On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Jeet Heer wrote:
> I would agree with Doug that Anderson's essays on current politics tend
> to be bloated excercises in stating the obvious at great length.
Often, but not always. Sometimes he regains his old magisterial form even here. For example in this article in the March issue of the London Review of Books which attempts to sum up the last decade (and in some ways, the last half century) of Italian politics:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/article.php?get=ande01_2406
This is long but IMHO dense with thought and elegantly put. I enjoyed even the parts I disagreed with.
I think the thing with Perry is that, books or articles, his stuff is just amazingly long. When his writing is taut, like _Lineages_, it is amazing that he can keep up such a high level for such a long time. And when his writing is flabby, it just seems just as amazing, but in the bad sense, that he can keep it up for so long.
I personally think his forte is the analysis of national (or regional) political cultures and their emergence from specific political histories. And that's essentially what the Italy article is about. When he writes about stuff far afield from that, the results are not usually in the same class.
Also he's always been a lot better at explaining the past than speculating about the immediate future.
Michael