Book Review

Method/Theory

Edwin A. Roberts. The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 1997. Pp. xv, 296. Cloth $67.50, paper $24.95.

If, in the years since World War II, Britain's global role has been diminished, the country has nevertheless remained a net exporter of ideas. Social history in the United States owes much to the writing of E. P. Thompson, while cultural studies as an academic discipline originated in Britain at the outset of the 1960s—even if its current North American enthusiasts are engaged in work distinct from that pioneered by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the early days of Britain's New Left. Dennis Dworkin has captured the spirit of those days, tracing the origins and development of a British tradition of what he terms "cultural Marxism" between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s. He admits that he is not the first to study the academic work of the British Left. Indeed, his book enters an already crowded field: Harvey Kaye has written a fine account of The British Marxist Historians (1984), while Patrick Brantlinger has examined British antecedents of contemporary American cultural studies in Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990). Nevertheless, Dworkin rightly sees his book as "the first intellectual history to study British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent intellectual tradition, not limited to one discipline or figure within it" (p. 3).	1
Dworkin introduces the reader to his topic with an excellent analysis of the Communist Party Historians' Group, that 1940s informal meeting ground for the likes of Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm that Dworkin insists must be seen as an "incubator for the development of British cultural Marxist historiography and historical theory" (p. 11). He explores the contributions made by Hoggart and Williams to the project of cultural Marxism in the 1950s, culminating in the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. After dissecting the seminal texts published by the Centre, Dworkin charts the role played by the New Left Review in familiarizing readers with continental Marxist theory. He then deftly traces the development of the writing of "history from below," beginning with the publication of Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963), and culminating in the History Workshop movement of the mid-1970s and Thompson's polemical attack on the work of Louis Althusser in The Poverty of Theory (1978). Dworkin concludes his study with Margaret Thatcher's ascension to power in 1979, claiming that her conservative reconstruction of "the popular," the beginning of the end of existing socialism in Eastern Europe, the emergence of new social subjects, and the proliferation of poststructuralist thought in the wake of the Foucauldian revolution all marked "the end of a decisive phase in cultural Marxism's development" (p. 246).	2
The strengths of Dworkin's study are legion. He offers an excellent account of the break made by a number of intellectuals with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, deftly moving among the various players in the drama with a keen eye for what motivated them. Moreover, although an ardent enthusiast for the work of the cultural Marxists, Dworkin is not afraid to be critical of that work: if at times his tone is a trifle too celebratory, he also takes issue with what he views to be History Workshop's antiquarianism and sentimentalism and, furthermore, is not afraid to wrestle with Thompson. But, most of all, Dworkin has written an important study insofar as it charts the evolution of a major strand of thought in postwar Britain and does so in part by making excellent use of unpublished papers and various interviews that the author undertook for the study. One example will suffice. By mining a transcript of the 1979 History Workshop meeting at which Thompson's Poverty of Theory was debated, and by relying on the testimony of participants in that debate, Dworkin is able to reconstruct not only the arguments made but the extraordinary passion that accompanied them.	. . .