Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge Revivals) by Paul Hirst

Author:Paul Hirst [Hirst, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781136999079
Google: PCPJBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-15T15:53:04+00:00

Chapter 5

The Uniqueness of the West— Perry Anderson’s Analysis of Absolutism and its Problems*

In 1975 Perry Anderson broke the long silence since The Components of the National Culture’ with a massive two-volume text about the development of the Absolutist state in Europe. In Lineages of the Absolutist State Anderson is concerned with the distinct paths of development which characterise Absolutism in Eastern and Western Europe. The first volume, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, is a preface to the study of Absolutism and treats of the antecedent feudal constitutions which provide the groundwork for Absolutism in different parts of Europe. Two further volumes were promised, the first of them dealing with the major bourgeois revolutions and the second with the structures of the contemporary capitalist states which have emerged from them. Neither has so far appeared.

All in all, this amounts to an attempt to provide a history of the development of and of the variant forms of the state in Europe from Antiquity to the modern period. Anderson insists that this history is confined to the state, it is not a general history and it excludes any specific history of the economic level. Anderson justifies this specific object, the state, on the grounds of its political significance and of its neglect by Marxist historians. It is at the political level that the class struggle is decisively fought out and resolved, and at this level that the relations of production are decisively transformed.

No one would dispute this significance of the state as an object of political theory. The state is only the ostensible object of

*First published in Economy and Society, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1975.

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