Just finished Perry Anderson’s review of @adam_tooze’s Crashed. As @zeithistoriker already pointed out, engagement with Tooze‘s first book conspicuously absent. In my eyes, this seriously blunts the force of the critique (1/n).
What’s the critique? Anderson attacks Tooze for “running with the hare, hunting with the hounds.” Roughly: criticising Europe’s establishment for gutting Greece but refusing to condemn “the European project.” Clarity on the bank bailouts (massive upwrds redistribution), but (2/n)
...abiding by Geither’s et al’s heroine self-description etc etc. For Anderson, it seems to me, he who says A must B: criticise bailouts/Greece-gutting etc, and you must get behind a branch-and-root anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project (3/n)
But let’s bring in Tooze’s Statistics and the German state: modern societies are ruled through carefully assembled/constructed economic knowledge. No GDP, no macro-mngmt. No macro-mngmt, no control. No control, well, perhaps a dark Hobbesian SofN (?). Def no Hayekian utopia (4/n)
(This is obvs massively oversimplified. Read the Statistics book, it’s excellent!). Back to Anderson’s critique: if rule requires knowledge, going from A (critique of bailouts etc) to B (throw in lot with anti-capitalists) no longer so straightforward (5/n).
Commitment to B, for a responsible intellectual, would then require partisans/sympathisers of B to produce a rival epistemology, perhaps literally a rival set of statistical concepts. Without those, the rival programme is bluster, not a revolutionary programme (6/n)
As far as I can tell, Anderson has not (yet?) proposed such a rival epistemology/statistics-for-rule to underpin, eg, a deep anti-EU programme. And so his critique of Tooze for saying “A, not B” rings somewhat hollow (or perhaps dangerously optimistic?) to me (7/7).
Ps: this doesn’t mean it can’t be done. A rival epistemology may be near (see eg Japan’s financial system, nicely described in Anderson’s review!), maybe based on paradigm shift around deeply politicising/nationalising investment while leaving product mkts alone. But not there yt
