Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007
pages 5-7 | 4498 words
The Enabling Boundary
Tom Nairn
- BuyWhat Should the Left Propose? by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Verso, 179 pp, £15.00, January 2006, ISBN 1 84467 048 1
- BuyThe Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Harvard, 277 pp, £19.95, February 2007, ISBN 978 0 674 02354 3
- Une brève histoire de l’avenir by Jacques Attali
Fayard, 432 pp, €20.00, October 2006, ISBN 2 213 63130 1
Dans mes bras, un cyclone imaginaire
flotte sur moi l’onde solitaire
Je suis la rivière qui penche
Le torrent qui s’élance
Je murmure sous la glace,
je connais les abîmes, les méandres irrésistibles,
Dans mes bras tourbillonne un cyclone
imperceptible, Sous mes pieds, des jardins imaginaires. . .
Anabase, ‘Le Bonheur flou’
These books don’t propose easy answers to the current dearth of centre-left initiative and hope. There are no quick third ways, rehabilitations and smart sideways leaps, and this makes them worth reading. The authors recognise the deep-seated errors of all the left-wing utopias that preceded the ascent of neoconservatism and insist that the latter’s victory wasn’t accidental, or avoidable. As a result, a much longer-range search is required for any change, which can no longer be a replacement, or a direct continuation. The recent French presidential election rubbed the point in painfully; as has the elevation of Gordon Brown on this side of the Channel.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 22 · 15 November 2007
From Tony Gross
In attempting to place Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s thinking in context (‘Unger’s Brazilian background must be relevant here’), Tom Nairn twice misses the mark (LRB, 18 October). First, although his point that Brazil has been amazingly detached from the 20th century’s warlike nationalism is right, it is not the case that it was ‘neutral in both great conflicts’. Although technically neutral at the start of the Second World War, the Vargas government allowed US air bases on its Atlantic coast and in January 1942 broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan. In July and August that year German submarines sunk several Brazilian merchant vessels, and on 22 August 1942 Brazil declared war on the Axis. The 25,000-strong Brazilian Expeditionary Force that landed in Italy in late 1944 played a key part in the Allied victory at the Battle of Monte Castello, the northward pursuit of German and Italian forces and their final surrender.
Second, by proposing that ‘Unger has lower-middle-class origins as good as anyone else’s,’ when he grew up with a grandfather who had been foreign minister in the 1920s, led the coup that deposed Vargas in 1945, and was then a state governor and senator, as well as having one great-uncle who was a renowned jurist and twice a minister during the Goulart government (1961-64) and a second great-uncle who was a well-known poet and president of the state oil company under Goulart, Nairn presumably seeks the elimination of the term ‘elite’ from the lexicon and wants to cause a collective crisis of identity among the millions of regular members of Brazil’s lower-middle class.
Tony Gross
Brasilia
From Alan Harris
In June 1917, Brazil revoked its neutrality and seized German ships. In November 1942, I was on a troopship in a large convoy heading for Freetown in Sierra Leone on its way to Durban. It changed direction and went instead to Bahia in Brazil. The explanation given to us was that Brazil had just entered the war against the Axis powers and the convoy’s visit would provide an early opportunity for Brazil to give practical effect to the new friendship.
Alan Harris
Bridport, Dorset
