The American Interest A new book by Perry Anderson masterfully recounts the rise and fall of the Brazilian Left. Where it goes wrong is its treatment of the Right.
Perry Anderson
Verso, 2019, 256 pp., $26.95
English Marxism is, or was, a happy marriage of temperaments. Marxists can sometimes lack a sense of humor, and the English, the courage of their convictions. The one supplies the deficiency of the other.
The historical accomplishments of the English Marxist historians are well known. Earlier this year the publication of a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, their greatest champion, was closely attended by American intellectuals. Even our journalists, not invariably candidates for reading history books (especially about countries other than the United States), can be relied upon to own a copy of The Age of Revolution.
Perry Anderson is the last of this type. Since the closing days of the Cold War, his contemporaries have either died or abandoned Marxism, the field of academic history has moved in other directions, and Anderson’s own zeal has waned with the eclipse of revolutionary socialism as a real possibility. Yet he remains a towering figure on the Left, as we have been lately reminded, in the form of his bombardment of the work of economic historian Adam Tooze. English readers are by now accustomed to the periodic pleasure of reading a hefty Anderson essay on Brazil in the pages of the London Review, on subjects ranging from macroeconomics to political intrigue to Brazilian letters and back again with consummate erudition and a famously extensive back-catalogue of allusions and ten-dollar words.
His latest book, Brazil Apart, collects five essays on Brazil spanning the last 25 years, and appends a new segment that brings the narrative forward another few months, from January to July 2019. The intention was to collect and translate the essays for publication in Brazil, where Anderson’s work has not yet garnered much attention from intellectuals.
The results will be interesting to watch. His wary conviction in the potential of the Brazilian Left, paired with his almost unblinking enumeration of its failures, may earn him enemies among both the diehard Workers’ Party (PT) Left and the party’s critics on the center and Right. With the book coming out in Portuguese, it seemed a waste not to have it come out in English, too.
The essays have largely been left as they were published. Anderson says his decision to leave in predictions and characterizations that held up badly was made in an effort to preserve the record. It does seem that little of value could have been lost in removing the periodic reintroductions of facts, characters, and institutions, which, if convenient in the original venue, are of no use to the reader of this book.
That is not to say that leaving each installment intact was not the right determination. In the traditional history book, both the author and the reader know the ending in advance; while in this book, the reader knows the ending, but the author does not—thus generating a more visceral sense of the abrupt changes of fortune that characterize the last 30 years in Brazil. A unitary work on the period, if composed now, would almost inevitably straighten the tortuous path of recent history for the sake of argument and present a false sense of continuity or prolepsis.
It is generally believed the Greek historian Thucydides composed his famous history in stages as the Peloponnesian War wore on. The figure of the contemporary historian—men who wrote on their own times but with historical acumen, dedicating their work to posterity rather than the applause of the moment—was a constant presence in antiquity: Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Ammianus Marcellinus. Today their work has been divided up between journalists and academics. Neither profession requires the combination of ambition and rigor that contemporary history once did.
Anderson’s broad scope, high stature, and wide reading habits have allowed him to write essays on Brazil that are neither journalistic nor academic. They touch on contemporary subjects, but they do not break news; they react to an extensive academic literature, but they do not proffer contributions to it per se. They remain above the ruck, but below the ivory tower, and they never fall into the gimmick and windbaggery that often characterizes writing that splits this difference.