Mario and the magician

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 9, 2001, Pages 5-29

  Nairn, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039892397     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (11)

1. This essay is excerpted from Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom, forthcoming from Verso.
2. Mario and the Magician and Other Stories, London 2000, pp. 145-6.
3. For a decreasing number of readers, some sense of déjà vu will be inevitable at this point. The underlying argument advanced has a forty-year history stretching from the early years of the New Left Review down to the present: that is, from Perry Anderson's 'Origins of the Present Crisis' down to and now through the 'crisis' itself. Once given hedge-baptism as 'the Naim-Anderson theses' about the anachronism and decline of Great Britain, that gloomy prognosis is now being far eclipsed by events themselves. My argument here unavoidably uses absurd compressions and elipses of what was a long-drawn-out affair, for which I must apologize. Readers anxious to catch up with the fuller history will find the greater part of it in Anderson's English Questions, Verso: London 1990, especially the introduction's concise narration of the 1960s, and the background to his 'Origins of the Present Crisis' (NLR I/23, Jan-Feb 1964).
4. Hansard, 11 December 2000, col. 351.
5. The most definitive study of the matrix of Anglo-British statehood is Ellis Wasson's Born to Rule: British Political Elites, Stroud 2000. He shows how, up until late in the nineteenth century, 'the governing classes of the three kingdoms and principality in the British Isles never amounted in total to much more than about 2,500' (p. 159).
6. The Portable Edmund Burke, Isaac Kramnick, ed., London 1999, 'Introduction', p. xiii.
7. The 'courts' of Thatcher and Blair have been able to perform as simulacra of the former ruling class only by the formation of weird synthetic 'families' or quasi-kinship networks where personal relations and rivalries can assume fulcral significance. The most riveting account of how this has worked in Blairism is that given by Andrew Rawnsley in Servants of the People: the Inside Story of New Labour, London 2000.
8. 'Bush's First Strike', New York Review of Books, 29 March 2001.
9. This has recently been ably anatomized by Larry Siedentop's influential Democracy in Europe, London 1999. The author underlines both the attraction, the influence, and the futility of this conception of European Union.
10. The Deputies from the Gironde region of France gave their name to a shorthand version of the revolutionary position opposed to the unitarist centralism that continued the Absolute core of France's ancien régime and came to the fore-front of affairs during the revolutionary wars. Farther reinforced by Napoleon, it has remained there down to the present, even attaining a new peak under the Mitterrand Presidency.
11. Independent, 13 April 2001.