Perry Anderson

“If the movement is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic justice will follow. A merely prudential opposition to the war will not survive a triumph, any more than handwringing about its legality a UN figleaf.”

For two decades – more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity – South America has been largely forgotten by world politics. Recycled democratisation, debt and dependency offered few conflicts and yielded no consequences to compare with dramas in Eastern Europe or Russia,...

Historically, in truth, ‘representative democracy is rarely a convincing way of running states.’ Amid the reigning gabble of non-stop ñ bureaucratic, academic, journalistic ñ democratese, such astringency is a bracing corrective. If any testimony were needed of just how unassimilable Hobsbawm’s work is to any comfortable consensus, these acrid verdicts would be enough.

Hobsbawm calls this combination of loyalty and ambition a form of egoism, which he does not defend. Most people would see in it evidence of an exceptional integrity and strength of character: a courage to take unpopular positions all the more striking in one for whom success has plainly mattered so much.

Italy has long occupied a peculiar position within the concert of Europe. By wealth and population it belongs alongside France, Britain and Germany as one of the four leading states of the Union. But it has never played a comparable role in the affairs of the continent, and has rarely been regarded as a diplomatic partner or rival of much significance. Its image lacks any association with...