Brief appreciation of Perry Anderson’s latest The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony Verso (January 2017) in the FT this weekend.

Many thanks to Ted Fertik for helping me get these 1100 words in shape. Credit to Ted. Blame all mine.

I end with the obvious question: “How will the foremost critic of liberal hegemony respond to the jarring displacement of the mellifluous Barack Obama by the crude power-grab of Trump and his entourage? As is commonly remarked, Trump is putting comedy out of business. Will he do the same to sophisticated intellectual leftism? Given the evident threat from the right and its own political weakness, should the left fall in with centrist calls for unity, forming a kind of 21st-century Popular Front? One can hardly imagine Anderson agreeing. At its peak, the liberal hegemony was only too happy to declare, “there is no alternative”. It would be painfully ironic if that hegemonic declaration were to command even greater practical force amid liberalism’s shambolic decomposition.”

To which Anderson has already given answer with his merciless piece in the January New Left Review “Passing the Baton”:

Enjoy!