Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the
German poet, playwright and essayist, has enjoyed a cult reputation among the
British libertarian left since the sixties, but in the past couple of years
there has been a surge of interest in his work. Last year Radius, Hutchinson's
radical imprint, published Europe, Europe, Enzensberger's extraordinary book of
impressions of the continent, having already republished Dreamers of the
Absolute, a collection of his sixties writings, in 1988. Now Verso brings us a
volume of essays from the late seventies and early eighties.
The book is stuffed with
gems. Enzensberger's intellectual range is breathtaking, and he is an inveterate
controversialist, with an unerring eye for cant and absurdity. He also writes
with unusual precision and clarity, and his translator, Martin Chalmers, has
rendered his work into English of a fluency rare in translations of political
writing.
There are two essays in
particular that stand out for their sharpness and continuing relevance.
"Reluctant Eurocentrism: A Political Picture Puzzle" starts off as a
ruminative piece on the history of anthropology and turns into a devastating
critique of the "Third World-ism" still commonplace among Left
intellectuals in Europe and North America. This attitude, Enzensberger rightly
believes, has its roots in a yearning for the exotic. It takes no account of the
aspirations of people in the so-called Third World (who desperately want to
consume like us); and, through being adopted by European-educated Third World
political leaders, has been the ideological underpinning for the Third World's
most disastrous authoritarian political experiments. "It is time to take leave
of such dreams," Enzensberger concludes. "It was always an illusion
that liberation could be delegated to faraway others; today this self-deception
has become a threadbare evasion. An exotic alternative to industrial
civilisation no longer exists. We are encircled and beseiged by our own
imitations." Quite so, and it's doubly refreshing to hear this sentiment coming
from the left.
"The Highest Stage of
Underdevelopment: A Hypothesis About Really Existing Socialism" manages in
17 pages to say more about the reality of life in the countries of the
"socialist bloc" than many book-length studies. The title is an
accurate evocation of its contents. Enzensberger presents us with a series of
vignettes of bureaucratic sclerosis, material shortages, official mendacity
and popular apathy, and asks whether he is describing conditions in a
"socialist" country or the Third World. Of course, it is impossible to
say, which leads Enzensberger into a telling account of the ways that Leninist
party-states have engendered economic and social collapse.
The theme running through
this piece, as through the rest of the book, is the necessarily self-defeating nature
of attempts to control society bureaucratically. Despite the pretentious of
technocrats, politicians and intellectuals everywhere, it is the creativity of
ordinary people that keeps the world going round. A simple argument, perhaps,
but it is one that is not heard often enough these days, and Enzensberger
advances it with exemplary wit, sophistication and force. This is an
outstanding book, the most stimulating political read I have had in ages.
