10 Quotes by Perry Anderson

Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

[P]olitics is always a Kampfplatz.

Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

El motor último del capitalismo no es, por tanto, la sed de ganancia ni ningún otro deseo humano, sino el desarrollo en cuanto entropía negativa. "El desarrollo no es un invento de los seres humanos. Los seres humanos son un invento del desarrollo" [Lyotard "Une fable postmoderne", en Moralités postmodernes pp. 86-87]

La sustitución de la historia por la ontología fue, sin embargo, una estación de tránsito: al cabo de pocos años, Lyotard se había pasado a la astrofísica.

But in Kemal, perhaps because some scepticism in him – an underlying boredom with government – kept him from a full addiction to power, continual drinking became alcoholism.

It should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.