Perry Anderson

Remember when this thing was released?

i read this and there's not much to it. there's bits where its so obvious he was only vaguely paying attention

like: 'during the eu negs it became obvious the eu were punishing the uk to make an example' uh this is not obvious at all, it would seem quite the converse. a major part of his argument hinges on this diagnosis as well. there was something similar about scotland i forget.

just basic semi-paying attention stuff but secondary to 'my grand thesis'

never got round to the ukania one, but have just read the first of the three-parter on Europe, 'The European Coup.' And having approached it with a great deal of scepticism, I've come out the other end thinking it's a masterly display of intellect and structure.

The overall arc is a review of the work of a Dutch thinker and European political player Luuk van Middelaar. Anderson dubs van Middelaar, as, 'in Gramsci's vocabulary, the first organic intellectual of the EU.' Anderson pays tribute to the achievement of his work, though is sceptical about the uniformity of the plaudits, and by extension the lack of close examination. And of course Anderson is about to give him a thorough working over. In doing so he does a number of things simultaneously, and I think quite brilliantly, in an interwoven, discursive, but never off-topic essay. It's even a little difficult to separate these out.

One strand, reviews the key points of van Middelaar's major work The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union. In doing so Anderson via van Middelaar provides a useful, and helpfully quite simple framework for thinking about the EU, or rather the overall European project. However, some of this framework rests on a quite difficult set of intellectual jumps, which I'll come back to in a sec.

Another strand, via the rather innocuous statement 'Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself', is to build up a network of thinkers and thought going back to Machiavelli and interconnecting with each other, who provide a genealogy of the historical and intellectual context of the European project.

Of course with this is the other strand, which is the content and interrelation of those ideas.

And the other strand is the historical context for those ideas, particularly the Congress of Vienna/Restoration of Europe/Congress system, but also the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. This process of thought takes its cue from the view of van Middelaar's teacher, Ankersmit:

Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems..

Or in another line contrasting the approach taken by these thinkers contra Rawls...'Ignored in a Rawlsian matrix concerned only with rights rather than interests...' In other words the process Anderson is describing, these core thinkers as they are understood in the retrospective context of the EU and its thinkers, is driven by contingency rather than idealism.

Lot of caveats there you'll note, and Anderson manages some of this complexity tonally, which is understandable, but on occasion can get a bit confusing, especially during the first third, where in order to review van Middelaar's ideas, he will ventriloquise them, sometimes to rather sharply sarcastic effect, and occasionally it's easy to forget he's ventriloquising.

Later in the essay, Anderson will drop the conventional mask of the reviewer somewhat, and use a later work of van Middelaar to take issue with some of the claims that van Middelaar makes for the successes of the EU over the last decade or so.

Anderson admires the earlier work as a realistic external assessment, with the later work being the view of an interested participant, or as Anderson has it: Alarums and Excursions belongs to a subclass of literature ... (which) might be called spin-doctorates of the equerry.

yes, they might well be, Perry, but only by *you* you hilarious word-guzzler.

The chief value he sees in the early work is that it lays bare, in the same way Machiavelli did, the operations and political machinations of the European project without any concern that it might be undemocratic or morally dubious - these after all are the demands that contingency places on politics, and anything is to be justified to further the European project as a thing above and beyond its constituent parts.

Anyway, i've rambled enough. What are the constituent parts:

• where is the demos for the European Union (or are they representatives without a demos), and how can they be engaged?
• what is the nature of European Union politics as van Middelaar and his intellectual heritage sees it. This produces that series of intellectual jumps which are quite hard to think through, or were for me anyway:
• 1) Politics as aesthetic: it is not representative by *resembling* what is being represented, but a substitute for it, therefore it is a creative act and subject to aesthetics.
• 2) Creating or engaging the demos is either, in three categories: German: aesthetics: an act of propaganda (flags and ode to joy); Roman: creating material benefits (eg unimpeded travel, free phone calls, and of course trade benefits), Greek: demos as participant and spectator in the democratic process (Anderson suggests that the EU and indeed van Middelaar are weak on this and weak on its solutions - in an interesting point right at the end of the essay, Anderson says the thinker to whom van Middelaar took most exception was Baudrillard).
• 3) It being a branch of aesthetics it is subject to the sublime - that transformative mixture in Romantic philosophy of terror and beauty. This bit's pretty obscure though I felt i was on the right track when i said to myself 'well in these terms isn't the general financial crash 'sublime'' and indeed in the next paragraph the activities of the bourse were considered to participate in this conception of the sublime. The crucial aspect here is that it's suggested that the sublime is the route to getting people invested in the 'Greek' way - that is as spectators and participants. They have to be interested in how the EU will affect their lives, and basically that can mean... getting them frightened basically.
• The 'three sphere' way of thinking about the dynamics: 1) The outer sphere, all countries that might be considered to come into the ambit of European Union politics, Europe as a continent, not just members, 2) the inner sphere: Commission, Court of Justice and EU Parliament and 3) an intermediate sphere, the operation of the member states, and at its apex the European Council.
• The mechanic of the coup, as understood by 17thC thinker Naudé: a coup d'erat denoting not just the sudden overthrow of a regime, but any comparably unexpected action undertaken to found, preserve, alter or aggrandise a state, the processes of which take place in secret. There's a great quote from Naudé on the imperative of secrecy being a constituent element of his version of the coup d'etat:

in coups d'erat one sees the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds, it strikes before it flames forth, matins are said before the bells are rung, the execution precedes the sentence, everything is done à la judaique - he receives the stroke who thought to give it, dies who thought himself quite safe, suffers who never dreamed of pain; all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness

• Anderson cites several examples of this version of the coup from van Middelaar's work, the two most significant: a 1963 ECJ ruling that national legislation had to complete with Community regulations under the rubric that it was in 'the spirit of the Treaty of Rome (even though nothing in the Treaty of Rome authorised this. The 1985 Act designed to add services to the common market, which was opposed by Britain, Denmark and Greece, who never got a chance to exercise their veto due to a piece of very dubious administrative sleight of hand by Craxi.

I'm certainly very dependent on trusting Anderson's bona fides, at least his scholarly probity, though I know generally what angle he has on the European Union. For example if you'd asked me who the major thinkers relating to the EU were I'd've said, idk? Habermaas? Streeck? Who don't make any appearance at all. The entire conception of the European project as being a way of keeping Europe unified through economic self-interest, while promoting progressively liberal policies for its community of citizens is entirely reframed here, completely reconfigured, which is what makes it so fascinating.

very interested to read the next two, which is *not* something you'd've heard me saying before i read this.

oh a couple of infelicities:

"the oubliette of his retrospect" ew no

and the final fucking line!

Van Rompuy has voiced the truths of Brussels more bluntly. In Greece, 'the performance of the troika may have taken place a little too much in the media spotlight': better in a blackout. What of the continent at large? "I believe the Union is over-democratised': in so many words.

Wait, what? 'In so many words'? Do you mean you've paraphrased Van Rompuy to say something quite revealing, but which he didn't say? Or is this your essay 'in so many words'? (Which would be a reasonable summary). Painful ambiguity to end on there.

It'd be good to see a review of this from someone who knows what they're talking about - Adam Tooze is a critical and engaged watcher of the EU for example. In fact, I'd like to revisit his thorough treatment of the troika, and EU statecraft in the aftermath of the GFC in Crashed, and replay it with Anderson's essay in mind to see what fits and what doesn't.

Every now and then you can feel Anderson straining van Middelaas to say more than he is actually saying in order to support Anderson's tacit argument of an undemocratic EU. Phrases like 'you can just feel his enthusiasm'. Ok ok, show don't tell, Perry.

Creating or engaging the demos is either, in three categories As a self-centric American, I can't get away from the first and third, would like more of the Roman, also a t-shirt w Naudé quote; thanks for the post.

Wonder what Anderson would make of this kind of talk? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/29/brexit-trade-deal-workers-rights-risk-unions

Or this---room for the sublime? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/24/at-long-last-we-have-a-brexit-deal-and-its-as-bad-as-you-thought

As far as I know, PA is pro-Brexit. (Maybe this article confirms it.)

I may possibly have remarked before that what rather grates about this is that, as far as I know, he does not live in the UK.

Like many people, I think Brexit is bad for those of us living here, and it's annoying to see it defended by someone who's unaffected by it. (You could even add Morrissey to this theme, though I don't think he would make it through a PA article.)

But my premises might be flawed; PA might actually spend much more time in the UK than I realise. And he would still argue, I'm sure, that he has the right to opinions on any foreign land, as he does on Italy, Russia, Turkey, etc.

the article isn’t about brexit (i think it mentions it once in what as you say is a v long article - as an example where van middelaar’s v whiggish support of european successes is perhaps misplaced). suspect an analysis of “the outer sphere” comes in this next instalment “An Ever Greater Union?”.

i don’t know whether anderson would be a brexit supporter as such, but he’s wary of the methodology of the european project and sees many of its layers as undemocratic, which is a charge of leavers i guess? i mean i suspect that anderson like many international thinkers eg Tooze thinks Brexit is, globally, and in the long term, of supreme unimportance, another milestone of blip on the UK’s confused and belligerent transition from an imperial power to a nation state. obviously we’ve been driven insane in the country by four years of relentless coverage of nothing happening apart from internal torments. it’s been very badly handled and is a bad idea, as many people will likely see a reduction in wealth (cultural, STEM and material) and global influence (if that matters), but in Anderson’s grand frameworks that probably doesn’t figure than as an example of something else rather than an important thing in itself.

this essay is more the history of ideas around it. i must admit i find it hard to say why the overall essay appealed to me so much. if you’d outlined it’s matter to me idve said god no life’s too short. but there’s something almost like gormenghast in the world building, the exposition of an intellectual framework and web, of people i’d never heard of and the interconnectedness of frames of thought, and i was genuinely impressed how perry managed it.

I think PA is pro-Brexit - even if he doesn't say so here.

But I agree that for him this would be in a disdainful context of dismissal of the importance of deluded "Ukania" - a very tiresome meme that he was been trading in uncritically for 30-odd years.

A feature of PA is that he hates centrists, liberals, Blairites, social democrats, etc, more than he does the political Right.

So one can be confident that in a PA analysis of Brexit there would be contempt for Remainiac types, Blair's interventions, perhaps CHUK, but not much for Farage, Gove, the PM.

I must admit that this feels suspect. If you're going to say one is bad (true), you need to say the other is at least equally bad.

You don't need to address everything, at least when it's a given. I'm not convinced you're right about Perry's animosities but I'm with it anyway, the centrist and faux-left temporizers have done far more harm to the left than any amount of plain sight reactionaries

If you never address a thing, it may not appear to be a given.

A feature of PA is that he hates centrists, liberals, Blairites, social democrats, etc, more than he does the political Right.

That doesn't sounds right to me at all. I think PA deals more critically with some of the people in these groupings, who might at other times have been on the left.

Having read "The European Coup" I was kind of startled by his mention of Brexit, which is something he hasn't dealt with in much of the writing I've read by him (a lot of the LRB archive has a focus on mainland Europe, Brazil, India). It could be that he just can't be fucked anymore -- but also reckon that in any treatment would also uncover weaknesses in his writing. UKANIA in the NLR is a block for me, only a quarter of the way through.

Now, by the fact he did mention Brexit -- if only as another data point that shows the weaknesses of the EU -- as in why did its leaders not give Cameron more concessions, was an interesting point of sorts...and I quite like to see where he will go with it. But the thing is he hasn't explored this question, so I don't know whether he is a Lexiteer. But a straight political opinion isn't something you get from PA.

are all three parts out now and what is the combined wordlength?

i will never calculate this for myself

the total number of words is called a "Perrygrination"

holdingnose_emoji

I didn't mean to scold him or preach to the choir w my posts re brexit, just wondering how/if the concerns cited/points made might fit into his "world-building," which is the most appealing term used here re his possible appeal.

It's about 30k, expect nothing less

strong dubdobdee blogpost energy

I've read the 3rd part of this Euro piece in one sitting. Mostly on Brexit, and you could mostly read without the other parts.

Perry's spinning plates technique is kinda incredible, and his way with detail -- what he can prioritise, what he does not -- gives rise to rich moments.

I'd add that to reduce his position on the EU to "Lexit" isn't correct. Throughout he is sober about what the EU is, what UK democracy is, in all of its shortcomings.

Perry has some sharp words for Remain support coming out of universities but it's not a class warrior position, more of an observation of the EU's relationship to UK higher ed.

I read, at last, Part II of PA in Europe, without reading Part I, which I don't have to hand.

Mostly a critique of the EU's infamous democratic deficit. Factually informative, but not surprising in outlook.

the meat of the essay is to show the context and geneaology of political philosophy that drives the character of its political model tho, right? the point of it being that he’s showing the intellectual mechanics that inform it. the use of that above the purely descriptive is to place it in the context of ideas which will be forming and formed by the future the world, no?

Fizzles: unlike you, I haven't yet read Part One. What you say may be what Part One is about, but so far it's not what Part Two is about. It's about 'mechanics' as in institutional operations, but not really about ideas.

i am postponing the 30,000 words of undiluted thrillpower until i have three clear days to go in hard

(adding that i suspect now more than ever that PA's 60s/70s project to detect and outline the ideology that actually underlay the UK's non-conformance to the standard evolution of polities -- the nairn-anderson thesis -- was, despite its probable good intentions at the outset, increasingly significantly distorts his reading of present-day UK politics. N&A were battling to refuse the "acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness" argument of course, and refusing to embed british exceptionalism in a negative characteristic = the absence of and casual freedom from any one affirmed ideology) (i mean it;s is thesis and fair play he wants to stick with it BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole) (also nairn omits discussion of the sex pistols from "the enchanted glass", his book on the monarchy, and not for good reasons IMO)

(so i will be reading it with all this very much in mind) (when i have a fkn second) (five clear days)

this post^^^ took me nearly three clear days and it's still full of typos

Btw, no mention of "ukania" in the first and third parts of that piece. Anderson skillfully used the ongoing relationship of UK politics to EU politics in the latter to draw out a set of insights from either. Mostly insights into Europe, but I got a lot out of it from a UK perspective.

I doubt that PA is seeking to surprise anyone with his outlook. Does he ever? Is anyone going to be surprised about any of his views on Brazil or India or UK? If you want to reduce his stance on to a one-liner -- which he resists by the vast quantity of reading and links he can make from it -- it's one of the i.e. all of this fucking sucks variety, but it's the facts and links that he draws that open up avenues for others. And in this, PA is getting to a map of this bloc of centre-right-to-centre-left coalitions that are highly robust, one that can survive all types and manner of crisis (created by itself or otherwise) that would topple national governments, one that can shrug at a member state's entire withdrawal from it.

BUT the seemingly trivial fact of the badness of the "ukania" gag continues to tell against the whole

I love this.

PA ends Part II saying that the EU's claims are almost all hollow but it has two benefits: free movement and a range of consumer goods. He recognises that those are popular - but then, in a way, dealing with them only in the last paragraph of a 10,000-word article suggests that he's slighting the practical benefits of the EU. As I have said before, I am unsure that he lives in the EU (or perhaps he does, half the year or something), which may be a reason he is cavalier about the everyday gains of being in it.

I think that a reader not knowing much about the subject, reading Part II and taking it at face value, would say: the EU is pretty bad and it would be good for a country to leave it and restore its democratic independence.

This isn't a very new sensation or surprising outcome - I felt the same after reading Susan Watkins on the EU in the LRB c.7 years ago, and she was, in effect, one of PA's successors as editor of NLR.

Reading Part III. A simple response consistently emerges: one that many of us have felt about many other things and fields.*

It's basically: "I believed you, indeed was profoundly impressed, when you were talking about those other places and things that weren't very familiar, but now you're talking about where I live and things I went through, and you keep saying things - even if only small things - that I know are wrong."

Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does.

[*A parallel: it's been said that everyone likes most things about Declan Kiberd's INVENTING IRELAND, except that Wildeans don't like the chapter on Wilde, Joyceans don't like the chapter on Joyce, Shavians don't like the chapter on Shaw ...]

im going to be using the expression ukania on ilx long after perry mason has shuffled off this mortal coil

"Not to say it's all wrong, or useless. But it's surprising how cavalier he is with factual narrative when talking about things that most of his readers will already know as well as he does."

Is it not very surprising or just wrong? I've certainly not seen this command of the overall narrative from anybody on the mainstream press though I've read good reporting on aspects of it.

Part of the reason people have been as divided on Brexit -- and not just along Leave or Remain either, with both camps having its own cliques -- is that there is very little agreement on the nature of the EU and its benefits and who are the main beneficiaries?

This was certainly part of the weakness of the Remain argument during the referendum and is a lot of the bathos of the angrier end of the FBPE crew

God knows when/if I'll get to read this PA piece but the subject of how the EU sells itself to its citizens would be worth a lot of analysis in itself

PA's argument is that it doesn't bother because it doesn't need to, and that the vitally important decisions made by (in partiuclar) the European Council and the ECJ are made in camera without the bother of tirseome politics or democracy.

I've read the first part and he essentially makes it sound like a confidence trick.

After the first part I'm mostly 'man, fuck a dutch tory'

As Perry Anderson's greatest admirer on ILX (with the caveat that Mark S was into amphibologies before I was) -- I found Part III of this overall remarkably poor.

The first half is a standard account of UK political history since the 1960s which you could assemble from Wikipedia or even from most UK adults' general knowledge -- but, as I noted, strangely specked with errors, casually misleading and false claims, which go with the 'breezy journalism' genre. Still, he does add *some* new analysis to this story, though its accuracy too remains questionable.

Then he gets on to Mount, Oborne, Wheatcroft - which feels much too easily self-selecting, PA as so often just going back to the same people he's been reading for years (especially Mount). It's at least interesting to see how much Mount has changed his tunes. But PA says these are all less impressive than Noel Malcolm and Richard Tuck, Hobbes scholars. Hm ... So what do they have to say?

Mainly that the EU is undemocratic and unaccountable - which is PA's general case, which could have been made in a page, not 30,000 words. But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits), surely *because those nations are neoliberal in their national politics anyway* ... That's all OK up to a point, but PA also TWICE cites the fact that Tuck argues that *Brexit makes the break-up of the UK less likely*.

Well, this could be true; it could be too early to say; but it flies in the face of everything that any political analyst has said for the last 6 years, and PA does *nothing* to explain why they're wrong and Tuck's right about it. And yet Tuck is one of his great sages!

And finally we get a last couple of pages just repeating the general charges of undemocratic structure and personal corruption, and along the way saying that the EU is politically worse than the UK.

Some of this article is true, some of it is insightful, but the balance of new insight to retreads is unusually unfavourable here by PA's standards. It's even noticeable that his prose is less sparkling than usual.

Part II was informative but unexciting. Part I, which Fizzles greatly admired, I still haven't properly read. But overall the balance of value here seems to be towards a let-down.

In part 1, there was a startlingly... tendentious (ie bad and wrong) paragraph about the founding of the United States.

"But as for Tuck: first PA repeats a standard Lexit claim ('the EU wouldn't let you nationalise industry', etc) which is interesting but has never been empirically tested in a large member nation (a point PA totally omits)"

No large EU state is testing this claim precisely because it is against the rules they are bound to observe by being in the EU.

Good point on Tuck, it did seem one of two points -- the other on Momentum and languages -- that were obscure and needed more, though I think in the latter there was a larger point on Labour's infighting on the issue that would've detracted from the piece.

very busy at the moment and still only halfway thru the second essay

two things i wanted to note in passing before i forget:
i: "They are set not in stone, but in granite" wtf u think granite is anderson
ii: "documents of such ‘epic length’ that the Ireland’s EU commissioner declared of the last that ‘no sane and sensible person’ could read it" where am i going with this

Perry Anderson is no Mason

wtf u think granite is anderson

incredible. reminds me of some otherwise completely forgotten tv doc years ago where the presenter knelt down by a railway in france and said something about 'this rail of non ferrous metal', i thought 'whaddya think sncf stands for ya mook'.

copy-editors sleepwalking as ever in the great man's contributions: i mean if it were me i would be DELIGHTED to catch him out, less obnubilation more reading back what you just wrote SIR

Those are excellent amusing comments by Mark S.