But Origins is usually cited as one of the building blocks of the Nairn-Anderson theory (at least as E. P. Thompson and later Ellen Wood put it?) I agree that there are many things that are both "very good" and "a thorough waste of time" but how do these overlap in the current case?
> The Nairn-Anderson thesis effectively redirected the left towards a critique of a supposedly unique English pre-modern governing culture. The true successor of the Nairn-Anderson programme, of course, was Margaret Thatcher's struggle against both the Tory Grandees and the 'Trade Union Barons'.
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First, was it really so influential? I don't think it did nearly as much to influence the British Left as, say, Thompson's work in "Making." And, second, how does it possibly follow that the critique of the unbourgeois, underdeveloped 17th century revolution (which, by the way was the Origin of the Present Crisis) led to Thatcherism? If anything, I'd say Thatcherism made it more possible for people like Wood (and her husband, Tony) to later look at Anderson and figure out what he missed about the way capitalism worked (i.e. that there is pure system based on social property relations and Britain was actually a better representation of this, despite its underdeveloped urban bourgeoisie). In other words, the neoliberal revival brought to the fore the argument that there was a pure model of liberalism. But in reading them, I can't help but think they are (to peg this back to the other conversation) that this insight is in some ways generated by a conception of capitalism as a Mode of Production, with more or less pure occasions of its instantiation in a social formation. In other words, their insight about Anderson, vis a vis Thompson, is ultimately made via Althusser in the context of Thatcher. I'll unpack that if you care enough about the response, but first I'd like an unpacking of how it is instead Anderson that leads to Thatcher, instead of, say, Hayek and Friedman?
> What Anderson was very good at was the grand survey of the state of the world.
I agree
> What he is not very good at is China and Russia, where he is led mostly by the most backward 'dissident' intelligentsia, who have an abiding contempt for the masses, and national sovereignty.
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no comment here. but it does seem like a common casualty of the genre in the current moment.
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