F.R. Leavis, Politics and Religion

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 2 · 7 February 1980

From Kevin Keys

SIR: I write in response to Roger Poole’s article on F.R. Leavis (LRB, Vol. 1, No 5). When Leavis said that Scrutiny was ‘anti-Marxist’ he meant ‘anti-English Marxist’. The curious admixture of romantic idealism and attenuated Marxism which is peculiar to England was obviously of little use or value in relation to the real function of literature and criticism as Leavis saw it. Its notions were greatly oversimplified, its concepts and terminology poorly defined and its whole method eagerly dogmatic. The whole question of ‘economic determinism’ illustrates the vitiating lack of subtlety or penetration on the part of these interpreters of Marx. Leavis (in ‘Under Which King, Bezonian?’) resists the claim for attention to the material conditions, the ‘dogma of the priority of economic conditions’. This dogma does not occur in Marx’s own writings and it is a contention of the so-called ‘vulgar Marxists’. Both Marx and Engels recognised that, in the realm of the arts, the interaction between the ‘economic base’ and the overlying ‘superstructure’ was a far more complex activity than this dogma allows. In the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx asserts that ‘certain periods of the highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organisation.’ The complexity of the problem was recognised and consciously engaged by the theory. Engels, in a letter to Starkenburg in 1894, wrote: ‘It is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and everything else a passive effect. But there is a reciprocal interaction within a fundamental economic necessity, which in the last instance always asserts itself.’

It is essential to realise that it is the ‘reciprocal interaction’ that finally asserts itself, not the ‘fundamental economic necessity’. This kind of insight into the issue derives from the proper understanding of the dialectical method, which was not widely possessed by the early Marxist writers in England. It was their simplified sociological model (after Plekhanov) of ‘art as a reflection of the class struggle’, and the insistence on the absolute primacy of the material conditions in relation to the arts, that Leavis rejected as inadequate. There is in fact a greater contiguity between his ideas and those of Marx and Engels.

Leavis is not a crypto-Marxist. That there are major similarities between Leavis and Marx is clear enough, nevertheless. In the article referred to above, Leavis refutes, through his discussion of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, the ‘orthodox’ Marxist dogma concerning the relationship between culture and the ‘methods of production’. This misses the point, he says, because the central feature of the contemporary (1932) situation is the potentially catastrophic ‘breach in continuity’ of our cultural tradition. This has fractured the relationship between the tradition and the ‘real culture’ that existed until the 19th century: ‘When England had a popular culture, the structure, the framework, of it was a stylisation, so to speak, of economic necessities.’ The industrialisation of the 19th century undermined this relationship (resulting in the ‘loss of the organic community’), so that ‘what survives of cultural tradition in any important sense survives in spite of the rapidly changing “means of production”.’

The significance of this is the qualification ‘in any important sense’. First, because, if it were not for that qualification, the substance of the argument would be rendered contradictory: a ‘popular culture’ still exists and it still, in essence, bears a dialectical relation to the prevailing ‘economic necessities’. The qualifying clause is a qualitative judgment designed to avoid this logical fallacy. It is an illustration of the peculiar complexity of Leavis’s approach to literature. On the one hand, he accepts the principle of the relationship between culture and the ‘methods of production’ (‘a stylisation … of economic necessities’); on the other hand, with regard to the present situation, he exhibits a curious, atavistic tendency to dismiss this relationship as no longer functional. Yet, according to the logic of his own reasoning, this relationship must still operate.

It is this atavism which produces the flaw in Leavis’s methodology, and which highlights the essential distinction that must be made between it and the methodology of dialectical materialism. If one accepts the principle of the interaction between the arts and the social and economic reality, as Leavis does, then it cannot logically be dismissed in favour of individual preference. ‘Logic’ is the crux. Marx and Engels recognised that the nature of the interaction cannot be statically defined – hence their insistence on the idea of constant change. Leavis chose the alternative, which was effectively to abandon the concept of interaction/stylisation of economic necessities – claiming that the line of continuity had been broken and the relationship therefore nullified – and to embark upon a form of criticism which regards each text as an autonomous, sealed entity. The point is, his judgments are subjective, a matter of individual preference. Hence his insistence on the ‘training of the sensibility’ and the development of ‘critical awareness’, which requires a sensuous responsiveness to the words on the page, for all practical purposes to the exclusion of everything else. By making that choice, Leavis moved from a position of close proximity to Marx’s original conception to one almost diametrically opposed to it.

Kevin Keys
Edinburgh

Vol. 2 No. 4 · 6 March 1980

From Nicholas Jacobs

SIR: Kevin Keys’s attempt (LRB, Vol. 2, No 2) to outline a ‘non-vulgar Marxism’, for the sake of his argument that Leavis was once nearer to Marx than he knew, involves him in a serious misunderstanding. He quotes Engels’s in recent years much-discussed letter in which he says that ‘it is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and everything else is passive effect. But there is a reciprocal interaction within a fundamental economic necessity, which in the last instance always asserts itself.’ He then proceeds completely to misinterpret it. Despite the fact that the syntax of this rather free English translation of the quite unambiguous German makes it clear enough that Engels meant that it was the ‘economic necessity’ that ‘always asserts itself’, Mr Keys asserts that ‘it is essential to realise that it is the “reciprocal interaction” that finally asserts itself’ – whatever that might mean – and makes matters worse by informing us that ‘this kind of insight into the issue derives from the proper understanding of the dialectical method, which was not widely possessed by the early Marxist writers in England’!

If this is the basis of what Kevin Keys calls ‘the methodology of dialectical materialism’, as opposed to what he refers to as the ‘dogma of the priority of the economic conditions’, then Marx was certainly a ‘vulgar Marxist’, though this did not mean that he was narrow or prescriptive in his literary tastes or judgments, or indeed that his judgments were any less ‘subjective, a matter of individual preference’, than Leavis’s.

Nicholas Jacobs
London NW5