New Left Review I/170, July-August 1988

Perry Anderson

The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio

In early 1848, within a few weeks of each other, two antithetical texts were published in London, on the eve of European revolution. One was The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The other was Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill. The former famously declared that the spectre of communism was haunting Europe, and would soon take possession of it. The latter, using the same imagery with scarcely less confidence, but in the opposite sense, dismissed socialist experiments as little more than chimeras that could never take on real shape as viable substitutes for private property. [1] Principles of Political Economy, London 1848, Vol. I, p.255. Mill’s judgment specifically referred to Saint-Simonian schemes, which—as he explained—he regarded as the most serious form of socialism. In his autobiography he used the same phrase for his initial view of any socialism, which could only be ‘reckoned chimerical’: Autobiography, London 1873, p.231. The antithesis occasions little surprise for us now. Liberalism and Socialism have long been conventionally understood as antagonistic intellectual and political traditions; and with good reason, by virtue of both the apparent incompatibility of their theoretical startingpoints—individual and societal, respectively—and of the actual record of conflict, often deadly, between the parties and movements inspired by each. However, at the very outset of this historical contention, it was strangely short-circuited in the trajectory of Mill himself. The risings of the urban poor across the principal capitals of Europe and the bloody battles that followed them stirred a warm solidarity in Harriet Taylor, the object of his affections. He set himself to study with a newly opened mind doctrines of common ownership; and soon—indeed in the very same work, Principles of Political Economy, in its revised edition of 1849—pronounced the vision of socialists collectively to be ‘one of the most valuable elements of human improvement now existing’. [2] Principles of Political Economy, London 1849, Vol. I, p.266. Of the several versions of socialism, Mill now decided that Fourierism was the most skilful and formidable variant, an opinion he held to the end of his life. Of the difference between the first and second editions of his work, Mill later wrote: ‘In the first edition the difficulties of socialism were stated so strongly, that the tone was on the whole that of opposition to it. In the year or two which followed, much time was given to the study of the best Socialistic writers of the Continent, and to meditation and discussion on the whole range of topics involved in the controversy: and the result was that most of what had been written on the subject in the first edition was cancelled, and replaced by arguments and reflections of a more advanced character’: Autobiography, pp.234–235. Rarely has a fundamental political judgement been so rapidly and radically reversed. Thereafter, Mill always regarded himself as a liberal and a socialist; as he put it in his Autobiography, ‘The social problem of the future we now considered to be how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw materials of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.’ [3] Autobiography, p.232. He defended the Paris Commune, and died working on a book on Socialism which he hoped would be more important than his study of Representative Government.

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