“Enlightenment, Enlargement, and the European Union”
Glyn Morgan reviews Perry Anderson's The New Old World for Dissent.
When the history of the present era is written, it will be interesting to see which institutions, ideologies, and reputations survive the Great Recession of 2008. Some casualties are already evident: Lehman Brothers, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Alan Greenspan, and Gordon Brown (to list a few obvious examples). Some are wounded, but will likely survive in a diminished form. Still others are doing quite nicely. As the West's leading Marxist intellectual, Perry Anderson appears to be having a rather good recession. Anderson was quick to recognize both the triumph and the contradictions of what he terms "the neo-liberal ascendancy." Anderson's fascinating new book of essays on Europe is framed by the Thatcherite-inspired deregulation of financial markets and the collapse of communism that initiated its ascendancy.
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