Tuesday, October 29, 2013

The new unimproved Perry Anderson

"But Anderson is no flighty herald of revolution. Rather, for more than two decades, he has asserted that liberal capitalism is the ne plus ultra of political and economic life on earth. His advice to the left is to abandon its hopes for socialism and embrace an ideal of “uncompromising realism.” As Anderson sees it, today’s leftist intellectuals are compromised by their academic affiliations and have rendered themselves irrelevant with their unfathomable prose. Indeed, he finds more to admire in neoliberal prophets and partisans of globalization, such as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, who in Anderson’s view have “provided one fluent vision of where the world is going, or has stopped, after another.” Anderson reserves particular antipathy for bourgeois democrats and liberal internationalists who appear to deny or resist the steady “flattening” of the world by omnipotent neoliberalism."