Spectrum

Antioch Review, The, Summer, 2006 by Maurice Meilleur

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas by Perry Anderson. Verso, 398 pp., $35.00. As in A Zone of Engagement (1992), Anderson arranges previously published review essays to illustrate larger trends in political thought, using the authors in question as exemplars. Anderson had written that the earlier volume covered post-war intellectual historians for whom he felt admiration, but not affinity or intellectual indebtedness. In this more systematic survey of twentieth-century political thought, he does include on the Left authors to whom he feels politically and intellectually closer, like Eric Hobsbawm and Sebastiano Timpanaro. But since Anderson's sense of affinity and intellectual debt cannot extend to thinkers elsewhere on the ideological spectrum, the question of fairness is appropriate.

Anderson stays fair to the Right. An essay on Oakeshott, Strauss, Schmitt, and Hayek, for example, if not groundbreaking, is an engaging comparison of their influences and conclusions. His account of the Center is more troublesome; the essay on Rawls's Political Liberalism, besides being dated, is a hatchet job, the content and tone of which obscures otherwise valid criticisms of Rawls. Anderson's tone softens with Habermas and Bobbio, and the essay comparing all three Center thinkers on their views of international relations and law, while critical, is nuanced and even forgiving. With the thinkers on the Left, though, Anderson's role and tone shifts markedly from skeptical to participatory. His treatment of authors like Hobsbawm, Timpanaro, Therborn, and Brenner, while still questioning, is also familiar--he apparently knows or knew all these authors personally--and indulgent.

The essays on Oakeshott et al. and Rawls et al., and an account of Anderson's father's career with the British Customs House in China from 1914-1941, are highlights of the book. But otherwise, there is not much here to appeal beyond Anderson's regular audience in The New Left Review.