English Marxists in dispute

Roy Porter

  • Arguments within English Marxism by Perry Anderson
    New Left Books, 218 pp, £3.95, May 1980, ISBN 0 86091 727 4
  • Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory edited by Philip Corrigan
    Quartet, 232 pp, £4.95, May 1980, ISBN 0 7043 2241 2
  • Writing by Candlelight by E.P. Thompson
    Merlin, 286 pp, £2.70, May 1980, ISBN 0 85036 257 1

The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe that blooms come best in mixed bunches. They may allow themselves some guarded asides on the psychology of chiliasm, but would reject Norman Cohn’s full-frontal psychopathology of antisemitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as dominated by clique and pique rather than by constitutional principle, but would hesitate about his overarching behavioural conservatism. Call this open-mindedness, pussy-footing or Vicar of Bravery, it has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick.

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Vol. 2 No. 14 · 17 July 1980 » Roy Porter » English Marxists in dispute (print version)
Pages 11-12 | 3263 words