Postwar

Patocka or Leszek Kolakowski—were still mostly unknown outside their own countries. As for the sparkling cohort of economists, philosophers and social theorists who had flourished in Central Europe before 1934: most of the survivors had gone into permanent exile in the US, Great Britain or the Antipodes, where they formed the intellectual core of modern ‘Anglo-Saxon’ scholarship in their fields.

In its newly fashionable usage, ‘Theory’ meant something quite different. It was largely taken up with ‘interrogating’ (a contemporary term of art) the method and objectives of academic disciplines: above all the social sciences—history, sociology, anthropology—but also the humanities and even, in later years, the laboratory sciences themselves. In an age of vastly expanded universities, with periodicals, journals and lecturers urgently seeking ‘copy’, there emerged a market for ‘theories’ of every kind—fuelled not by improved intellectual supply but rather by insatiable consumer demand.

At the forefront of the theory revolution were the academic disciplines of History and the softer social sciences. The renewal of historical study in Europe had begun a generation before: the Economic History Review and Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilizations were both founded in 1929, their revisionist projects implicit in their titles. In the 1950s had come the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the influential social history journal Past & Present; the Cultural Studies unit at England’s Birmingham University, inspired by the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams; and, a little later, the Social History school centered around Hans-Ulrich Wehler at Bielefeld University in West Germany.

The scholarship produced by the men and women associated with these groups and institutions was not necessarily iconoclastic; indeed, though usually of very high quality, it was often quite methodologically conventional. But it was self-consciously interpretive, typically from a non-dogmatic but unmistakably left-leaning position. Here was history informed by social theory, and by an insistence upon the importance of class, particularly the lower classes. The point was not just to narrate or even explain a given historical moment; the point was to reveal its deeper meaning. Historical writing in this vein seemed to bridge the gap between past and present, between scholarly speculation and contemporary engagement, and a new generation of students read (and, not infrequently, mis-read) it in this light.

But for all its political applications, History is a discipline peculiarly impervious to high theoretical speculation: the more Theory intrudes, the farther History recedes. Although one or two of the leading historians of the Sixties went on to achieve iconic status in old age none of them—however subversive his scholarship—quite emerged as a cultural guru. Other disciplines fared better—or worse, depending on one’s point of view. Borrowing from an earlier vein of speculation in the field of linguistics, cultural anthropologists—led by Claude Levi-Strauss— proposed a comprehensive new explanation for variations and differences across societies. What counted was not surface social practices or cultural symptoms but the inner essences, the deep structures of human affairs.

‘Structuralism’, as it came to be called, was intensely seductive. As a way of sorting human experience it bore a family resemblance to the Annales school of history—whose best-known contemporary exponent, Fernand Braudel, had built his reputation on the study of the longue duree, a bird’s-eye view of history describing slowly shifting geographical and social structures across long periods—and thus fitted comfortably into the academic style of the time. But of greater relevance was structuralism’s immediate accessibility to intellectuals and non-specialists. As explicated by Levi-Strauss’s admirers in cognate disciplines, structuralism was not even a representational theory: the social codes, or ‘signs’, that it described related not to any particular people or places or events but merely to other signs, in a closed system. It was thus not subject to empirical testing or disproof—there was no sense in which structuralism could ever be demonstrated to be wrong—and the iconoclastic ambition of its assertions, allied to this impermeability to contradiction, guaranteed it a wide audience. Anything and everything could be explained as a combination of ‘structures’: as Pierre Boulez noted when labeling one of his compositions Structures, ‘it is the key word of our time.’

In the course of the 1960s there emerged a plethora of applied structuralisms: in anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, political science and of course literature. The best-known practitioners—usually those who combined in the right doses scholarly audacity with a natural talent for self-promotion—became international celebrities, having had the good fortune to enter the intellectual limelight just as television was becoming a mass medium. In an earlier age Michel Foucault might have been a drawing-room favourite, a star of the Parisian lecture circuit, like Henri Bergson fifty years earlier. But when Les Mots et les Choses sold 20,000 copies in just four months after it appeared in 1966 he acquired celebrity status almost overnight.

Foucault himself foreswore the label ‘structuralist, much as Albert Camus always insisted he had never been an ‘existentialist’ and didn’t really know what that was.[163] But as Foucault at least would have been constrained to concede, it didn’t really matter what he thought. ‘Structuralism’ was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, ‘structuralists’ were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs.[164]

But for all its protean applications, the idea that everything is ‘structured’ left something vital unexplained. For Fernand Braudel, or Claude Levi-Strauss, or even Michel Foucault, the goal was to uncover the deep workings of a cultural system. This might or might not be a subversive scholarly impulse—it certainly was not in Braudel’s case—but it does gloss over or minimize change and transition. Decisive political events in particular proved resistant to this approach: you could explain why things had to change at a given stage, but it wasn’t clear just how they did so, or why individual social actors opted to facilitate the process. As an interpretation of human experience, any theory dependent on an arrangement of structures from which human choice had been eliminated was thus hobbled by its own assumptions. Intellectually subversive, structuralism was politically passive.

The youthful impulse of the Sixties was not about understanding the world; in the words of Karl Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, written when Marx himself was just 26 years old and much cited in these years: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ When it came to changing the world there was still only one grand theory purporting to relate an interpretation of the world to an all-embracing project of change; only one Master Narrative offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself.

The intellectual affinities and political obsessions of the Sixties in Europe only make sense in the light of this continuing fascination with Marx and Marxism. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it in 1960, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason: ‘I consider Marxism to be the unsurpassable philosophy of our time.’ Sartre’s unshaken faith was not universally shared, but there was general agreement across the political spectrum that anyone wishing to understand the world must take Marxism and its political legacy very seriously. Raymond Aron —Sartre’s contemporary, erstwhile friend and intellectual nemesis—was a lifelong anti-Communist. But he, too, freely acknowledged (with a mixture of regret and fascination) that Marxism was the dominant idea of the age: the secular religion of its epoch.

Between 1956 and 1968 Marxism in Europe lived—and, as it were, thrived—in a state of suspended animation. Stalinist Communism was in disgrace, thanks to the revelations and events of 1956. The Communist parties of the West were either politically irrelevant (in Scandinavia, Britain, West Germany and the Low Countries); in slow but unmistakable decline (France); or else, as in the Italian case, striving to distance themselves from their Muscovite inheritance. Official Marxism, as incarnated in the history and teachings of Leninist parties, was largely discredited—especially in the territories over which it continued to rule. Even those in the West who chose to vote Communist evinced little interest in the subject.

At the same time there was widespread intellectual and academic interest in those parts of the Marxist inheritance that could be distinguished from the Soviet version and salvaged from its moral shipwreck. Ever since the Founder’s death, there had always been Marxist and marxisant sects and splinter groups—well before 1914 there were already tiny political parties claiming the True Inheritance. A handful of these, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), were still in existence: vaunting their political virginity and asserting their uniquely correct interpretation of the original Marxist texts.[165] But most late-nineteenth-century Socialist movements,circles, clubs and societies had been absorbed into the general-purpose Socialist and Labour parties that coalesced in the years 1900-1910. Modern Marxist disputes have