The three texts published here were written in the mid-1970s.
John Breuilly, “Critique of P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State”
Theodor Shanin, “The Marxism(s) of Our Time”
Michael Evans, “Some Notes on Perry Anderson”
Here I explain how these came about.
Back in 1974, I was teaching on a Modern Politics and History degree at Manchester. This involved modern historians from the History Department and members of POLSIS, the politics department. There was some concern that the academics from the two departments did not communicate with each other but taught their respective courses quite separately.
It was suggested that one way to address this problem would be to organise joint seminars on subjects of shared concern. The running was made by Terry Ranger of the History department. His initiative, which turned out to be a one-off achievement, took the form of organising three seminars discussing two recently published books by Perry Anderson: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolute State. In each seminar, Mike Evans of POLSIS considered questions of Marxist theory and method involved in the particular historical problems under consideration. He was then followed by an historian. In the first seminar Alan Bowman, an ancient historian, developed a critique of what Anderson had to say about Rome and the slave mode of production. In the second seminar, Ian Kershaw (best known now as an historian of the Third Reich, especially his biography of Hitler, but, at the time, a lecturer in medieval economic history) criticised Anderson’s arguments about the feudal mode of production and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So, the first two seminars were devoted to the slimmer, first volume. I was the historian tasked subjecting the whole of the Lineages book to critique in the third seminar. What is more, Ranger invited Anderson to attend that seminar. (Mischievously, Ranger did not introduce us to each other before the seminar began and challenged me to recognise Anderson – whom I had never met before – from how he listened to my critique! It was obvious who he was within about 30 seconds.) We had a very good discussion.
Afterwards, I think it was Teodor Shanin, a professor in the Department of Sociology, who had been present at the seminar, who suggested we work up our critiques into a symposium for the historical journal Past and Present, along with a response from Anderson. We duly did this, and Shanin added his own critique. Thus, five pieces were submitted. They languished for an eternity with the then Past and Present editor, Trevor Aston. Then the submission was rejected, with no clear reason being offered, as I recall. I, and certainly the other historians, Bowman and Kershaw, considered that too much time had passed for it to be worth seeking publication anywhere else. The texts were left to the gnawing critiques of rats or their equivalents; as Engels said of the manuscript of The German Ideology.
A few years back, I found my critique (written on a manual typewriter; it was that long ago) in a file. In that file were also copies of the pieces written by Shanin and by Evans. Neither Alan Bowman or Ian Kershaw have written copies of their critiques.
Recently I happened to mention all this in an exchange with Ilya Afanasyev. Ilya thought that Historical Materialism would be interested in publishing these critiques. However, when contacted, neither Bowman nor Kershaw were able to track down any copy of what they had written. So there are just three pieces being published here.
I see these as having primarily an historical interest. Nearly fifty years have passed since those seminars. Marxist approaches to history have both changed and become less central in historical writing, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although this historical event does not in itself constitute an intellectual challenge to historical accounts informed by one or another kind of Marxism, it has had the effect of dimming debates amongst Marxists and reducing the prominence of Marxist theory and historical writing within the academy. There has also been a massive amount of research in all the vast historical fields Anderson addressed, research that, in turn, has been informed by new perspectives and approaches.
Nevertheless, Anderson’s two volumes was a major intellectual achievement and, in certain respects, they have never been superseded. I recall looking out the early reviews, and it seemed to me that no-one felt able to mount a critique which matched Anderson’s books in its historical sweep and relentless argument. In a way, we tried to do this by breaking up the critique into theoretical and historical parts, as well as having three different historians focus on different problems: the dynamics of the slave mode of production, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the ways in which that transition were linked to different kinds of “absolutism”. Shanin, in the critique he wrote after the seminars, did seek to rise to the same theoretical level as Anderson, taking into account the very different Marxist approach of Wallerstein in work published at the same time.
Today, critiques would need to take account of developments in Marxist theory, in historical research, and in historiographical approaches, for example “micro-history”, “history from below”, and a focus on the discourses of historical actors. That cannot be undertaken here. However, these critiques may be of interest in disclosing some of the ways in which Marxist approaches towards major historical issues across a broad span of European history were being debated in the 1970s.
Here are links to the three texts:
John Breuilly, “Critique of P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State”
Theodor Shanin, “The Marxism(s) of Our Time”
Michael Evans, “Some Notes on Perry Anderson”
Further reading suggestions
The historiography of these subjects has changed in many ways since 1976. This short list of reading suggestions is intended to help readers interested in those changes.
For alternative Marxist accounts on a similar scale to that of Anderson see the Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), published in the same year as Anderson’s books. See also Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London, 2010).
For Marxist historical writing, including on issues treated by Anderson, see Chris Wickham (ed), Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (British Academy Occasional Paper, number 9.) (New York, 2007).
On Rome and the slave mode of production see the chapter in Wickham (ed) by Andrea Giardini, ‘Marxism and Historiography: Perspectives on Roman History”.
On the transition from feudalism to capitalism see, Shami Ghoshi, ‘Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism: Germany and England Compared (c.1200–c.1800)’, The Journal of Agrarian Change, 16/2 (2015). This subject was transformed by what has become known as the Brenner debate which began with an article Brenner published in Past and Present 70 (1976), ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’. Brenner has a chapter in Wickham, Marxist Historical Writing, and his arguments are analysed in Ghoshi’s article.
On absolutism see Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London, 2000).
