ABSTRACT
In this form it was not to be. After issue no.12, barely two years after it started, Stuart Hall resigned, the London club closed, and Perry Anderson and a group of younger scholars from Oxford, who had meanwhile been publishing The New University, took over. Thereafter, theory, apparently sundered from social movement, took central space. NLR changed format to a standard academistic one, though singlemindedly, through the journal and, later, from 1971, its publishing house, pursuing an agenda of translation from (mainly) European texts from the Frankfurt School, the French structuralists and post-structuralists, Italian post-Gramscian Marxists, and a re-examination of the work of Lukács as well as some Latin Americans (though oddly enough no Africans, Asians or even Russians), and attempting to integrate this work into a rethinking of the nature of British society, politics and culture. It was a formidable agenda, announced in Perry Anderson’s (1964) article ‘Components of the National Culture’ (reprinted in Cockburn and Blackburn 1969:214-84) which made a distinction between those European intellectuals (Wittgenstein, Namier, Popper, Berlin, Gombrich, Eysenck and Malinowski) who provided a ‘tremendous injection of life…[to] a fading British culture’ by being willingly appropriated to it, and those, ‘the “Red” emigration, utterly unlike that which arrived here…[who] did not opt for England, because of a basic cultural and political incompatibility’ (Anderson 1969:231-3). Thus the Frankfurt School, Neumann and Reich, Brecht, Lukács and Thomas Mann, who chose to migrate elsewhere, were set against those Europeans who came to Britain to be appropriated by the dominant culture and receive knight-hoods, thus maintaining an ‘insular reflex and prejudice’. ‘For the unmis takable fact is that the traditional, discrete disciplines, having missed either of the great synthetic revolutions in European Social thought, were dying of inanition’ (Anderson 1969:232). The task of the new NLR was thus to rewrite the agenda of British intellectual life, and to provide the theoretical foundations for ‘a revolutionary practice within which culture is possible’ (Anderson 1969:277).
