The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-up of Britain by Wade Matthews (review)

The intractable dilemma long posed for socialists by the “national question” is starkly stated in the preface to Wade Matthews’ well-researched study of the ways in which selected intellectuals of the post-1956 British New Left have addressed (or failed to address) issues of nationalism and national identity. “When appealing to categories that transcend nationality, such as ‘humanity’ or ‘class,’” remarks Matthews, “socialism has appeared bloodless and deracinated … yet when accentuating nationalist sentiments, socialists have mined the affective identities of political reaction … As such, socialists have been caught between abstraction and particularity: either they have sacrificed reason and equality for a celebration of particular identities and finished indistinct from their ideological opponents, or they have combated their adversary’s discourse but consigned themselves to political oblivion.” (ix)

Emerging from the ferment of 1956 with the aim of revitalising socialist thought and practice not just domestically but internationally, accepting no orthodoxy nor party discipline, and encompassing some of the most talented left intellectuals of the post-war era, the milieu of the British New Left would seem fertile ground for fresh encounters between socialists and the national question (or rather questions). The scene for these encounters is set by way of two contextualizing chapters, the first offering a brisk, concise overview of the history and historiography of the New Left, and the second an account of the contortions performed by British socialist intellectuals (Cole and Laski are the most extensively treated, though Tawney, Strachey, Orwell, Durbin and the Communist Party intellectuals around Left Review also feature) around these questions in the inter-war period. Matthews is wellversed in the literature, especially on the New Left. Thus he avoids perpetuating the well-worn but misleading characterization of “two New Lefts” separated by the transfer of control of New Left Review (nlr) in the early 1960s, in favour of a more nuanced approach giving due weight to the real differences within as well as between its various groupings, and reminds us that the most substantial ideological distinction was arguably that which attended the nlr’s conversion to a form of Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s. He is also right to point to the relative absence in literature on the New Left of analysis of its engagement with nationalism, despite the fact that questions of nationalism and internationalism (the supposed capitulation to “nationalism” and/or “parochialism” of early New Left thinkers such as E.P. Thompson, the question of what a responsible “internationalism” might consist of) formed one major ground of internal dispute.

New Left thinkers, Matthews argues, “inherited a conflicted and sometimes confused tradition” in the form of a socialist discourse that “allowed both the rejection and the celebration of national difference, the repudiation of nationalism as inimical to socialism and the assumption that nationalism constituted the education of socialist desire.” (36) They themselves “would be forced to engage a series of national questions” that intersected with and complicated their initial exploration and reworking of class, culture, community and “the present crisis.” (57) These included the end of Empire, the rise of peripheral British nationalisms, the question of European integration, the politics of race, immigration and “identity,” and the “national and nationalist implications of Thatcherism, the Cold War and the fall of communism.” (x) This is quite a list, and any reader looking for the definitive New Left resolution to the conundrum posed in the preface will search these pages in vain. What they will find is a stimulating set of studies of five individual New Left thinkers: E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. Each is characterised first and foremost in relation to his own “sense of imagined community” (ix) – where is he writing from? What is his “country”? These are the recurring tropes that give the chapters their titles and “hooks.” Thus Thompson is located “in the provinces”; (60) Hall appears as the inside-outsider providing insights into British national identity that homegrown...