Tom Nairn was the author of The Break-Up of Britain and The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy. His work in New Left Review in the 1960s, along with that of Perry Anderson, gave rise to what became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis, which argued that many of Britain’s failings were the result of capitalist development that came too early and wasn’t accompanied by a bourgeois revolution that would have resulted in a modernisation of state institutions. Many of the pieces he wrote for the LRB considered the same issues: nationalism, the nature of what he called the Ukanian state and the hold of the monarchy.
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...
More than a quarter of listeners asked last year in a Radio 4 poll who they thought was the most important philosopher for today’s world replied Karl Marx – he was easily the winner, ahead of Hume, Plato, Karl Popper and others. Asked to comment, Eric Hobsbawm said he thought that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis...
‘The long walk to justice doesn’t end at Gleneagles,’ Noreena Hertz warned protesters just before the recent G8 summit. ‘It only begins there.’ The official parade was in fact to end with a scamper, rather than a flourish, bearing an artfully prepared set-up into oblivion. As for the great anti-globalist parade, white-band-wearers ended up marking time more or...
“’Multitude’ is defined in Webster’s as ‘the state of being many’, with an implication of formlessness or indeterminacy: ‘a multitude of sins’ is probably its most common use. The same dictionary goes to Claud Cockburn for its adjectival example: ‘The mosquitoes were multitudinous and fierce.’ Hardt and Negri attempt a more positive definition, laying emphasis on signs of grace, and attendant democratic virtues. But this turns out to be curiously like the bus tours found in all big cities. Sightseers impatient for the general design get whisked at speed past famous landmarks, as the guide intones a suitable (often rather similar) judgment on each one, with too few dodgy jokes. The guides in this case are invariably erudite: their references take up 45 pages, and great efforts are made with innovative concepts such as network struggles, ‘swarm intelligence’, ‘biopower’ (’engaging social life in its entirety’), immaterial labour, and the multitudinous spirit as carnival (’a theory of organisation based on the freedom of singularities that converge in the production of the common: Long live movement! Long live carnival! Long live the common!’). The ‘monstrosity of the flesh’ gets a look-in as well, though rendered decent as Man, ‘the animal . . . that is changing its own species’.”
The swagman he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
‘Waltzing Matilda’, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1895)
Three weeks before the American presidential vote, the political right was victorious in the Australian federal elections of 9...
The organisers of the Festival of Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s...
Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom...
I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his...
Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.