Albion's Seedlings

The Origins of the Anglosphere Perspective

David Billington remarks in comments to Lex's earlier post:

But the historical argument for the Anglosphere is a frankly sweeping view of the past that draws on only a handful of sources. These appear to be full of interesting insight. But how they are handled matters. Reviewers of Macfarlane who are experts on the Middle Ages have praised and criticized his work. Yet Macfarlane is cited in Anglosphere arguments as an expert witness to make a case. The case may be strong but other historians might view this use of history with caution.

David has brought up an important point. I am quite aware that Alan Macfarlane is not a representative of a mainstream consensus among historians, although he is not the historian's equivalent of a Velikovsky, either. Personally, I see him as the equivalent of the early proponents of plate tectonics in geology -- making a plausible case, but not yet accepted by all or even most of his colleagues. Oh, well, historiography, like science, advances funeral by funeral.

And as with continental drift, even before the experts are done squabbling, you can look at the problem, see the overall patterns, and make some reasonable judgements. You can look at Africa and South America on the globe and say "Damn it, they fit!" Just so, if you have been dealing with the issues of English-speaking exceptionalism, you can look at Macfarlane's work, and now James Campbell's even before it, and say "damn it, it fits!"

If I had derived the Anglosphere perspective from Macfarlane's work, a reliance on a small number of opinions not generally accepted by their colleagues would indeed make me nervous. But the Anglosphere perspective is not a foundationalist approach to understanding the questions it deals with, and it does not rest on the validity of Macfarlane's work. In fact, the first publication manuscript of The Anglosphere Challenge was finished before I had heard of Macfarlane's work. In rereading Claudio Véliz's The Gothic Fox in the New World, I came across a footnote reference to Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism, and promptly realized that the roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism might be far deeper than I had been assuming. I also realized, with mixed excitement and dismay, that I would have to rewrite the whole damned manuscript.

The Anglosphere perspective did not come out of a study of history, but rather a gradually growing perception of the current fact of Anglosphere exceptionalism in politics, economics, and culture.

Far from being a triumphalist explanation of Anglosphere success, it began as a search for an explanation for an Anglosphere failure, specifically the remarkably persistent inability of Anglosphere nations to conduct industrial policy successfully. I became interested in this during my heavy involvement in the policy issues at the takeoff of the US private space launch industry, where various industrial-policy approaches were being advocated and debated, and through my involvement on the Board of what is today the Foresight Nanotech Institute. I became interested first in the question of why British industrial policy in the aerospace industry had in general been so disastrous from the postwar period onward, despite the fact that British aerospace design was in many cases brilliant.

I came to the conclusion (to make a long story short, the long story being published here) that socio-cultural considerations had much to do with the relative success of industrial-policy approaches in Continental European and other cultures, and with their failure in Britian and Canada, and that these factors were probably predictors of the failure of industrial-policy approaches if attempted in the United States.

These tentative conclusions came as a surprise to me. I had been a kind of reflexive Turnerian and Correllian, and had expected to see a degenerate, aristocratic Britain somewhere closer to its European neighbors and further from its vigorous, frontier-selected American offspring. However, the similarities seemed to be more significantt than the differences.

Then I ran across David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed (from which the name of this blog is derived, of course) and it was an immediate revelation. Fischer, in my opinion, gutted Turner like a fresh-caught trout, and re-opened the apreciation of the deep underlying connections between British Isles and American cuture that Founding Fathers like Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams had taken for granted. In this regard, Fischer allows us to return to the roots of the American founding, as does Macfarlane's revindication of Montesquieu (and therefore Jefferson) in Riddle of the Modern World.

Interestingly enough, Fischer is as important in bringing to proper attention the differences between different regions of America as he is in reaffirming the continuity between the British Isles and America. This, when followed out to its logical conclusions, returns the proper focus from individual Anglosphere nations to the Anglosphere as a coherent and distinct culture area, and sees both the broader subdivisions within the whole, and the smaller coherent units, the regions and subregions through which the various currents of Anglosphere culture flow. The Anglosphere state-nations are, wthin this, webs of shared narrative binding together various chunks of regions and subregions with the "mystic cords of memory", distinct from and at times tangential to the natural lines of culture and geography. The Anglosphere is a sufficiently large and diverse subset of humankind that only such a schema is sufficient to serve to understand it.

It is not my intent to provide in this post a detailed or complete intellectual history of the Anglosphere perspective. It would require substantial discussion to describe the importance of Fukuyama's Trust, or Downing in discussing the divergences between England and the Continent in the sixteenth century as the bureaucratic military state emerged in the latter but not the former (or the work of N.A.M. Rodger in qualifying the latter statement with the important differences between England's naval bureaucracy and the Continent's military version), or to discuss the importance of the comparative studies -- Véliz's of the "Gothic foxes" of the Anglosphere against the Hispanosphere in the New World, or Macfarlane's of Japan versus the West in Making of the Modern World. A sketcchy outline of this intellectual history is provided in the book's bibliography. The principal point of this post is to clarify the specific role of Macfarlane's assumptions in supporting the Anglosphere perspective.

To summarize the above, then, the core perception of the Anglosphere perspective is not about the past, but about the present -- about the existing fact of Anglosphere exceptionalism. In the earlier drafts of my book, I had not read Macfarlane, and I had assumed, like most people who have thought about such things, that England had undergone the transition from medieval familialism to modern individualism somewhere around tthe sixteenth or sevententh century -- early, but still part of a general European transition to modernity.

Ironically, given that Macfarlane seems to believe that following continental Europe's transition to modernity, English exceptionalism is no longer significant, my initial draft had drawn the exact opposite conclusion from Macfarlane -- I believed that English exceptionalism was recent but significant today, whereas he believed that it was deep-rooted but no longer all that significant. At any rate, I immediately accepted his arguments fo the antiquity of English individualism, partly because they explained the contemporary phenomena I was seeking to understand far better than the more shallow-rooted explanations I had been working with. As a pattern, it fit, and I tend to think primarily through the construction and testing of broad-scale apttterns.

Macfarlane's work was exciting when I discovered it, and seemed to support and deepen my conclusions greatly, but it was not the original source of the perspective. In other words, I liked Macfarlane's conclusions because they were very consistent with a pattern I had already seen, not because I derived the perception of the pattern from his work. If his work were conclusively refuted (unlikely in my opinion, but possible) the Anglosphere perpective would still stand, although its roots would be shallower.

Posted by James C. Bennett at November 28, 2005 11:15 AM