RENEWALS
PERRY ANDERSON
New Left Review 1, January-February 2000

The life-span of journals is no warrant of their achievement. A couple of issues, and abrupt extinction, can count for more in the history of a culture than a century of continuous publication. In its three years, the Athenaeum put German Romanticism into orbit. The fireworks of the Revue Blanche, the first journal of a modern avant-garde, lit Paris for barely a decade. Lef closed after seven issues in Moscow. These were reviews at the intersection of aesthetic innovation with philosophy and politics. Journals of criticism have often survived longer—The Criterion, in various incarnations, for most of the inter-war period, Scrutiny from the thirties into the fifties. Reasons for closure might be external, even accidental, but typically the vitality of a journal is tied to those who create it. In heroic cases, a single individual can defy time with the composition of a personal monument: Kraus writing Die Fackel alone for twenty-five years, Croce rivalling the feat with La Critica. Usually, life-cycles of journals are more adventitious and dispersed. Editors quarrel, change their minds, get bored or go bankrupt, for the most part well before they go to the grave themselves.

A political journal is as subject to the incidents of mortality as any other. In one respect, more so—since politics is always a Kampfplatz, a field of division, breaking ties and forcing conflicts. Wreckage through disputes or scissions is more frequent here than anywhere else. In other respects, however, political journals have a different reason for being, that makes renewal beyond their first impetus a test specific to them. They stand both for certain objective principles, and the capacity of these to decipher the course of the world. Here, editorial fade-out is intellectual defeat. Material or institutional pressures may, of course, cut off any periodical in its prime. But short of such circumstances, political journals have no choice: to be true to themselves, they must aim to extend their real life beyond the conditions or generations that gave rise to them.

This journal, now entering its fifth decade, has reached such a point. Forty years is a significant span of activity, though not an extraordinary one—Les Temps Modernes, from which NLR learnt a good deal in its early days, has lasted much longer. But it is sufficient to call for an overhaul. With this issue, we start a new series of the journal marked by a break of numerals, in keeping with radical tradition, and a redesign of its appearance, in token of changes to come. Charged for the moment with the transition to another style of review, not to be achieved overnight, I set out below my own view of the situation of NLR today, and the directions it should begin to take. Billed as an ‘editorial’, the result is nonetheless a personal—and therefore provisional—statement: open to contradiction. So too will be the editorials that follow in each issue, written on topics of their choice by others, without presumption of any automatic agreement...............................
http://newleftreview.org/II/1/perry-anderson-renewals