Origins of the Present Crisis? Perry Anderson on David Edgerton’s analysis of the modern British State
Perry Anderson, veteran New Left Reviewer, has written an important assessment of David Edgerton’s recent The Rise and the Fall of the British Nation (New Left Review Nov/Dec 2021).
The piece is paywalled but I’ve extracted the penultimate paragraph below which gives a flavour of the differences between Andersons and Edgerton’s view of the British State in 2021. Anderson whatever his previous views is no fan of the neo-liberal EU these days. Edgerton is no fan of Brexit, which is not to say he is fan of the current British State either. Anderson’s underlying point is that while he and the NLR have had a clear analysis of the British State, as an historian Edgerton doesn’t seem to have an overarching perspective, a benchmark against which to judge developments and changes.
Edgerton’s view is that the British economy declined up to 1945 to be revitalised by the national project of Labour after that date into the 1970s at which point a Thatcherite emphasis on financial services over industry may have led to prosperity (for some) but wrecked the UK industrial base.
Anderson by contrast returns to his analysis (with Tom Nairn) first developed in argument with E P Thompson in the 1960s in New Left Review, that the British imperial State and its priorities, Ukania as he calls it, remains much as it has been. It’s the only European power not to be invaded by another country and retains a perspective on Nation and State that requires things like (unusable independently) nuclear weapons and imperial military adventures.
Commenting briefly on twitter Alex Callinicos has noted that the move towards the finance State and the City of London, not central to Anderson’s historical analysis, relates to much wider forces of capitalist development than an EU/Brexit discussion or to the policies of Mrs Thatcher.
Historically it may be too early to say whose analysis is really the most helpful in the key task- getting rid of UK capitalism altogether. Suffice to say Anderson is right that Edgerton offers many very sharp insights into modern British history and Anderson’s critique makes effective points as well.
What Anderson may not know but I certainly took from discussions with Edgerton is that he is sympathetic to many of the points E P Thompson made, perhaps for example in his Peculiarities of the English…
In 2019 the Conservative sweep across working-class districts of the North and Midlands under the slogan of Get Brexit Done also made it clear that powerful other discontents were at work in rejection of the eu at the polls, of which neither Rise and Fall nor Edgerton’s subsequent writing take account, since these pay no heed to the eu and its bearing on the uk itself. Obvious here, and articulated from the very outset of British candidacy to the Common Market, are the facts that unlike any other major state in Europe, Britain was never defeated or occupied by a foreign power in the twentieth century, so possessed of a much stronger sense of inviolate external sovereignty; that its legislature claims an age-long degree of internal sovereignty, limited by no other authority than its own, unknown anywhere else in the world; and that the European Union had by the twenty-first century become, in the operation of its Commission and the confabulations of its Council, a force openly over-riding the will of any democratic legislature within the zone of the single currency, should it breach budgetary or other diktats of Brussels, and regularly forcing the reversal of any popular consultation whose outcome was to its displeasure. That the tension between these two utterly contrasted systems of political decision-making was combustible was not a sudden revelation of 2016. It was long apparent, and the evolution of the eu post-Maastricht made it steadily more so. Brexit was many things. But one of them, and not the least salient, was a demonstration that, wretched though Ukanian democracy with its first-past-the-post and other fetters may be, it is less oligarchic in its structure than the European Union, and when push came to shove, was capable of resisting pressures, invincible everywhere else in Europe, to reverse the popular will as elite opinion—national and continental—demanded.
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