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First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin
In the late 1950s, Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams among others, came together as part of a promising new political formation, the New Left. The six years of the group's formal existence represents one of the richest and most exciting periods in the intellectual history of the left in Britain. This short period saw the beginning of many future theoretical developments in radical politics, and the founder members of the New Left are now associated with groundbreaking work in history, culture and politics.
226 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1995
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August 19, 2018
This book is both an account of the pivotal early years of the peak of the British New Left's political activity, 1956-62, and an analysis of the work it produced in these years. It focuses particularly on Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall, with a chapter on each. There are also two chapters dedicated to New Left thought on political economy and international issues.
As a descriptive account of the New Left's activity in those years, this book is an ok source. But its overall value is very limited for the following reasons:
- The book doesn't really organise its explanation of why the New Left failed as a political movement with any real clarity or cogency. It gestures towards the fact that the New Left failed to influence the Labour Party without really explaining in much depth or with much insight why that was.
- The book fails to adequately justify its narrow focus on what it calls 'the first New Left' as distinct from the 'second' associated with the core editorial group around New Left Review from 1963 onwards: Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Robin Blackburn, Alexander Cockburn, Quintin Hoare, Branka Magas, Fred and Jon Halliday, Gareth Stedman Jones, Peter Wollen, Ronald Fraser, Tariq Ali, and so on. It becomes evident over the course of the book that this narrowing of focus is essentially because Kenny doesn't much like the 'second New Left', particularly Perry Anderson, who comes in for repeated and mostly unfair criticism in the book.
- Within the 'first New Left', the focus on Hall, Williams and Thompson, with no real discussion of the ideas of, say, Saville, Miliband and Samuel - on any account, hugely important 'New Left' intellectuals - is not really justified either.
- By focusing on just these years, the book omits discussion of virtually all the most interesting works produced by even those New Left figures it actually discusses. Thompson's William Morris was written in 1955 (and is not discussed), The Making of the English Working Class was 1963, and is also not really discussed. Instead we get analysis of some of his early political essays, which aren't that good. Williams's The Long Revolution (1961) is discussed, but not to illuminating effect. His most valuable work came after. All of Hall's most important work came after, in fact long after, this initial period - formative as it may have been for him.
- Kenny is a poor summariser and even worse analyst of the works he does describe. His typical critical manoeuvre is to take what someone else said about a work or an idea and say that in fact it was more 'complex' or 'ambivalent' or 'complex and ambivalent'. This is pretty familiar from anyone who has read Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, where the emphasis is always on taking concepts used to describe a particular historical phenomenon and then insist the reality was more complex, messy and two-sided than using this concept suggests. The result is a dissolving kind of analysis which doesn't have the discipline to come to any firm kind of conclusion about or explanation for the things it's describing.
- Kenny's own attitude to the first New Left's ideas seems pretty 'ambivalent'. He seems to regard their chief virtue as having questioned Marxist and socialist 'orthodoxies' in places and revised them. But to what end? It isn't clear whether he thinks the ideas, so revised, are still worth having, or whether instead he just likes the first New Left because they revised away from Marxist and socialist orthodoxy, which he dislikes. That would probably explain his hostility to the 'second New Left', since especially after 1968 much of their work was characterised by a conscious attempt to develop, but also reaffirm, a revolutionary Marxism.
For a worthwhile critical engagement with the ideas of this period, it's better to read the stuff New Left Review have published about it; Perry Anderson's engagement with Thompson, 'Arguments Within English Marxism'; and NLR's interviews with Raymond Williams, 'Politics and Letters'. The secondary literature on the British New Left is unfortunately mostly pretty poor, like this book.
As a descriptive account of the New Left's activity in those years, this book is an ok source. But its overall value is very limited for the following reasons:
- The book doesn't really organise its explanation of why the New Left failed as a political movement with any real clarity or cogency. It gestures towards the fact that the New Left failed to influence the Labour Party without really explaining in much depth or with much insight why that was.
- The book fails to adequately justify its narrow focus on what it calls 'the first New Left' as distinct from the 'second' associated with the core editorial group around New Left Review from 1963 onwards: Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Robin Blackburn, Alexander Cockburn, Quintin Hoare, Branka Magas, Fred and Jon Halliday, Gareth Stedman Jones, Peter Wollen, Ronald Fraser, Tariq Ali, and so on. It becomes evident over the course of the book that this narrowing of focus is essentially because Kenny doesn't much like the 'second New Left', particularly Perry Anderson, who comes in for repeated and mostly unfair criticism in the book.
- Within the 'first New Left', the focus on Hall, Williams and Thompson, with no real discussion of the ideas of, say, Saville, Miliband and Samuel - on any account, hugely important 'New Left' intellectuals - is not really justified either.
- By focusing on just these years, the book omits discussion of virtually all the most interesting works produced by even those New Left figures it actually discusses. Thompson's William Morris was written in 1955 (and is not discussed), The Making of the English Working Class was 1963, and is also not really discussed. Instead we get analysis of some of his early political essays, which aren't that good. Williams's The Long Revolution (1961) is discussed, but not to illuminating effect. His most valuable work came after. All of Hall's most important work came after, in fact long after, this initial period - formative as it may have been for him.
- Kenny is a poor summariser and even worse analyst of the works he does describe. His typical critical manoeuvre is to take what someone else said about a work or an idea and say that in fact it was more 'complex' or 'ambivalent' or 'complex and ambivalent'. This is pretty familiar from anyone who has read Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, where the emphasis is always on taking concepts used to describe a particular historical phenomenon and then insist the reality was more complex, messy and two-sided than using this concept suggests. The result is a dissolving kind of analysis which doesn't have the discipline to come to any firm kind of conclusion about or explanation for the things it's describing.
- Kenny's own attitude to the first New Left's ideas seems pretty 'ambivalent'. He seems to regard their chief virtue as having questioned Marxist and socialist 'orthodoxies' in places and revised them. But to what end? It isn't clear whether he thinks the ideas, so revised, are still worth having, or whether instead he just likes the first New Left because they revised away from Marxist and socialist orthodoxy, which he dislikes. That would probably explain his hostility to the 'second New Left', since especially after 1968 much of their work was characterised by a conscious attempt to develop, but also reaffirm, a revolutionary Marxism.
For a worthwhile critical engagement with the ideas of this period, it's better to read the stuff New Left Review have published about it; Perry Anderson's engagement with Thompson, 'Arguments Within English Marxism'; and NLR's interviews with Raymond Williams, 'Politics and Letters'. The secondary literature on the British New Left is unfortunately mostly pretty poor, like this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review