Weird

[chickenfeet]

The only thing I can think of weirder than Tariq Ali being a huge Anthony Powell fan is that he was introduced to his works by Perry Anderson.

It's in the papers so it must be true.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

What a great piece! (And I'm afraid I have no idea who Perry Anderson is.) He's too dismissive of Robert de Montesquiou, though. If only (but he's much more) because of the Whistler portrait at the Frick.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Perry Anderson is a professor of history at UCLA and was, at one time, an acolyte of Althusser and his gang; usually referred to by me as 'Left Bank Stalinists'. He famously launched a coup in which he effectively took control of New Left Review on the grounds that it was insufficiently theoretical and suffered from a romantically English pragmatic approach. He generalised this thesis in "The Origins of the Present Crisis" which laid the blame for Britain's social and economic ills on its "premature" bourgeois revolution (The revolt against Charles I). If the English bourgeoisie had had a proper economic revolution (like the French did! - for Anderson like certain other American academics all things French are unarguably ideal) instead of showing an 'unscientific' concern with religion, things would have turned out much better. The late EP Thompson skewered this nonsense in the excellent essay "The Peculiarities of the English" which mercilessly derided both Anderson's approach and his understanding of 17th century England. Subsequent research has shown how little he understood of the French Revolution.