Ataraxy and Utopia

Extract

This is surely bound to fail, but the need to attempt to make some connections has become irrepressible. In this first article, then, I want to use Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the present state of British culture to introduce some quotations from The Dialectics of Liberation. What I am getting at here can emerge, if ever it does at all, only as we proceed. The point is that there is something wrong with British culture: what Anderson refers to as its ataraxy, its imperviousness to certain disturbing ideas; and there is a chance that the utopian dimension evoked once again by some recent thinking may prove quickening and liberatory. In a second article I want to bring out the ambivalent connections between the work of Herbert Marcuse and that of Martin Heidegger. Finally, in a third article, it should be possible to relate all this to the English literary-critical tradition and to the classical moment in Catholic theology.

Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, first published in 1959 and now widely available as a paperback, has recently been hailed as a ‘classic’, to which ‘all critics of English philosophy owe a great debt’. This salutation of another orthodoxy (that by the standards of a revolutionary and internationalist political consciousness English philosophy is trivial, after all) comes in an important essay by Perry Anderson in the fiftieth issue of New Left Review (July-August 1968). This is the most persuasive and thorough-going offer of new bearings for the critique of contemporary British culture that has so far been made.