioned subjectivities. The trouble with
such a resolution is that, like the solitary lovers discourse, it remains
unveriable. Nevertheless, if my discussion of Luisa Passerinis work
has been affected by any miscomprehension, or discrepancies of histori-
cal situation, I will happily pick up the bill.
4
Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard,
Harmondsworth 1990, p. 7.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in
Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge 1983, p. 102.
6
Ibid., p. 62.
new left review 1 jan feb 2000 145
Politically, France is moving at the governmental level in much the same direc-
tion as the rest of Western Europe. Behind official rhetoric, the Jospin regime
has accelerated privatizations (more public assets have been sold off than under
the Jupp government), take-overs and cuts in social spending. The estab-
lishment press, after mourning the fall of modernizing Finance Minister
Strauss-Kahn on corruption charges, welcomes the reassurances of his succes-
sor Sautet that there will be no change of course. As in Britain, the Right is
paralysed by rancorous internal disputes, and the official political scene devoid
of any effective opposition. Intellectually, however, neo-liberal hegemony is
weaker than elsewhere. Open advocacy of la pense uniquethe homologue of
Anglo-Saxon TINAhas now become rarer. A generalized sense of discontent,
of impatient and puzzled indignation, has found expression in a range of pub-
lications that have found a mass market. Publishers continue to find, rather to
their surprise, that books denouncing the free market, globalization, labour
flexibility, poverty and inequality are best-sellers. These are not mild sedatives
of the sort produced in Britain or America by Will Hutton or Robert Reich. La
Misre du monde, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, has sold 80,000 copies; LHorreur
conomique by Viviane Forrester 300,000; LImposture conomique by Emmanuel
Todd, 50,000; Ah! Dieu que la guerre conomique est jolie by P. Labarde and B.
Maris, 70,000. Serge Halimis merciless attack on sycophancy in the media, Les
Luc Boltanski & ve Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme
Gallimard: Paris 1999, 195 Fr (hardback)
843 pp, 2 07 074995 9
Sebastian Budgen
A NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
REVIEWS
146 nlr 1
r
e
v
i
e
w
s
Nouveaux chiens de garde, has been another spectacular success. However power-
ful conformist reflexes remainwith rare exceptions, reactions to NATOs blitz
in the Balkans were no advertisement for Gallic intellectual independencethe
moral climate has moved some way from the enthusiastic self-abasement and
all-out Americanization of the eighties.
The appearance of Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme by Luc Boltanski and ve
Chiapello is the most important event of the turn so far. This massive book is an
astonishing combinationan ideological and cultural analysis, a socio-historical
narrative, an essay in political economy, and a bold piece of engaged advocacy.
Like two experienced rally drivers, Luc Boltanski and ve Chiapello take the
reader on a dizzying theoretical tour of the past thirty years, at each point where
one fears that they might skid off the road with a gross generalization or incau-
tious formulation deftly turning the wheel with an astute qualification or a whole
new level of conceptualization. The work has been widely perceived as likely to
become a classic.
Boltanskiof the same generation as Bourdieu, with whom he was once
associatedis a sociologist who first came to public prominence with the
work he co-authored with Laurent Thvenot, De la justification, a sophisti-
cated and sometimes abstruse study of the different intuitive notions of justice
people bring to their encounters with the world of social relations and objects.
Associated, via Thvenot, with economists concerned with the conventions of
market exchangecriticized by some for harmonicismBoltanski confesses
a primary debt to Albert Hirschman, to whom Le Nouvel esprit is dedicated.
Chiapello, by contrast, is a young instructor at a business school, whose first
book was on the relationship between artists and managers. An established soci-
ologist and a youthful management theorist do not make an obvious couple for
a ferocious critique of contemporary capitalism. But this is, among other things,
what Le Nouvel esprit delivers.
Its starting point is a powerful statement of indignation and puzzlement.
How has a new and virulent form of capitalismthey label it a connexionist
or network variantwith an even more disastrous impact on the fabric of a
common life than its predecessors, managed to install itself so smoothly and
inconspicuously in France, without attracting either due critical attention or any
organized resistance from forces of opposition, vigorous a generation ago, now
reduced to irrelevancy or cheerleading? The answer to this question, Boltanski
and Chiapello suggest, lies in the fate that overtook the different strands of the
mass revolt against the Gaullist regime in MayJune 1968. There have always
been, they argue, four possible sources of indignation at the reality of capitalism:
(i) a demand for liberation; (ii) a rejection of inauthenticity; (iii) a refusal of egoism;
(iv) a response to suffering. Of these, the first pair found classic expression in
bohemian milieux of the late nineteenth century: they call it the artistic critique.
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The second pair were centrally articulated by the traditional labour movement,
and represent the social critique.
These two forms of critique, Boltanski and Chiapello argue, have accompa-
nied the history of capitalism from the start, linked both to the system and to
each other in a range of ways, along a spectrum from intertwinement to antago-
nism. In France, 1968 and its aftermath saw a coalescence of the two critiques,
as student uprisings in Paris triggered the largest general strike in world history.
So strong was the challenge to the capitalist order, that at first it had to make
substantial concessions to social demands, granting major improvements of pay
and working conditions. Gradually, however, the social and the artistic rejections
of capitalism started to come apart. The social critique became progressively
weaker with the involution and decline of French communism, and the grow-
ing reluctance of French employers to yield any further ground without any
return to order in the enterprises or any increase in dramatically falling levels
of productivity. The artistic critique, on the other hand, carried by libertarian
and ultra-left groups along with self-management currents in the CFDT (the
formerly Catholic trade-union confederation), flourished. The values of expres-
sive creativity, fluid identity, autonomy and self-development were touted against
the constraints of bureaucratic discipline, bourgeois hypocrisy and consumer
conformity.
Capitalism, however, has always relied on critiques of the status quo to alert
it to dangers in any untrammelled development of its current forms, and to dis-
cover the antidotes required to neutralize opposition to the system and increase
the level of profitability within it. Ready to take advantage of even the most inhos-
pitable conditions, firms began to reorganize the production process and wage
contracts. Flexible labour systems, sub-contracting, team-working, multi-task-
ing and multi-skilling, flat managementall the features of a so-called lean
capitalism or post-Fordismwere the result. For Boltanski and Chiapello,
these molecular changes were not simply reactions to a crisis of authority within
the enterprise, and of profitability within the economy, although they were
that too. They were also responses to demands implicit in the artistic critique
of the system, incorporating them in ways compatible with accumulation, and
disarming a potentially subversive challenge that had touched even a younger
generation of managers who had imbibed elements of the spirit of 68.
Capitalism is conceived here, in Weberian fashion, as a system driven by the
need for the unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means, that
is fundamentally absurd and amoral. Neither material incentives nor coercion
are sufficient to activate the enormous number of peoplemost with very little
chance of making a profit and with a very low level of responsibilityrequired to
make the system work. What are needed are justifications that link personal gains
from involvement to some notion of the common good. Conventional political
beliefsthe material progress achieved under this order, its efficiency in meet-
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ing human needs, the affinity between free markets and liberal democracyare,
according to Boltanski and Chiapello, too general and stable to motivate real
adherence and engagement. What are needed instead are justifications that ring
true on both the collective levelin accordance with some conception of justice
or the common goodand the individual level. To be able truly to identify with
the system, as managersthe primary target of these codeshave to do, two
potentially contradictory longings have to be satisfied: a desire for autonomy (that
is, exciting new prospects for self-realization and freedom) and for security (that
is, durability and generational transmission of advantages gained).
The title of Le Nouvel esprit alludes, of course, to Webers classic study of the
Protestant ethic. Boltanski and Chiapello, however, argue that historically there
have been three successive spirits of capitalism. The first took shape in the
nineteenth century. Its key figure was the Promethean bourgeois entrepreneur,
a captain of industry with every capacity for risk, speculation and innovation
offset by determination to save, personal parsimony and austere attachment
to the family. By the inter-war period, however, this model came to be felt as
outmoded. Between 1930 and 1960, there emerged a new figurethe heroic
director of the large, centralized, bureaucratic corporation. The dream of young
planners became to change the world through long-term planning and rational
organization, linking self-realization and security, as plotted by ascent through
a fixed career structure, with the common interest of satisfying consumers and
overcoming scarcity. In turn, the crisis of 1968 dealt a deathblow to this spirit
of capitalism, discrediting its forms of justification as archaic and authoritarian
fictions, with less and less bearing on reality (degrees no longer a guarantee of a
stable career or pensionable future, etc.).
To mobilize sufficient human energies for it to survive and expand, the system
now needed a third spirit. This is the specific object of the enquiry Boltanski
and Chiapello undertake, following the example of Sombart and Weber, through
a comparative analysis of management texts from the 1960s and 1990s. These
are prescriptive texts, that aim to inspire their target audience by demonstrat-
ing that the techniques they recommend are not only exciting and innovative,
but also compatiblebeyond mere profitswith the greater good. The contrast
between the two periods is striking.
In the 1960s, management literature was constitutively troubled by the dis-
contents of managers and the problems of running giant corporations. It offered
to solve these by decentralization, meritocracy and limited autonomy for manag-
ers, without loss of overall control. Most feared was any survival of patriarchal
or familial taints among employers (favouritism, nepotism, confusion of the
personal and professional), that might compromise the rationality or objectivity
of the management process as a whole. By contrast, the literature of the 1990s
rejected anything that smacked of hierarchy or top-down control, as uneconomic
in transaction costs and repugnant in moral overtones. The key tropes of such
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texts now became the permanence of change and the ever-increasing intensity of
international competition (the threat of Asia or the Third World replacing the
EastWest conflict of the Cold War years), encapsulated together in the master-
term of globalization. The central organizational figure of the contemporary
world becomes the network. Indeed, so rhizomatic has management literature
become that Boltanski and Chiapello almost suggest, in mischievous mood, that
Deleuze and his followers could be taken for management gurus rather than
anti-establishment philosophers. The flexible network is presented as a distinct
form between market and hierarchy, whose happy outcomes include leanness of
the enterprises, team-work and customer satisfaction, and the vision of leaders or
coordinators (no longer managers) who inspire and mobilize their operatives (rather
than workers). The ideal capitalist unit is portrayed as a self-organized team that
has externalized its costs onto sub-contractors and deals more in knowledge and
information than in manpower or technical experience.
Charisma, vision, gifts of communication, intuition, mobility and general-
ism become the ideal traits of the new leadersdressed-down, cool capitalists
like Bill Gates or Ben and Jerry (particular targets of the anger of the Seattle
protestors), who refuse to surround themselves with the formal trappings of
bureaucratic authority. For in the liberated enterprise, control has become inter-
nalized in each employee, who shares the dream of the leader, and externalized
in the customer (the client is king) and the pressures of competition. Taylorist
separation of design and execution is overcome by integrated tasks of quality
control and equipment maintenance, enhancing personal experience and auton-
omy. Trust becomes the general lubricant of a world virtually without bosses,
where everyone can realize themselves by involvement in the ongoing project,
and has a chance of becoming a visionary of their own dreams.
The downside of this utopian vision is partially conceded by neo-manage-
ment writers, who note that the freedoms of this new organization of labour
come at the expense of the sense of security offered by the more fixed career
paths of the second spirit of capitalism. As partial recompense, they sketch a life-
pattern of involvement in successive projects that continuously improve ones
employability as a form of personal capital. The brittleness of the new spirit
of capitalism shows through here, as it does too in the inordinate importance
accorded by this literature to questions of reputationintegrity, sincerity, loyalty
and so on: gestures towards personalization that only too clearly hint at the risk
of their abuse through deception and opportunism.
Boltanski and Chiapello proceed to outline a model of the new moral frame-
work of this emergent order, whose ideal figure is a nomadic network-extender,
light and mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence, realistic about peoples
desires, informal and friendly, with a less rigid relationship to propertyfor
renting and not absolute ownership represents the future. By now it should
be fairly clear how Boltanski and Chiapello connect the new spirit of capital-
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ism with the libertarian and romantic currents of the late 1960s. In however
perverted a fashion, the challenge these threw down to bourgeois society, as tradi-
tionally conceived, have been rendered compatible with a new form of capitalism.
In the process, the metaphor of the network, originally associated with crime
and subversion, has been transformed into an icon of progress, upgraded by
favourable discourses in philosophy and the social sciences (Kuhn, Deleuze,
Braudel, Habermas, Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, symbolic interactionism and
ethnomethodology, among others) as well as in new material technologies of
communication and transport.
Such ideological and cultural analyses are then interwoven with analysis of
socio-economic transformations and political processes, in a panoramic syn-
thesis far beyond the scope of Webers originating essay. In chapters devoted
to the balance of forces in the enterprise, that have seen a steep decline in an
already far from strong French trade unionism, Boltanski and Chiapello insist
on the central importance of a reality that mainstream sociology, not to speak of
political science, now effaces: social classes. But in accounting for the changes in
these years, the weight of their explanation rests neither on conscious collective
strategy nor impersonal structural pressuresalthough they do give considera-
tion to bothbut rather on the cumulative effects of many molecular actions
leading to unintended or perverse consequences. Thus, the radical critiques of
trade unionism and shop-floor representation from the far left after 1968 in the
longer run furnished ammunition for an employers offensive that weakened
any chance of resisting the new ways of organizing the labour process; while
after the oil shock, and recession of 197475, interaction between enlightened
employers and sociologists of work helped to neutralize any challenge to mana-
gerial prerogatives from below.
In the late 1970s, while the nouveaux philosophes were tirading against the
evils of Communism, a silent counter-revolution was at work, slowly revers-
ing the balance of power on the shopfloor. This was the decisive phase for
morphological changes in the enterprise. But the Socialist victory of 1981 in turn
accelerated the process, as the Auroux laws of 198283, supposedly strengthen-
ing the unions by shifting wage-bargaining to plant level, actually helped the
employers to weaken them, while narque economists enforced competitive
deflation and former soixante-huitards became business consultants. As the
social critique of capitalism was abandoned to a discredited PCF by the rest of
the Left, former radicals pressed what remained of the artistic critique into the
service of various employers initiativesnaturally, in the name of transcending
capitalism, but also, thereby, anti-capitalism.
This ideology, however ascendant, could not occupy the whole space of repre-
sentations in such a polarized society. As classes diappeared from any respectable
discourse, the theme of social exclusion emerged as a relatively innocuous sub-
stitute. Boltanski and Chiapello trace the way humanitarian impulses in turn
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gave rise to new social movements that embody a hesitant and modest revival
of the social critique of capitalism: rank-and-file coordinations that have mounted
a number of strikes in recent years; movements of the sansthose without the
necessities of modern life, lacking documents, homes, jobs; or the autonomous
SUD unions. All these, they argue, are faithful reflections of their time. Far from
reproducing the traditional structures or practices of the labour movement, they
display a morphological homology with the network form of capitalism: flex-
ibility and focus on specific projects, punctual agreements around particular
actions, heterogeneity of composition, indifference to the numbers or forms of
membership, and so on.
What, then, are the political conclusions of the book? For Boltanski and
Chiapello, the discourse of exclusion is much too weak to offer a sustained basis
of resistance to the system. What is needed instead is a new conception of exploi-
tation, adequate to the connexionist world, that links the mobility of one actor
to the immobility of another, as a new form of the extortion of surplus value.
The result is, in their view, a proliferation of relations of exploitation: financial
markets versus countries; financial markets versus firms; multinationals versus
countries; large order-givers versus small sub-contractors; world experts versus
enterprises; enterprises versus temporary employees; consumers versus enter-
prises. It is along these ramifying lines that the social critique of capitalism
is to be renewed. Nor should the artistic critique be surrendered to its latter-
day complicity with the established order. Rising rates of anomic suicide and
depression are symptoms of the contradictions and limitations of capitalisms
endogenization of its critical other. The notion of authenticity, too often decried
as a value (by thinkers like Bourdieu, Derrida or Deleuze), can and should be
rescued from its commodification by the market, without reverting to conserva-
tism. The new spirit of capitalism demands a new critical combination against
it, capable of uniting demands for solidarity and justice with those for liberty and
authenticity.
What criticisms are to be made of a work ending on this note? The case
for the new spirit itself suffers from a certain under-motivation of its primary
materials. The sample of management texts used is relatively small, and does
not distinguish between local and translated works, or discuss relative sales or
penetration. More importantly, no strong evidence is advanced for the general
influence of this literature in French society at large. It is quite possible to believe
that it has had a powerful impact on executives, without accepting that work-
erseven in the new lean enterprisesreally imbibe much of this ethos. It is
also true that Le Nouvel esprit lacks any comparative dimension. Deregulation of
finance, flexibilization of production, globalization of trade and investment are,
after all, not confined to France.
Boltanski and Chiapello pay virtually no attention to Anglophone debates
on these matters. Since major structural changes in contemporary capitalism
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have been international in range, one must wonder whether they do not over-
estimate the weight of May 1968 and its aftermath in their causal account. The
arrival of neo-liberalism in France was clearly over-determined in important
ways by features of the local situation. But Boltanski and Chiapello can still be
suspected of underplaying systemic pressures in favour of national and conjunc-
tural variables. It would be interesting to know whether management texts since
the mid-nineties (their sample is from 198994) continue to strike the same
critical note, or whether the pressures of global accumulation have led to more
straightforwardly aggressive and war-like tropes.
Theoretically, Boltanskis previous work with Thvenot was sometimes wel-
comed as a salutary rejection of the sterile rhetoric of ideological exposure and
denunciation supposedly represented by Bourdieus schoola pragmatic turn,
giving due weight to the beliefs and justifications of actors themselves, rather
than consigning them to categories of false consciousness. Nourished by the
best of communitarian philosophyWalzer and Taylorand by an embedded
microeconomics, this would be a new sociology capable of reconciling the inter-
ests of justice with the logic of the market. Le Nouvel esprit is clearly a more radical
work than De la justification. But much of its theoretical apparatus remains con-
tinuous with the earlier book, without there ever being a satisfactory articulation
between the two. What is common to them, however, is a conception of the
state as a site of compromisebetween different logics and normsand thus of
social constraint and regulation. It is this that allows Boltanski and Chiapello to
focus so intensively on micro-displacements at the level of the enterprise, going
behind the back of traditional corporatist arrangements or welfare institutions,
and so to envisage a package of juridical reforms as the antidote to an unfet-
tered development of network capitalism. The agents of such a programme, they
suggest, might include high-level bureaucrats, executives and even enlightened
capitalists. Here, clearly, is the limit of any such pragmatism, the point at which
it deserts any sense of realism.
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Few political operatives in the US enjoy a reputation as tawdry as Dick Morris,
pioneer of the use of focus groups for devising candidate platforms. Hired by
Clinton mid-way through his first term to rescue his prospect of re-election,
Morris devised triangulation as the winning strategy to foil his likely oppo-
nent, Dole. Playing to Clintons own instincts, he counselled him to jettison all
pretence of commitment to a traditional Democratic agenda, even the watered-
down version on which he had campaigned in 1992, and take over much of
the substance of the Republican legislative programme instead. Calculating
that two-fifths of all voters were in the independent middle of the electorate,
Morris targeted this centre, reckoning that by stealing the Republicans clothes,
Clinton would drive them further to the right in search of some still distinctive
Presidential apparel.
He was well placed to urge this manoeuvre, as a long-time mercenary willing
to serve either party, provided the fee was large enough. Most of his recent work
had been for Republicans: Trent Lott, Senate leader from Mississippi, was a key
client. In 199596 his message to his two patrons was to bury the hatchet. If
Clinton and Lott would come together to crack down on crime, reform welfare,
erode immigrant rights, devolve federal responsibilities and the like, Clinton
could keep the White House and Lott continue to command Capitol Hill. Politics
could be confined to narrow limits.
Morriss strategy gave Clinton the winning formula for the 1996 race, though
massive doses of corrupt finance, extracted from donors all the way from New
York or Chicago to Djakarta and Beijing, were a vital lubricant of victory. Morris
himself, however, did not survive to enjoy its fruits. During the Democratic
Tom Mertes
COUNSELLOR TO CLINTON
Dick Morris, The New Prince
Renaissance Books: Los Angeles 1999, $22.95 (hardback)
256pp, 1 58063 079 0
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Convention, it emerged that he had been in the habit of lolling in bed with a
paid concubine while on the line to the President, and passing the phone across
the pillow for her to savour important exchanges on domestic and state affairs.
Evidently, prostitution was an attraction not to be confined to politics. The sym-
bolism of the affair was too pointed, and Morris had to resign. The next year,
he cashed his time under Clinton into a standard narrative of service with the
President, Behind the Oval Office, complete with a lachrymose letter to his wife
begging for forgiveness, and unctuous tributes to his master: The press has
given me much credit for President Clintons triumph in 1996. It will become
obvious throughout this narrative that the mind behind the victory was that of
President William Jefferson Clinton.
At the same time, Morris took the opportunity, with feigned regret, to lace his
tributes to Clintons accomplishments with insinuations that all was not quite
well in the White House. There was a Saturday Night Bill whose conduct, albeit
in private, was at odds with the regal Sunday Morning Bill of public office. By
bringing this into the open, Morris assured his readers, he was helping to save
Clinton from himself. For whatever his peccadilloes, history will in time dig
beneath the scandals and retrieve his record of achievement for the American
people. What he has done to help the United States and its citizens is too sweep-
ing and too profound to remain buried for all time.
The New Princesubtitled Machiavelli Updated for the 21st Centuryis a
more ambitious work, presenting itself as a technical manual for power-holders
or -seekers of any stripe in the United States. On the face of it, Morris might
seem well placed for such a conceit. Could there be better credentials for it than a
famously cynical lack of principle? Any reader coming to it with this expectation
is going to be disappointed. The Florentine is way off as a model. This is not just
because of the dissimilarity of positions. Machiavelli, writing The Prince in 1513
to win the favour of Lorenzo de Medici, was a powerless exile; the Medici had
just returned to rule Florence, in an Italy beset with wars and civil wars. Morris
has the ear of almost any political figure he wants to influence, in an America
quiescent under a neo-liberal order. There is a more important difference than
this, however. Far from displaying any ruthless or consistent cynicism about US
politics, Morriss book is a litany of gurgling pieties about themthe antithesis
of everything represented by The Prince. If one were to take Morriss conceit
seriously, which is impossible to do, a closer forebear might be le pre Joseph,
Richelieus henchman in diplomatic intrigue and domestic manoeuvre, whose
Capuchin robes created the legend of the grey eminence, since he not only had
real influence as confidant of the Cardinal, but was a devout man of the cloth.
But there any analogy would break down: where the friar was legendary for his
discretion, Morris cannot conceal his exhibitionism.
What is the good news The New Prince brings? American democracy has
never been in better shape. Voters are well-informed and expert judges of public
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affairs, skilled at discounting bias in the media and filtering out irrelevant
issues. Their decisions are consistently superior to those of bureaucrats, ideo-
logues, academics or journalists. The role of money in electoral politics is greatly
exaggerated. Special interests are paper tigers. Race no longer matters much.
Images are over-done. Citizens respond not to negative campaigns but to posi-
tive messages. They do not want to hear about failures or scandals, but issues of
substance. Successful candidates are those who offer bold hopes and high ideals,
rather than mere appeals to economic self-interest. A warm-hearted morality is
the best policy for winning or holding office.
Who could better embody these prescriptions than the President? At the
beginning, admittedlyMorris notesClintons Health Plan was an embar-
rassing debacle. But once he had learnt how to update Machiavelli, under
his advisers guidance, he proved a star performer. One legislative success fol-
lowed another. Even his early setbacks were redeemed: The far-reaching reform
Clinton failed to achieve in his 1994 health-care legislation happened incremen-
tally through the private sector and through gradual expansion of health-care
coverage to children. We have seen an administration of remarkable domestic
reforms, not to speak of rare diplomatic skills in the service of peace: President
Clinton has been particularly successful in establishing a reputation for patience,
empathy, reliability, resourcefulness, idealism, and subtle diplomacy in his
repeated and usually successful interventions in global trouble spots, since he
is able to make everyone feel he knows their pain, empathizes with their posi-
tion, and secretly wants to do all he can to help them. None more so than Iraqis,
Tutsi, Chechens, Sudanese, Yugoslavs, Colombians.
In fact, in its recipes for success, Morriss manual aptly captures the char-
acter of Clintons rule, with its combination of sanctimony and cynicism: the
incumbent on his knees in prayer with the Reverend Jackson, or at the rostrum
lecturing black teenagers on the evils of promiscuity, while taking hefty back-
handers from the Riady family or Johnny Chung, and raining bombs on civilians
in Baghdad or Khartoum to screen squalid perjuries at home. In this duality,
Clinton is the New Prince in person. For Morris, too, cannot avoid letting cats
out of the bag. The other side of his glutinous receipts for high office quickly
shows through. The voter cannot be expected to focus on a political message
longer than thirty secondsfor the competition for his attention is steep: the
ham sandwich and the beer in the refrigerator. But half a minute suffices to
convey the substance of any issue. Television advertising is the life-blood of any
modern democracy. News broadcasts, on the other hand, indeed reportage in
the media of any kind, is a noxious irrelevance (perhaps still smarting from the
role of the press in his downfall, Morris shows unconcealed animus against the
Fourth Estate). Reporters are not under control; advertisements are. Candidates
should remember when they speak to the media that the most important part of
the story is the sound-bite. The rest of the statement can be boilerplate or detail.
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If coverage is unfavourable, its impact can be quashed by a happily chosen back-
ground for the speaker. For the viewer, what counts is the visual not the verbal.
In short, the more flatteringly feel-good the rhetoric, the more contemptuously
manipulative the reality.
Morris frames his advice in a grander scheme of political evolution. The
US, he argues, is moving from a Madisonian republic of indirect representa-
tion to a Jeffersonian direct democracy. Jeffersons promise to destroy parties
has come to fruition with the decline of stable alignments and the recession of
ideology. California-style referenda are overtaking the functions of state assem-
blies. In his latest work, Vote.com, Morris expatiates on a vision of the future
in which the Internet will create virtual town meetings where citizens can log
their desires and transmit their political will without the need for representative
mediation at all. Today, focus groups signalling the mood of the US public are
anticipations of this panglossian democracy. Morriss own websitefor exam-
pleoffers another step towards it. Internet politics will not be divisive. There
are no longer any big issues; prosperity has dissolved populist discontents. The
politicians of the future will eschew doctrines: men of affairs who respond to
each new situation with practical, specific ideas unfettered by ideological con-
structs increasingly dominate our political process. Aspirants should ignore the
prejudices of parties and embrace new issues; organizations will fall into line
behind any candidate who polls well with focus groups and so has garnered the
other measure of viabilitymoney.
What Morris is projecting is not, of course, Jeffersonian. For Jefferson,
democracy was based on a virtuous yeomanry, with the intelligence to elect mem-
bers of a natural aristocracy. If any analogy were to be made between Clintons
style of politics and historic predecessors, the Jacksonian regime would be a
little closer. Emotional appeals to the common man, castigations of entrenched
power and promises of a new, less federal-centred style of government were
staples of King Andrews fare; as were kitchen cabinets of political hacks, manip-
ulation of opinion, and double standards at all levels of operation. But, of course,
Jacksonian politics was for better or worse aggressively populistjust what
Morris would take off the agenda today, and of which Clintonian emollience is
the opposite.
The historical dimension of Morriss books is little more than a gesture,
however. Here, as elsewhere, the contrast with previous political analysts who
were also advisers is stark. Take the case of Kevin Phillips, who helped devise
Nixons strategy in 1968. Phillips based his advice on a complete mastery of
demographic and electoral data at constituency level across the country. His sta-
tistical and historical analysis suggested that the Republicans could capture the
Presidency by targeting Sunbelt states and appealing to law-and-order themes
calculated to swing blue-collar workers out of the Democratic column. Phillipss
meticulous regional and social reckoning was born out. After breaking with
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Nixon, he went on to write hard-hitting accounts of class polarization in the
Reagan era and studies of longer historical patterns in American politics, as an
outsider to any establishment.
The complete vacuity of Morriss landscape, by comparison, is a telling sign
of the times. No regional, social, sexual, or any other kind of complications are
allowed to disturb the flow of bromides on the importance of national televi-
sion or the need for uplifting messages. He never registers (although of course
he knows) that the American electorate comes predominantly from upper and
middle-income brackets: whoever does not or cannot cast a ballot does not exist
in the world of The New Prince. Morris cannot even bring himself to concede
that the economy matters much. Clinton has delivered endless prosperity, so
citizens now have less divisive concerns. He ends Vote.com by announcing that
the United States is the most democratic nation on earth, though less than
half of the nation even makes it to the ballot box. This is a country with one of
the lowest participation rates and highest-per-voter spending rates on earth. The
United States is now more than ever the economic model to be taken as a para-
gon by the rest of the industrialized world. How long will it be before it becomes
a political model for Schrder or Blair, Cardoso or Lagos? Morris at least, despite
his disavowals, plainly sees some useful future for himself in America. Only one
politician receives a more unconditional paean than Clinton in The New Prince.
Who else but Albert Gore?
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The publication of the correspondence between Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jnger is
an intellectual event of some moment. The letters collected in this volume span
a full half centuryfrom 1930, when the two first met in Berlin, to 1983, shortly
before Schmitt died at the age of 97. Jnger survived him by over a decade, dying
in 1998 at the age of 103. The care and skill with which this collection has been
edited by Helmuth Kiesel makes it an impressive accomplishment: German lit-
erary scholarship at its best. Detailed notes and background information are
provided on nearly every letter, ending with an authoritative afterword on the
relationship between the two thinkers. In a handsome production, only an index
is missing. The volume makes compelling reading. In range and level, it stands
comparison with Benjamins correspondence with Adorno or Scholem, or the
thematically closer exchange between Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojve. The let-
ters are usually more laconic, sometimes enigmatic, than such counterparts. But
they are never dull or cumbersome. Schmitt and Jnger were in different ways
masters of a German prose running against the grain of the language: terse,
clear and elegant.
When the two men met in 1930, each enjoyed a distinctive eminence in
Weimar intellectual life. Schmitt had risen from an obscure Catholic back-
ground in Westphalia to become one of Weimars foremost legal authorities.
But his wider reputation rested on a series of remarkable essays spanning a
much broader range of themes: a political critique of German Romanticism;
exploration of the theological background of Emergency Powers; portrait of the
Roman Church as European bulwark against Bolshevism; diagnosis of the crisis
of contemporary parliamentarism; andnot leasta theory of politics as a field
Ernst JngerCarl Schmitt, Briefwechsel 19301983
Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart 1999, 78dm
893 pp, 3 608 93452 9
Gopal Balakrishnan
TWO ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS
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constitutively defined by the distinction between friend and foe. Oscillating
between moderate republicanism and counter-revolutionary decisionism, his
main political links were with the Catholic Zentrum.
Jnger at this stage enjoyed a more dramatic notoriety. From a somewhat
more respectable, though by no means elevated, Protestant background (his
father was a pharmacist), as an 18-year-old he ran away to enlist in the French
Foreign Legion. Brought home from Africa, he fought for Germany during the
First World War on the Western front with such distinctionhe was wounded
seven timesthat he was awarded the highest Prussian medal for courage, Pour
le Mrite. His celebration of modern warfare in a coldly burnished, clinically
exact prose, Im Stahlgewittern (In the Storm of Steel) was an immediate best-
seller in 1920. An active participant in the paramilitarism of the Freikorps, he
won further renown with works portraying the life-world of front-line soldiers
as the model for a totally mobilized society of war and work to come. As a
writer, Jnger was closely associated with ideas of a conservative revolution;
after a brief flirtation with the NSDAP in the mid-twenties, he moved towards
the circle of National Bolsheviks around Ernst Niekisch. His record was much
more engaged with the far Right than was that of Schmitt. But in the vision
of the latters Concept of the Political he found reason to exalt. The correspond-
ence opens with his salute to it, just after they became acquainted at Schmitts
initiative. You have invented a special technology of war: a mine that explodes
silently. One sees as if by magic the ruins collapse; the destruction is over before
it becomes audible.
If the two were drawn together by similarities of style and outlookboth
were adventurers, to some extent loners, in their respective mileuxtheir paths
crossed over when the Nazis came to power. Schmitt, after spending the last
years of the Republic as constitutional advisor and confidant to von Papen and
Schleicher, and warning of the dangers of Nazism, rallied to the Third Reich and
became a top figure in its legal establishment, under the protection of Goering.
His adhesion to the regime, if it was certainly in part opportunistiche was
soon piling up honorary titles and strategic positions in a severely purged corps
of academic jurisprudencealso answered to certain of his convictions. Hitlers
regime seemed to offer a drastic solution to many of the problems of political
order that Schmitt had posed so starkly in Weimar times.
Jnger, unexpectedly, took the opposite route. Initially an activist in the sub-
culture of right-wing paramilitarism from which the Nazis had emerged, he later
became detached from any organized movement, maintaining friendships not
only on the Right but on the anarchist or deviant Left as a well, in a spirit closer
to literary bohemia than political faction. When Hitler came to power in 1933,
he retired from Berlin to the provinces, where he was viewed with some suspi-
cion by the new authorities. In these conditions, letters between the two men
necessarily became allusive. Behind them, however, were more forthright and
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face-to-face political discussions. From the outset, Jnger warned Schmitt of any
too close association with the new regime, whose inner circle he knew all too
well. When Schmitt was offered a position on the Prussian State Council in 1933,
Jnger advised him to leave the country and go to Serbia to live with his in-laws,
as a scholar in voluntary exile, instead of accepting this poisoned chalice. In the
following year, when Hitler staged the murderous Roehm purge and Schmitt
publically defended the assassinations, Jnger told him he had committed politi-
cal suicide and advised him to equip his domicile with machine-gun nests.
Two years later Schmitt was evicted from his niche in power, under a wither-
ing attack from the SS as a crypto-Catholic careerist who had no place in the
regime. Confined to academic life again, he continued to be intellectually pro-
ductive, with publicationson Hobbes; the structure of international relations;
land and sea-powerwhich might help him recover the favour of the regime,
without committing himself too expressly to its policies. Jnger, meanwhile,
was writing his coded novel on tyranny, Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble
Cliffs), published just before the war broke out in 1939. Shielded as a war hero
by the Army High Command, he was awarded the Iron Cross for his part in
the defeat of France, and posted to Paris as cultural attach in the occupation
regime. There, at the centre of literary and artistic life under the occupation,
he knew Cocteau, Cline, Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach, Sacha Guitry and many
others; and in the autumn of 1941 arranged for Schmitt to be invited to speak at
the German Institute, with a side-trip to Port-Royal on which the two exchanged
reflections.
When the Officers Plot struck in July 1944, narrowly failing to kill Hitler,
the Kommandantur in Paris was deeply implicated, and leading generals shot.
Jnger, aware of the plan to overthrow Hitler although not a participant, was
lucky to escape into retirement. Schmitt, a close friend of civilian participants in
the plot in Berlin, was not taken into their confidence. The two men ended the
war in the humble capacity of air-raid wardens. After it, their fates diverged dra-
matically. Schmitt was arrested, jailed and interrogated for the better part of two
years by American prosecutors, stripped of all academic positions, and released
into ostracisma forbidden figure in the Bonn Republic. Jnger, on the other
hand, suffered no sanctions in the French Zone, and was soon publishing his
Parisian Diaries to general acclaim. The next fifty years saw a brilliant second
literary career, in which successive novels and essays established him as lucid
ecological sage and counter-cultural anarch, whose passing was a national event.
The author who made his name by exalting the approximation of humans to
machines became a writer calling for the protection of nature against humans
without great alterations of style; a unusual case in German, or perhaps any
letters.
Schmitt was not without admirers in West Germany, and had back-door
influence on the framing of the post-war constitution. But his reputation as
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a former Nazi jurist was too lurid for him ever to be able to re-enter public
life again. His bitterness at this exclusion found often venomous expression
in his diaries, where his jealousy of contemporaries who had survived the col-
lapse of the Third Reich without damage is unconcealed. Here he gave way to
a resentment of Jnger that he generally mastered when writing to him. Their
correspondencealways formal, even when cordial aims at a more dispas-
sionate level. Contemporary political developments come into view, but rarely in
the form of direct theoretical generalization. The letters written under Nazism,
which comprise about two-fifths of the whole, approximate to what Leo Strauss
thematized as the art of writing esoteric criticism without oppositional intent,
under tyrannies. Sharp differences of outlook between the two men are apparent
here, that confound easy labelling.
The relationship between Schmitt and Jnger was based on an attempt to
grasp and shape the often unfamiliar idioms of the other. Both were deeply
dissatisfied with the intellectual traditions of German conservatism: it was this
shared antipathy that in part gave them a preliminary rapport with each other.
Jnger, not unaffected by Nietzsche or Spengler, had a more familiar back-
ground in this respect, but was willing to take his cues from Schmitt, who
remained an inveterate enemy of the local intellectual scene. Schmitt guarded
his prerogatives as a theoretical mentor, which Jnger calmly conceded to him
from the beginning. This is all the more striking, in that the letters are conspicu-
ous for their consistently aesthetic points of reference. Innumerable exchanges
focus on points of agreement or dispute over the significance of a wide range of
writers held in shared esteem.
One strand here is a search for authentic representations of evil, maps
that emplot the brutal co-ordinates of existence in an era of total civil war.
Hieronymous Bosch, Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville repeatedly come
into consideration. Cline and Malraux figure as the latest representatives of the
French moralist tradition, whose dispassionate literary pessimism is held supe-
rior to the German metaphysical variety of moralism and its obverse in Faustian
amoralism. In these discussions, the heterodox Catholic fanatic Lon Bloy looms
largeSchmitt introducing him as an antidote to Jngers Nietzschean under-
standing of nihilism. Schmitts tacit objective seems to have been to keep the
exchange focused on literary topics, where he might influence Jngers develop-
ment as a writer, while preserving the division of roles between them, in which
he held the more political and philosophical ground. Here, however, it is Jnger
who lets drop the most arresting historical observation, when he remarks that
the tragedy of modern German history stemmed from the absence of a strong
nationalist Left. The argument, initially made in conversation with Schmitt in
1930, that Germanys core historical problem was the absence of a local Trotsky
had an unsettling effect on Schmitt, who for decades repeatedly recollected it.
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This idea, of course, came from Jngers association with the circle round
Niekisch, a sign of his more experimental political outlook. Schmitt, on the
other hand, always had a deeper intellectual grasp of the challenge to traditional
conceptions of politics posed by Marxism, after the victory of the Bolshevik
Revolution. A similar pattern can be seen in their respective attitudes toward lib-
eralism. Schmitt, more deeply implicated with the criminal regime, paradoxically
had a much better understanding of the strengths of classical liberals, express-
ing sympathy and admiration for figures like Constant and de Tocqueville. In a
letter of 1934 he characteristically remarked that the most consequential liberal
theoristsHobbes and Constant, thinkers self-confessedly creatures of fear
and indolence, were cases in pointhad a fundamentally illiberal vision of
human nature. Traditions like these were not a reference for Jnger. Such dif-
ferences, of course, were in part explicable in terms of intellectual interest and
orientation.
They were also questions of temperament. From his Parisian vantage point,
Jnger viewed the Nazi order with a frigid, caustic detachment. On occasion
revulsion broke through, even to admission of his own role in helping to
unleash an underworld of slave-drivers and murderers. One of his most chill-
ing letters reports a scene from hellworthy, as he says, of Boschon the
Russian front, seen from a cable-car while on duty in the Caucasus. But he gazed
on moral condemnation and political resistance with the same general detach-
ment. Fatalistically inclined to view Nazism as a force accelerating the nihilistic
destruction of all Old European values, he would comfort himself with the belief
that it might be clearing the ground for some transvaluation to come.
Common to Schmitt and Jnger, however, was a repression of the moral and
political crisis of the time into metaphysical realms of parable and myth. As early
as 1941, Schmitt was comparing himself to Benito Cereno, the Spanish captain
of Melvilles story, prisoner of a slave mutinywhose image he made into the
fable of his position under the Third Reich, after the war.
The cloak of legend as medium of estrangement and exoneration fell, inevi-
tably, over the fate of the Jews. In the Weimar period, Jnger had for a time
brushed close to radical anti-Semitism; Schmitt, on good terms with Jewish
colleagues and pupils, had shown no interest in it. But when Hitler came to
power, their positions reversed. Jnger expressed disdain for official racism, as
a new Inquisition, while Schmitt moved to establish impeccable anti-Semitic
credentials, organizing a campaign to root out Jewish influences in the legal
world, though without convincing the SS. Driven back to the academic margin,
he started for the first time to weave mythical motifs into his theoretical texts,
taking Leviathan and Behemoth as Jewish monsters of sea and land in the Old
Testament whose fateful after-life defined the direction and imagery of Hobbess
work. A giant pterodactyl of the air from Kabbalistic sourcesso powerful that
an egg falling from its flight will shatter a thousand cedars of Lebanonappears
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in the letters soon afterwards. Cruelty and destruction are the marks of this
Judaic bestiary.
Neither man had much doubt that the war was lost for Germany by 1943.
By the end, it is clear that both were aware of the Judeocide, and each sought
to distance themselves from itnot for the sake of the Jews, however, but for
those who persecuted them. In the maelstrom of the final months of the Third
ReichFebruary 1945Jnger recalled Flavius Josephuss account of the obsti-
nacy of the Jews in the siege of Jerusalem. Nazi attacks on the ethics of the
New Testament had profited only those of the Old: the extermination of the
Jews was setting their morality loose in the world at large. Schmitt replied with
a quotation from Bruno Bauer: But in the end God created the Jews, and if
we kill them all, we will suffer the same fate. The idea could be seen as a
deranged corollary of Schmitts argument in Weimar times that if an enemy
always defines the horizon of a political project, he must be respected as such,
since any attempt to annihilate him will destroy the project itself, politically anni-
hilating the annihilator.
The enormity of these responses, as an odious casuistry of absolution, needs
no comment. After the war, the differing circumstances of the two writers
separated them. Paradoxically, if the sincerityor intensityof Schmitts anti-
Semitism as a subjective conviction can be doubted under Nazism, it is clear
that once he was driven from public life after 1947, he became an unbridled anti-
Semite, as the notebooks posthumously published in Glossarium (1991) make
clear, since he now blamed Jews, from America or elsewhere, for his humiliation
and expulsion. Jnger, now well adapted to post-war conditions, had no time for
such phobias.
This led to the sharpest clash of their fifty-year correspondence. When
Schmitt complained of Jngers favourable portrait of the Jews, thinly disguised
as Parsees, in his novel Heliopolis (1949) Jnger immediately issued him a
friendly warningyou know the neuralgic point well enough. Schmitts reply
was furious. Jnger then reminded him of their disagreement after the Night
of the Long Knives: I have a right to advise you in this matter, as I showed
at the most fateful decision of your lifeyou will recall the night I left you in
Friedrichstrasse, in my distress, he wrote. If you had followed my advice and
example then, you would perhaps no longer be alive today, but you would have
the right in the highest court to judge me. If I had followed your advice and
example, today I would certainly not be alive, either physically, or otherwise.
Capisco et obmutesco, Schmitt replied tersely. But in his notebooks he gave vent
to a boiling rage, with virulent comments on Jnger. It was seven months before
they renewed contact again. After Schmitts death, Jnger, though shaken by the
revelation of Schmitts animosity, did not hold it severely against him.
If Jnger comes out well from this episode, this was certainly in part a
question of characterhe had many qualities Schmitt lacked. But it was also a
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symptom of the way events had treated them. By the 1950s, Jnger seemed to
embody an image many Germans wanted of their lives under the Nazis: stoically
performing the motions of duty, all the while living in internal exile. Schmitt,
punished with post-war humiliation, when otherssome with worse records
escaped unscathed, loomed by contrast as an uncomfortable reminder of the lost
worlds of European fascism. It would be premature to think we have buried the
legacy of either.
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For all his posthumous fame, Marx has so far defied any attempt to write a
definitive version of his life. Each political period has found something differ-
ent to say about him. It was the mud and mustard gas of World War One that
spurred Franz Mehring to write the first biography in 1918. The work was dedi-
cated to his fellow SDP members, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, whose
friendship, Mehring wrote, has been an incalculable consolation to me at a time
when blustering storms have swept away so many manly and steadfast pioneers
of socialism like dry leaves in autumn winds. The importance of Marxs life
for Mehringa witty and independent-minded Berlin editor and bon vivant
was political: a salutary message for the party that had so calamitously failed to
oppose the war, in which lifelong followers of Marx, men who had brooded for
three or even four decades over every comma in his writings he wrote, failed
utterly at an historical moment when for once they might and should have acted
like Marx.
David Ryazanov, born in Odessa in 1870, made his way to Europe at the
age of 21 to visit the Russian Marxists in exile. Arrested at the frontier on his
way home, he was sentenced to four years solitary confinement and hard labour
under the Tsar but escaped again to Berlin in 1907, where he pored over the
MarxEngels letters and writings (bequeathed to the German SDP on Engelss
death), becoming their expert archivist and eventually piecing together the mice-
nibbled pages of the Paris manuscripts of 1844. After the October revolution
Ryazanov set up the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and, taking issue with
Mehrings freehand characterization, produced a joint biography of Marx and
Engels. His work fused the two into an indivisible pair, embedding them firmly
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx
Fourth Estate: London 1999, 20 (hardback)
431 pp, 1 85702 637 3
Susan Watkins
THE NINE LIVES OF KARL MARX
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within a patiently dogmatic exposition of the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution, the francophile Moselle valley and the Bremen cotton mills; it still
retains the narrow intensity redolent of the nineteenth-century artisans groups.
(Ryazanov himself was arrested on Stalins orders and died in prison in 1938.)
Boris Nicolaievsky, born in the Northern Urals and seventeen years Ryazanovs
junior, joined the revolutionary movement while he was still at school and
got his Menshevik education in the Tsarist prisons. Director of the Historical
Revolutionary Archive in Moscow from 1919 to 1921, he was imprisoned by the
Bolsheviks and then expelled. In Berlin, he worked closely with the SDP through
the Weimar years. The biography he co-wrote with Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl
Marx: Man and Fighter, was written on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power.
When Marx was asked what his idea of happiness was, they wrote, his answer
was, to fight . . . Our theme was dictated to us by the time in which we live. He
who opposes Marxism today does not do so because, for instance, he denies the
validity of Marxs theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall . . . The arena
in which Marx is fought about today is in the factories, in the parliaments and at
the barricades.
Werner Blumenberg, the social-democrat son of a German pastor, coalminer,
journalist and fighter in the underground anti-Nazi resistance (first in Germany
and later in occupied Holland), was the first of Marxs biographers to publish,
in 1962, Louise Kautskys letter testifying that Marx had had a child with the
familys housekeeper, Helene Demuth (Heaven protect us from small-mind-
edness!). In 1964 Heinz Monz brought out his portrait of Trier at the time of
Marxs birth, a densely detailed social canvas of a small and ancient Catholic
town locked in a catastrophic agricultural slump. In Yvonne Kapps rich portrait
of the London years (Eleanor Marx, Volume One: Family Life), Marx is the father,
both a sheltering presence and a stormy, troubled one. David McLellans 1973
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought was the most punctilious of all as to dates and
proper names, although the ultra-left complained of a bourgeois plot to send
proto-Marxists to sleep. In Karl Marx and World Literature, published in 1976,
S. S. Prawer attempted, if not exactly a biography, certainly a life; but here, a
chronological narrative of Marxs inner life, chronicling the engagement of his
imagination with the world.
And now, for these post-communist and perhaps post-Marxist times, left-
liberal Guardian columnist Francis Wheen presents an affable and readable
new biography of Marx, whom he finds astoundingly topical, a prophet of glo-
balization with much to teach us about political corruption, monopolization,
alienation, inequality and global markets. Following, perhaps, Mehrings ambi-
tion to be within the reach and comprehension of at least the most advanced
workers, Wheens text is laden with references to kiwi fruit, Monty Python,
Haagen-Dazs, Pizza Hut, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates and MTVday-
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time television as the heart of a heartless world, as it were, Oprah the sigh of the
oppressed.
Like others, he rehearses the childhood pranks, the student duels, the dis-
covery of Hegel; the apprenticeship on the Rheinische Zeitung; the meeting with
Engels at the Caf de la Rgence; Brussels; the Manifesto; the year 1848; and then
Soho, journalism, Das Kapital. Wheen has a fine feel for the energy of Marxs
prose and quotes plenty of heaven-storming periods. He has dug up some enter-
taining anecdotes and memoirs from the early Cologne days, such as Heinzens
recollection of helping Marx back to his lodgings after several bottles of wine:
He sat down astride a chair with his head leaning forward against the back and
began to declaim in a strong singing tone which was half mournful and half
mocking, Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant! Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant!
This lament concerned a Prussian lieutenant whom he had corrupted by teach-
ing him Hegelian philosophy.
He gives a spirited account, too, of Marxs defence of press freedom in his
first article for the Rheinische Zeitung, published in May 1842:
Naturally he criticised the oppressive intolerance of Prussian absolutism and its
lickspittles; this was brave enough, if unsurprising. But, with an exasperated cry
of God save me from my friends!, he was even more scathing about the feeble-
mindedness of the liberal opposition. Whereas the enemies of press freedom were
driven by a pathological emotion which lent feeling and conviction to their absurd
arguments, the defenders of the press in [the Rhine Province] Assembly have on
the whole no real relation to what they are defending. They have never come to
know freedom of the press as a vital need. For them, it is a matter of the head, in
which the heart plays no part. Quoting Goethewho had said that a painter can
succeed only with a type of feminine beauty that he has loved in at least one living
beingMarx suggested that freedom of the press also has its beauty, which one
must have loved in order to defend.
It is Marx the journalist to whom Wheen really responds, praising his
eloquence, daring and originality, and defending him against the charge of intel-
lectual bullying in his polemics. Marx was no coward, tormenting only those who
wouldnt retaliate: his choice of victims reveals a courageous recklessness which
explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation. Wheen
makes good use of Marxs 1850s journalism for the New York Tribune, quoting
nimbly from polemics against Palmerston (What he aims at is not the substance,
but the mere appearance of success) that have more than one topical echo.
There are times (praxis makes perfect) when Wheen goes a soundbite too
far, or when his popularizations truly appal (There was nothing wrong with
Hegel that couldnt be cured by standing him on his head). The metaphor of the
dating agency (opposites attract) is dismally inadequate for a discussion of dia-
lectics and there is no excusenor even historical basisfor describing Jenny
von Westphalen as a bit of posh. But there is no doubt that this is a friendly
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enough account of Marxwhich leaves one wondering: should not a Marx for
our times be a little more critical than this? A little more questioning?
To some periods of Marxs life we have given far more space than others,
declared Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen. Our standard was not mere length
of time but the importance of events in Marxs life. The years of revolution in
184849 and those of the First International are two or three times as important
as the rest. Despite Wheens interest in his journalism, Marxs year in Cologne
as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung at the height of the 1848 revolution gets
only 12 out of his four hundred pages (the maverick russophobe Tory David
Urquhart does almost as well). That stormy year is in fact one of the duller
moments of Wheens book, devoted largely to Engelss walking tour through the
vineyards of France. There is not much here, either, of the sweep of nineteenth-
century history that so enriched some of the earlier Livesno wider panoramas
of pre-Bismarckian Germany, the Brussels of Villette or Balzacs France. Wheen
gives little sense of the world in which Marx was a combatant; and so little idea
of whom he was fighting, or what for.
Wheen seems to have something of a blind spot about the political
commitment that was the driving force of Marxs life. He steadfastly rejected the
temptation to save himself in the peaceful harbour of some bourgeois career,
declares Mehring proudly, although he might have done so without dishonour.
Wheen seems to think this rather a pity. If only he had stuck to it, Marx could
have made his name as the sharpest polemical journalist of the century, he
remarks wistfully.
Marx, then, with the politics left out. The one moment at which Wheen does
pose a critical question is during his discussion of the Communist Manifesto:
How could Marx be so wrong and yet so right? Wheen goes on to answer this
by discussing Marxs chess technique (brilliant strategy, fragile tactics) and con-
cludes by remarking that, at the end of the millennium, the Manifesto is still a
best-seller (so thats all right). But tactics surely are irrelevant here: strategy is the
whole point.
Marxs early biographers wrote out of urgent political necessity: Mehring to
put some backbone into a party that had capitulated to the generals in the moment
of need; Ryazanov to further the political education, as he saw it, of a class newly
risen to power; Nicolaievsky to rally opposition to German Fascism. In more tran-
quil times, Prawers book might stand for the cultural energies of the Marxist
imagination, and Kapps (though certainly not Kapp herself) for the Freudian and
feminist questioning of Marx. McLellans Marx is rather that of the liberal estab-
lishment, or perhaps of the social democratic bureaucracy: a museum figure, the
fire extinguished. In this light, Wheen is more in the tradition of McLellan: his is
a feel-good Marx, freed from history and political commitment, a floating bundle
of good quotations; Marx with the heart taken out.
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Los Angeles is an exception among cities. Or, at least, we like to think of it
as such. Its sprawling refusal to conform to Western notions of what a proper
metropolis should be has generated continual debate amongst architects, plan-
ners and sociologists. Paradoxically, in one ethnocentric teleology, the urbanism
that starts in Athens and Rome, and runs through Paris and New York, inevita-
bly ends in Hollywood. (Quite where Beijing, Timbuktu or Tenochtitlan would
fit into this scheme has never been very clear.) Los Angeles is a dream city of
sunshine and mobility, and the infernal setting of every second disaster movie. It
is also, of course, the home of an industry whose obsessive self-concern distorts
its global image even more.
The Ecology of Fearsubtitled Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster
weaves together maps and words, dreams and matter, the physical city and (some
of) its social divisions, and above all its human inhabitants and its natural envi-
ronment, in startling and luminous ways. The heated reactions of academics,
journalists and real-estate agents to this book can be taken as back-handed trib-
utes to its unsettling power. Beautifully written, it constantly offers disconcerting
insights and associations. Early on, recalling the arrival of Anglo-American
conquistadors in this Mediterranean ecology, Davis observes that in the most
fundamental sense, language and cultural inheritance failed the newcomers.
English terminology, specific to a humid climate, proved incapable of accurately
capturing the dialectic of water and drought that shapes Mediterranean envi-
ronments. By no stretch of the imagination, for example, is an arroyo merely a
glen. The passage captures something of the strangeness of this land, as it
must have appeared to each of those who entered it for the first time, but it also
Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear
Metropolitan: New York 1999, $14 (paperback)
484pp, 0 37570 607 0
Doreen Massey
ANGELENO ANOMALIES
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points ahead to a larger claim: that the Los Angeles basin still remains opaque as
a historico-natural phenomenon to Anglo paradigms of urbanism.
Thus in an already famous chapter entitled The Case for Letting Malibu
Burn, Davis demonstrates the madness of building houses in a fragile, fire-prone
zone of chapparal, and the further insanity of fire-fighting strategies calculated
to intensify the inevitable conflagrations when they occur. The grim injustices of
a city committed to boosting the property values of the super-affluent, regardless
of fiscal cost, while tenements in inner-city barrios burn, come out in stark relief.
But Davis does not offer a conventional picture of power and powerlessness. One
of the most distinctive motifs in The Ecology of Fear is the way in which the ele-
ments, monstrously disfigured by nature-defying patterns of habitation, wreak
their revenge on even the enclaves of the privileged. The dialectical retaliation of
nature can visit well-nigh biblical retribution on human indifference.
The fear of the books title refers, before all else, to the interactions between
the two, particularly in the border regions between them. These are zones which
give rise to phantasms that transpose social categories onto nature and natural
categories into society. The denizens of Malibu project the rolling flames that
threaten their way of life into a new breed of terrorist, black gangs, vagrant
hobos camping out in the canyons, and other anthropomorphic evilseven as,
ironically, the burning hills [are] full of hundreds of present and former gang
members: all risking their lives on state and county fire crews. Mountain lions
are denounced as serial killers, while gang members are cast as animals.
But could such tales be told of other cities? Refreshingly, Davis does not seek
to present Los Angeles as the Bladerunner future of urbanism in the twenty-first
century. But at times he cannot resist a tendency to cast LA in exceptional or
superlative terms. It is too often unique or in various ways the most, with
geographical categories finessed to sustain the claim. Thus the six-county Los
Angeles region is unique in the Northern Hemisphere for the intensity of inter-
action between humans, pets, and wild fauna; Los Angeles has the longest wild
edge of any major non-tropical city; while only Mexico City has more com-
pletely toxified its natural setting, and no other metropolis in the industrialized
Northern Hemisphere continues to grow at such breakneck speed (my italics).
Whatever the empirical validity of particular such claims, a more general
phenomenon may be at work herethe US habit of calling a local sporting event
The World Series. For example, in 1971 the San Fernando earthquake killed 64
people, and in 1994 the Northridge earthquake 72; both were followed by hys-
terical dread of the terminal Big One, and literary and cinematic aftershocks.
But in September 1985, between these two, there was an earthquake in Mexico
City with a death toll of about 10,000. Number of films made about it? None
that I know of. While writing this review, BBC Radio News announced a number
of times that there had been a small tremor outside Los Angeles; no-one had
been killed. That same week, Mexican states from Veracruz through Hidalgo to
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Guerrero were disappearing under floods and mudslides, with hundreds dead or
injured, and thousands left homeless. No item on the news. Davis is of course
aware of the power of the LA-based media to select and stage events. But while he
meticulously excavates media-induced ecological amnesia, like the suppression
of evidence of local tornadoes, his own tendency to overstate LAs exceptional-
ism as a site of disasters can succumb to a radical version of the same kind of
metropolitan self-absorption.
In the last two chapters of the book (The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles
and Beyond Bladerunner), Davis explicitly addresses media representations of LA as
Apocalyptic ground zero, and the different ways this has been overdone. Dismissing
the predictive relevance of Bladerunner as a condensation of old preoccupations,
Davis suggests that the LA of the future might be best understood using models
from the Chicago sociology, but with fear of the social and natural unknown, over-
determined by media-generated phantasms, as the decisive variable of settlement.
Here Davis places racial panic at the centre of his analysis. Rightly so. But the
underpinnings of his account seem to rely too much on a generalized terror
of the other. What is lackingalthough one can find it in his earlier work City
of Quartzis an explanation of the conditions that reproduce these racisms.
Davis underscores the significance of the transformation which LA underwent
during the mid-seventies, when it went from being the most WASP-ish of large
American cities to being one of the most ethnically diverse and fractured con-
urbations in the industrialized world. But he tends here to simplify the mosaic of
the city into a polarization between the Anglo rich and the ethnic poor. Other fac-
tors of tension and division are side-linedgender, for example, is not attended
to at all. Similarly, although class is certainly not ignored, one is left wondering
whether the city contains no poor whites, or prosperous ethnic minorities.
Immigration is, of course, one of the defining features of any world city,
which no one would dispute Los Angeles to be. But if world cities really are
global condensations of forces and relations of international scope, then writing
about them should not remain local. Other analystsRoger Keil in his pedes-
trian but informative volume Los Angeles: globalization, urbanization and social
struggles (1998), for exampletrack the flows of incoming capital and labour to
LA. One of the few times we go abroad with Mike Davis is to follow the routes
of a plaguea strange wandering. This too is still the story of an arrival in Los
Angeles. Global cities do gather many far-flung elements into themselves. But
that is only one side of the story. They also throw out long tentacles beyond
themselves. For extended relations of power run out from these centres. They are
seats of control over considerable parts of the planet. Their pull on migrants can
both devastate and save (through remittances) rural communities in other coun-
tries, hundreds and thousands of miles away. Their cultural exports can change
those places too. Their environmental impacts may beggar the imagination.
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At one point Davis criticizes Angeleno environmentalism of the seventies for
its parochialism; yet his own call for a more subversive but necessary politics
typically stops short at local issues of urban design. The relationship of the city
with the outside world remains to be explored. Yet this is a limitation that can be
remedied elsewhere. Daviss tale of injustice and greed, natural and social disas-
ter, tightly focussed within the city, urgently needed to be told. The Ecology of Fear
has seized attention; provoked argument; brought new issues into the public
sphere. A more moderate account might have passed without much notice. Who
could ask more of a radical intervention?