Ukania Delenda

Perry Anderson's latest mega-essay for the New Left Review on "the conjuncture" (Ukania Perpetua) has the air of an elegy. He's 82 and many of his collaborators and critics have now left the stage, notably Edward Thompson, Tom Nairn and Ellen Meiksins Wood. He probably won't be around for much longer and while he remains as acute and acerbic as ever, there is a sense of a life in review, if not an apologia pro vita sua. The essay revisits the Nairn-Anderson thesis, as it came to be known, which attributed the UK's industrial decline in the 1960s to the persistence of an ancien regime following the incomplete bourgeois revolution of the 17th century (which was waylaid by religion) and the absorption of a precocious capitalism by the aristocracy between 1688 and 1832 (I'm massively simplifying, of course). This in turn produced political complacency and mystagogy, a subaltern and conservative labour movement, and an intellectural Philistinism in both academia and public life. The thesis was further elaborated in the late-70s and early-80s (notably in Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain), when the failings of the UK state appeared to herald its dissolution and British capital was deserting what was left of domestic industry.

This narrative of the UK's history is contrasted to the more "normal" development (from a Marxist perspective) seen in continental Europe, archetypically in France after 1789. The classic hallmarks were the sweeping away of feudal remnants, the development of modern bureaucracy, the state direction of industrial strategy, the valorisation of technical education, and the emergence of both a labour movement committed to revolution and a socially-integrated intelligentsia. This contrast was memorably ridiculed by Thompson as "inverted Podsnappery", though the heart of his critique concerns Nairn and Anderson's tendentious domestic history rather than the international comparison. In Thompson's view the UK's peculiar history reflected the success of the aristocracy and gentry in becoming capitalist in practice and stymying monarchical absolutism early. The political struggles of the 18th and early-19th centuries are then primarily factional disputes - largely between those members of the gentry who benefited from Old Corruption and those who didn't - rather than class friction between a landed aristocracy and an urban bourgeoisie. For all the prominence of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the significant moment was the 1832 Reform Act, which more evenly distributed power within a capitalist class that now spanned the agrarian, industrial and financial sectors.

Thompson's critique was expanded upon by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her 1992 book, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (excerpted here). In particular, she paid attention to the other side of the comparison, noting the continuity of the ancien regime in bourgeois modernity: "the emergence of these hallmarks in Continental Europe did not signal the maturity of 'bourgeois' or capitalist forces but on the contrary reflected the continuing strength of pre-capitalist social property relations. In fact, the appearance of ideas commonly associated with the advent of the modern state - certain conceptions of indivisible sovereignty and nationhood, for instance - testify as much to the absence of 'modernity', and indeed the absence of a unified sovereignty and nationhood, as to their presence in reality". This, I think, is a potentially fruitful point of departure in analysing the current political situation in the UK, in particular the way that characteristics more familiar from absolutism (a subject addressed in Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State, though he doesn't refer to that 1974 book in his new essay) have started to appear, particularly in respect to sovereignty and nationhood. Examples of this are citizenship (which is really a totalising institution birthed under absolutism rather than its democratic antithesis), the symbolic embodiment of the nation, and the role of law as the servant of the state rather than the individual.

Up to the 1980s, the use of "citizens" instead of "subjects" was mostly a leftwing manoeuvre in British political discourse - albeit with wider nationalist connotations in the UK periphery - intended to emphasise both the institutions of the social democratic state and its liberal commitment to civil society. Citizenship had formally replaced the British subject in the 1948 Nationality Act, but it was only after the 1981 Nationality Act that the two were finally divorced. From that point onwards, the term citizen eclipsed that of subject both in official usage and the popular vocabulary. Yet rather than suggesting a growing republicanism, it signalled a shift towards a normative nationalism that would eventually be enshrined in the citizenship test for those seeking naturalisation. For all the ridicule the test continues to prompt, citizenship in political discourse has clearly become a synonym for integration and a cultural catechism in its own right - a view that owes as much to Scottish as English nationalism in recent years. The increased use by the political right of terms like "the people" is not simply an indicator of populism - the opposition of the popular will to a notional elite - but the demand for political homogeneity. Likewise, the Windrush scandal is not simply racial and class prejudice but the inevitable fallout of an attempt to rigidly define the boundaries of that people in the face of messy reality.

A characteristic of the post-Falklands era in Britain has been a growing identification with the military as the embodiment of the nation, and a complementary decline in respect for the no longer irreproachable royal family, the Queen excepted. The contemporary totems of nationalism are the St George's flag and the remembrance poppy; the one a coded rebuke to the supra-national House of Windsor, the other a celebration of popular sacrifice. The emergent national idea is a mix of mangled history (the benefits of empire, licking Hitler), paranoia (the EU, migrants) and a performative loyalty in which the tropes of sporting fandom (theatrical contempt, badge-kissing) have replaced the complacent deference of old. This obviously owes something to the disenchantment of the royal family in an era of mass media, though scandalous behaviour was hardly a novelty in the past. But it also owes something to the erosion of the concept of duty in parallel with the expansion of the market. The armed forces remain one of the few unimpeachable exemplars of "public service" and injured former soldiers are emotive emblems of communal sacrifice in an era of hyper-individualism.

In his NLR essay, Anderson describes the economic prioritisation of the City's globalisation and the willingness to ride shotgun for the US in the postwar period as the "two prongs of Ukanian eversion" - i.e. the maintenance of the state elite by a conscious turning outwards and neglect of the domestic. Just as Brexit represents a rejection of the economic prong, Help for Heroes represents a rejection of the interventionist prong. This isn't a new development, and nor should it be casually bracketed with the chauvinism of the far-right - its antecedents are the original Little Englanders who eschewed imperial adventures in favour of bourgeois industry. Again, it's helpful to compare England with Scotland here, noting the SNP's longstanding objections to Trident and its equivocation over NATO. Unless you imagine the Scots are peculiarly pacific, this suggests that the UK population as a whole is less than keen on foreign wars, which was certainly obvious even in the early days of the Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures. As jingoism has declined, we have perhaps paradoxically become more sentimental about the armed forces.

On the political right, the challenge to the supremacy of the law goes beyond a distaste for the Supreme Court, set up under New Labour, and its supposed championing of the European Courts' "meddling" in UK affairs, to a more general distrust of the judiciary as representative of a liberal, as opposed to conservative, elite. This transformation, which is clearly one of perception rather than reality, is startling when you consider the attitudes towards (and the attitudes of) the higher judiciary in the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of Lords Denning and Donaldson. The parallel denigration of lawyers as self-interested shysters, or metropolitan elitists determined to frustrate the popular will over Brexit and asylum, owes less to any popular shift in sentiment (despite the best efforts of the press) and more to a deliberate policy pursued by the Conservative party to make the courts subservient to executive fiat. Similarly, the government's various attempts to insist it is above the law, whether in its arbitrary prorogation of Parliament or the provisions of the Internal Markets Bill to allow it to renege on international treaties, are the hallmarks of absolutism. Examples of personal impunity are then emblematic of a theory of state rather than a simple lack of virtue.

These changes are significant because all three institutions - the subject, the monarchy, the courts - were central to the success of aristocratic capital in establishing its political hegemony between the 16th and 18th centuries, thereby nullifying the threat of monarchical absolutism in Britain. The notion of the subject - someone with inalienable and ancient rights rather than feudal obligations - supported the claim that the entire nation was present in Parliament, even if most of it had no say in its representation, in contrast to the fragmented polity in pre-revolutionary France. Constitutional royalty was the basis of sovereignty - the Crown in Parliament - but this was designed to exclude the possibility of any sort of democratic sovereignty, once the radicals had been defeated by the grandees during the Civil War (and their inheritors first brutally suppressed at Peterloo and then dismissed with the failure of Chartism). The crown courts were the means by which class power was established at a national level rather than being parcellised through manorial courts and local jurisidictions (in the French manner), protecting the property rights and executing the contract law that were foundational to the emergent agrarian capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. So what is driving change in these three areas? The supersession of the subject by the citizen could be attributed to the delayed effects of democratisation, as could the gradual disenchantment of the monarchy, but democracy cannot be fingered for the recent assault on the law, despite invocations of the will of the people.

As Ellen Meiksens-Wood described, the triumph of the bourgeois state in 19th century France was less a violent disjuncture from a feudal past, as the traditional story of 1789 has it, than the fulfilment of the absolutist designs of the 17th and 18th centuries: a centralised state apparatus, the primacy of offices and government perquisites over commerce as the route to advancement, and a nationalism based on cultural homogeneity rather than dynastic fealty (features which persist and are arguably being reinforced under Macron, despite his valorisation of commerce). A paradox of the last 40 years is that while governments of both conservative and liberal temperament have advocated the rolling back of the state, what they have enacted has been a steady centralisation of power. Local government has been neutered as a political rival and its powers of patronage curtailed. Privatisation has been widespread, both in the selling-off of nationalised industries and in the transfer of housing assets from public to private ownership, but the more significant development in respect of the state's character has been the growth of outsourced public services, which has created a state/capital nexus that exhibits many of the characteristics of absolutism, such as privileged access to tax revenues (consider the role of firms like Serco or BCG recently) and richly-rewarded offices within the grant of government (think Dido Harding or the jockeying for the plum role of Chair of the BBC).

Though corporatism was rejected after 1789 in favour of individual rights, it continued to live on during the bourgeois era, being revisited by thinkers such as Mill and Durkheim, before being revived by the Facists in unambiguously absolutist terms: "everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". While politicians in the social democratic era certainly targeted particular interest groups - mothers, pensioners, young adults etc - this was always within the frame of a class position based on an overall balance between tax and spend. We are now in an era in which high taxation is taken to be inimical to economic growth and the market has been largely moved beyond the purview of government. As a result, control of expenditure now does most of the heavy lifting in the management of the state's finances. The consequence of this is that parties now compete for votes through promises of preferential treatment, such as the pensions triple-lock or the abolition of tuition fees, rather than through broader promises of tax reductions or spending increases in which specific cases are held to be emblematic of a wider programme (even Labour's 2017 and 2019 manifestoes were cautious in this regard). 

The result is that politics is increasingly framed in corporate terms, in the sense that it deals with distinct and presumably self-interested groups within society, which is reflected in the turn of political science to the (often spurious) sociology of an electorate divided by geography, age and ethnicity more than traditional class consciousness. In this environment, national identity is increasingly associated with intrinsic preferences and dispositions (aka the culture wars), including some that are essentially projections of elite prejudice (e.g. somewheres versus anywheres), rather than the supra-political totems of old. If the social democratic era was marked by the celebration of warm beer and eccentricity, our current era seems to be defined by gentlemen of a certain age "protecting" statues or newspaper columnists demanding a daily hecatomb to assuage the gods of the economy. It would be easy to laugh and miss what's going on here - not a descent into frivolity and spite but the insistence that everything is zero-sum: if you are up then I am down. This is a hallmark of absolutism: a closed system of power in which relative advantage is all.

At a time when the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill now before the Commons seeks a carte blanche for the agencies of the state (in a specific and limited way, of course), and the military are to be given protection against civilian charges of historic abuse, it should be obvious that there is something very wrong in a country that has historically prided itself on the restraint of arbitrary state power and has been wary of showing the military too much respect. Though Perry Anderson has been happy to amend his thinking in light of the criticism of Thompson and others, his failure to mention Meiksins Wood (who was on the NLR's editorial committee for almost a decade) in his new essay strikes me as significant. It is precisely her insights into the absolutist lineaments of the bourgeois state that I think are relevant to the UK's present conjuncture. If I'm right, what we're witnessing is not the delayed completion of the English revolution by a modernising gentry (of which both Johnson and Cummings are representative) but the collapse of British exceptionalism that Anderson long-heralded. The problem is that lacking many of the institutions typical of the "mature" bourgeois state to cushion the blow, the lineaments of absolutism are becoming ever more pronounced. Far from Ukania Perpetua, we may be witnessing Ukania Delenda.