Vol. 13 No. 9 · 9 May 1991
pages 3-8 | 9655 words
Nation-States and National Identity
Perry Anderson
- The Identity of France. Vol. II: People and Production by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds
Collins, 781 pp, £25.00, December 1990, ISBN 0 00 217774 9
The most renowned historian of his time. Fernand Braudel owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and limited in execution. The Identity of france has generally been treated as a charming but relatively slight coda to his achievement as a whole. In fact, this concluding project – on which Braudel embarked in his late seventies – was conceived on a colossal scale. The torso that survives, two volumes devoted to geography, demography and production, is over a thousand pages in its English edition. They were to be followed by two sequels: one concerned with French politics, culture and society, the other with external relations. This quartet on ‘Identity’ was then to be completed with two further works, respectively on the ‘Birth’ and the ‘Destiny’ of France, in which Braudel planned to re-totalise the structures analysed separately in the first four studies into an integrated narrative history of his country. Perhaps incredulous of such ambition, Sian Reynolds has taken the liberty of suppressing the full extent of it in her graceful English translation.
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[*] Routlege, 330 pp., 300 pp. and 298 pp., £40 and £12.95 each, 15 June 1989, 0 415 02772 1, 0 415 02773 X and 0 415 02774 8.
[†] Europe, Europe, translated by Martin Chalmers (Radius, 272 pp., £14.95, 1989, 0 09 174222 6).
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 12 · 27 June 1991
From Rupert Wilkinson
As a historian of ideas of national character, who is based in American Studies, I would like to comment on what Perry Anderson says about these ideas (LRB, 9 May). Anderson usefully illuminates the path of European contentions about national character up to the early 20th century, but he is quite wrong to assert that serious work on the subject ceased after the Twenties. He does not, it seems, confine this assertion to Europe: yet even in Britain he overlooks, for example, the wide-ranging analysis by Morris Ginsberg, published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1942. Nor do I agree that George Orwell’s essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (published the year before) can be written off as patriotic guff. Of course it was coloured by wartime patriotism, but it was far from complacent about the ability of collective attitudes and values to cross the lines of class, region and political ideology.
Anderson’s main omission, however, is the contribution of ‘culture and personality’ anthropologists led by Margaret Mead (the group included her British protégé Geoffrey Gorer) in the Thirties and Forties, and the subsequent post-war boom in American-character studies – generating an output which the Sixties revolt against ‘consensus’ interrupted only temporarily. It is true that some of this writing, from The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman et al (1950) to The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979), presented new American character types as the harbingers of something that was happening more generally in the modern world. This is in line with Anderson’s reference to a ‘homogenised’ and permissive culture of international capitalism, a subject explored back in 1977 by Daniel Snowman’s book, Kissing Cousins, which portrays a convergence of American and British values and culture since World War Two. On the other hand, the notion of a distinctive American character still has powerful voices, including the political sociologist, Seymour Martin Lipset, author of several comparative studies (including Europe) since the early Sixties, and the team of scholars led by Robert Bellah, whose Habits of the Heart (1985) identifies four traditions of American individualism. Anderson manages to avoid a single reference to America or American thinking, even though the American sociologist, Daniel Bell, addresses much the same issue in the late Sixties. In a way, this is understandable since the main focus of Anderson’s essay was continental Western Europe. But it would have been better if his comments on the literature of national character and national identity had either kept explicitly to this terrain, or had widened their scope and modified their claims.
Rupert Wilkinson
University of Sussex
