Semi-Daily Journal

Perry Anderson's Missing Book

In the early 1970s Perry Anderson wrote his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State. The first covered the rise and decline of classical Mediterranean civilizations and the rise and transformation of the European feudalisms that grew out of and followed them. The second covered the "absolutist" European monarchies that in turn grew out of feudalism in the early modern period. I don't agree with them exactly--I am much more of a techno-organizational determinist than Anderson. But they are very interesting and thoughtful works indeed.

The natural next step seemed to be for Anderson to take his particular analytical framework--what I think of as neo-Weberian "modes of domination" coupled with a close look at politico-economic institutions all of which Anderson ties up in a package and pretends is some form of Marxism--to the eve of the Industrial Revolution: a study of European politics in the age of the democratic revolutions coupled with a look at the pace of the industrial economic transformation. It would have been an extraordinarily stimulative work on the birth of "modernity"--political democracy, urban culture, mass politics, the industrial revolution, market capitalism, and how and whether they all hung together as a system. I imagined chapters on the economy, society, and polity of:

• Late sixteenth-century Holland: the age of the revolt of the Netherlands.
• Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on up to the founding of the Third Republic.
• Nineteenth-century Germany.
• Nineteenth-century Italy.
• Nineteenth-century Spain.

Yet it was never written. Anderson has, instead, spent his time on a number of lesser projects that are, I think, of much less general interest (and that are certainly of much less interest to me).

I have always wondered why...