There was once a book that I had to read three times in grad school. And yes, it is one of the few books in grad school that I read more than twice (In truth, most of them I did not even finish because, well, it was painfully dull to get through them.).
Now, the book I have in mind was a distinctively unique book among hundreds of books that I was forced to read by professors with unapproachable personalities who all insisted on being called by their first name.
The book was by the historian-political scientist named Benedict Anderson called "Imagined Communities" (1983).
So what was it about?
Well, it's about nationalism, strictly speaking, but I find the moment it speaks to most interesting of all, for the book signals a decisive turn by "New Left" academe away from the legacy of the Comintern of international socialism (yes, there actually was a time when academics were card-carrying Socialists during Anderson's own days as a young student) towards a reevaluation of the premises of nationalism of all things as a kind of given for any promise of leftist politics.
This book signaled a theoretical departure on emphasis towards something once derided as a capitalist construct--- that is to say, the nation-state.
What I find most spectacular about this book is just how amusingly implausible it would be if Benedict Anderson were born (all else equal) in 1986 rather than 1936, or -- more to the point-- if he wrote the book in 2023 rather than 1983.
Could you imagine an up-and-comer of the "Left" validating the nation-state or, gulp, cultural nationalism in our own days? Clutch your pearls, indeed!
Hard as it is to believe, I confess there was a time, not all that long ago, when Leftists did not equate patriotism with fascism or borders with apartheid. They didn't see the nation as a problem in other words, but as a fundamental reality within which progressive politics was to be platformed. I mean, where else would it be platformed if not after the ballot in the places of lawmaking? That kind of presupposed a well-defined jurisdiction for laws to take effect, no?
And Anderson's book is not the outlier that it seems.
Another interesting period piece of the same Silent Generation variety to note is Richard Rorty's surprisingly grounded pamphlet Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). I say "grounded" because there is much in Rorty's "leftist" book that is fairly noncontroversial and, dare I say, even conservative? Here are some receipts that drip with historico-dramatic irony (thank you, Goodreads!):
Exhibit A: “The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us –– black, white, and brown –– are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such.” [Read in 2020? All Lives Matter].
Exhibit B: “If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines” [Read in 2020? Platforming Colonialism/ Commemorating White Supremacy. You hear that, Columbus Day?].
Exhibit C: "The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess." [Read in 2020? Neoliberalism.].
Each page, if memory serves, reads like a litany of platitudes by an aging left-leaning academic who lost his sense of confidence in the youth.
And Rorty was not alone either. Theodor Adorno's growing disillusionment with youth politics is perhaps lost to memory because it was mostly confined to West Germany that prompted in part his trek to sunny California where his characteristic pessimism left us with Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. [Indeed, much of Adorno's work, especially on aesthetics and music, can be seen as rather elitist.].
Anyway, the merits of Anderson and Rorty's similar observations about the plausibility of geographically and historically defined nation-states did not seem to resonate with the generations that followed.
By 2020, such books that committed to the norm of national communities suddenly seems quaint. Just as related calls to civic moderation, including Mark Lilla's The Once and Future Liberal (2017), largely went unheeded if not openly derided.
It was during this inflection point, let's say, that my graduate studies became increasingly difficult to bear as I began to ask myself, "why bother to continue? Where would I find myself ten, twenty, or thirty years from now if the likes of Anderson and Rorty seemed reactionary? Was I a "reactionary"? Did I belong here? Would I have to hide as a rule for the rest of my life just to get tenure?"
Turning back to these two books, it's hard to believe but Anderson and Rorty had careers at the same time as Derrida and Judith Butler. Stylistically, there is something interesting to observe among these unlikely peers, but then again, the late 20th century was so serene and irenic that even the silliness of the intellectuals doesn't seem all that material. These were times when America and the West could literally afford to be flippant and adorably insane. By 2020, however, the self-knowing flippancy had given way to a naive sentimentality. The insanity became mistaken for truth. People, without cracking a knowing smirk (as would many postmodernists in the '80s), would say things like "anti-racism is about praxis" or some such cringe garbage without even inquiring where "praxis" came from. Identity politics became less about inside jokes positioned as tenure-winning prose in academia (as was originally the case) and more about staffing HR departments and rewriting corporate grey literature with abstraction-mongering taken out of their original context, or about framing every contemporary issue around some great metahistorical monolith.
But despite their underdog status, let us say, Rorty and Anderson do suggest a deep pivot in how the American Left understands its own strategic self-interest between their publication dates and today: at the level of intellectual formation, for starters, young people in the 21st century don't seem much to care much about economics or labor relations or administrative law or what was once called the "harder social sciences" of the "real world" with its inquiry into process and structure because that would require a passing familiarity with a rather technical subject matters.
The shift to identity, which Lilla found so counter-productive in multicultural societies, makes sense when you realize that students prefer online phenomena and questions of identity and-- above all--- safe combativeness because they spend most of their lives online as anonymous disembodied personalities where the costs of an opinion are basically zero but the attention is disproportionately awarded to outliers. Indeed, that dynamic is precisely their sense of a community or country! By 2020, it was less about achieving "our country" and more about maximizing my twitter impressions.
How did this trend gain momentum? How did Rorty's nightmare for the Left that he cared so much for become a reality?
There are many ways to start to answer that question, but I prefer a useful thought experiment: If you call your boss "bourgeois" does it make him lose sleep at night? Ha-- No. He might join in the joke itself, but call him "sexist" or "racist" or "homophobe" --- and presto!, Your boss fears you!
With the rise of social media, the attack vectors on reputation, both personal and institutional, multiplied astronomically but they all tended to be highly focused on immutable characteristics. Why? Because that's where it personally hurts. The real teeth behind an attack were less about economics (even when that is where the inequality truly resides!) and more about literally almost anything else that defines our personal encounter with reality. This goes back to an important distinction that Rorty himself made: there is something salacious about sadism (e.g. racism, sexism, etc. in their true and original sense) but there is something manifestly unjust about greed that gets a pass in American life. And for Rorty (and most "classic leftists", let's call them), the real threat has always been economic inequality and our growing indifference towards it. Rorty saw the sensationalizing preoccupation with sadism (not the tendency itself which was, of course, bad) as a way to distract from the issues that truly concern us all once we sober up. There was something in effect de-politicizing about identity politics and Rorty was the first to point that out (without actually using the phrase "identity politics").
Even if he was largely right, it still feels that Rorty's treatise and Anderson's effort to historicize it lost out between 2008 and 2020.
Anderson was perhaps too short-sided himself when he asserted somewhat grandly from the opening of his book:
"The reality is quite plain: the 'end of the era of nationalism', so long prophesied [first by Marxist internationalists and then by neoliberal globalists], is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time."
Anderson goes on to explain the emotional richness and particularity of this identity over all others.
But then again, to what avail?
Not that it was his fault. By the early 1980s, who could foresee the rise of the EU as a kind of supra-national undemocratic entity or the dominance of strategic partners in trade? Or, the rise of the global Internet and the omnipresence of visual recording devices? Or, the rise of MNCs and their ability to transcend (and rewrite) territorial sovereignty of the nations they operate within?
So much for predictions. If only young men (myself included so long ago) could focus their attention on worthwhile things!
But this was a moment in my life when my beliefs were very muddled, much too worldly, and my sense of injustice somewhat misdirected towards this world. I was genuinely incensed that nobody was held accountable for the 2008 crisis that cost so many people their savings and their jobs or that held a generation back a decade or more in its development. This book resonated with me because I found myself surrounded by people who were remarkably unserious; and so, I sympathized with the likes of an Anderson and a Rorty who were similarly dismayed by their colleagues' lack of realism.
However, looking back on this today, I still can't help but chuckle to myself whenever I see this old book upon my bookshelf.
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