AMERICANA
Perry Anderson
Three Essays Collective, 2015
244 pages; Rs 350
Perry Anderson, of the New Left Review, the New School, and the London Review of Books, is probably our greatest living political essayist. He has a rare gift: to be able to summarise a vast literature in a few pages, dismiss it as missing the point, and then in effect, in the subsequent few pages, replace that vast literature with his own theorising. His arguments are invariably bolstered by unfamiliar quotes from familiar names that cause you to question the received narratives about those people; and by reading that seems as wide as his arguments are pointed.
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Americana, his new book - now published in India by Three Essays Collective - is, like The Indian Ideology, a collection of three essays, except these were written for the New Left Review and not the LRB. The first, "Homeland", is a survey of the American political landscape since 2000; the second, "Imperium", is a history and a diagnosis of US foreign policy since Roosevelt; and the third, "Consilium", is about the people and ideas that populate American "grand strategy", from Robert Kagan to Francis Fukuyama.
"Homeland", the essay about American domestic politics, is mercifully short. Prof Anderson touches sparingly on various issues: Bill Clinton's peccadilloes, the culture wars under George W Bush, the determined centrism of Barack Obama - without adding anything of consequence to these much-discussed subjects. Unusually for Prof Anderson, none of the arguments here are exciting or in any way original. Had he been writing about a smaller or less-studied country, Prof Anderson might not have felt the pressure to try and talk about everything in a short essay - the Christian right, inequality, racism, crisis and recovery. In effect, he talks about everything, and thus conveys nothing.
"Imperium" is much longer than "Homeland", and far more readable. It is a critical survey of Pax Americana of the sort that, once, the Soviet Union used to fund, taking in US intervention and villainy in Latin America, West Asia, and Europe. Today, when the only real criticism of American foreign policy that has equivalent historical sweep comes from slightly deranged bloggers or postmodern academics with an ideological objection to facts, to read Prof Anderson write about American empire in a clinical, inquiring tone feels oddly nostalgic.
Again, this is not to say that Prof Anderson gets a great deal right in this section. What he does get right has been said more eloquently elsewhere. You already know that, when the US set itself up as the beacon of democracy in the 1950s, the architects of the Cold War in the State Department - George F Kennan and Dean Acheson - were not free of hypocrisy. You already know that criticism of Mr Obama's foreign policy from votaries of US power is over-done, and that he has extended the reach of the executive. But it is not when he is right, but when he is wrong, that Prof Anderson is both original and interesting. The idea that the fall of the Soviet Union was the reason that neoclassical economic policy was more sharply applied is interesting (though wrong). The idea that Mr Clinton's "first priority was to build out the liberal order of free trade into a global system under US command" is, again, interesting - though so wrong as to reach tinfoil-hat status.
The real problem with "Imperium" is that, in spite of the excellent writing, it becomes a little heavy going for a reader. The reason is that Prof Anderson does not care to link the geographically and temporally distinct episodes he describes into a single coherent argument. He does have a single overarching argument, in fact: that US foreign policy is both "universal" and "particular" - universal in that it seeks to establish a liberal world order for the good of all, and particular in the sense that it expects US interests will naturally take primacy in any liberal world order. This is an interesting idea, and had Prof Anderson integrated it, and domestic politics, more tightly with his descriptions of foreign-policy misadventures, "Imperium" would have been a great essay. As it is, it is slightly less.
The final section, "Consilium", is a sociology - or a typology, really - of American strategic thinking. Here, finally, in his most circumscribed subject, Prof Anderson hits his stride. He examines, turn by turn, various schools of American strategic thinking, taking particular authors as emblematic; he looks at differences, similarities, and turning points. It is a masterful review of one of the most politically salient fields of thought in the world, and it deserves to be read. Sadly, it is the only essay in this collection that deserves as much.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this edition of Prof Anderson's book, however, is the introduction. Reading The Indian Ideology, you got the sense that India irritated Prof Anderson because many of its characteristics and national claims were a little too like the United States. In the first paragraph of the introduction to Americana, he makes his view of those similarities clear.
Prof Anderson is our greatest essayist. But his great essays are written about smaller subjects than he has recently taken on. It may be futile to hope that he realises this, but I do so hope anyway.
CLARIFICATION
George F Kennan was wrongly mentioned as John Kennan. The error is regretted.
