Method/Theory
like Antoine Prost and Jean-Jacques Becker, Sherman
invokes Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau at
regular intervals to structure meditations on the mean-
ings of memory, substitution, displacement, personifi-
cation, and transference.
Shcrman's kcy conccpt is that of "cmcrgcncc," a
complex notion of how the past is fashioned into active
temporalities. Generally speaking, the author posits
two major approaches to memory scholarship: the
commemorative and the traumatic. The memorializa-
tion of the war is the perfect vehicle through which to
draw together these two types of historical memory:
thc celcbratory commcmorativc logic of history as
nation-state, and the traumatic evasions of forgetting,
repression, and exclusion. How these memories are
contested and negotiated within a political and social
field determines their multiple sites of meaning and
ultimate "emergence" as parts of a naturalized histor-
ical narrativc.
Sherman's project is to stake out many of these sites.
In vivid detail, he crafts discussions of ossuaries,
tombs, and touristic pilgrimages to battlefields and
does smart readings of diaries, fiction, and blueprints
to delve deep into the unspoken logic of French
warfarc, diplomacy, and political factionalism. He also
manages to remind his (presumably American) major-
ity audience of resonances to his work in the Vietnam
memorial of Maya Lin, the staging of history at Iwo
Jima, the rhetorical impact of self-denial and sacrifice
at Gettysburg.
As many of the study's major literary and monumen-
tal gcnrcs will bc familiar to rcadcrs, Shcrman pulls
against the grain of previous scholarship, prioritizing,
for example, the roles of gender and childhood in
soldiers' monuments. He foregrounds the unexpect-
edly complex roles played by female allegories; were
they protecting, grieving for, or paying tribute to the
mcn rcprcscntcd? Thc discussion of toddlers in many
commemorative images (and their real function in
ceremonies) highlights the political role of those for
whom so much blood was presumably shed. Other
standout moments include discussions of "sacrifice" as
a category and the ways this played into encouraging
contributions from divided constituencies for new
plaques and statuary. Also engaging are the splendid
high-low tensions between local townspeople's taste in
monuments and the wounded scnsibilitics of artists
and critics hoping to push the public past presumed
vulgarity, excess, and "cumbersome banalities" (p.
158). Some of the larger arguments, such as whether
the gendered representations heralded tensions about
female suffrage or betrayed symptomatic anguish over
insecure masculinity are allusive, although not devel-
oped at great length.
The epilogue is a series of chronological snapshots
suggesting both where this work has come from and
where it might go. From a fashion for "eternal flame"
projects in the 1930s, we leap to the museal world of
the 1960s and then to the historicallanti-commemora-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1695
tive 1990s. Why highlight these particular decades?
The gap around World War II is striking; the telescop-
ing of the second conflict into the memory of the first
receives little attention. Perhaps the logic here is
intended to complement Sherman's 1992 citation from
the (quite serious) curator of the new Historial de la
Grande Guerre at Peronne: the gradual dying off of
1914 veterans is not exactly unfortunate-it means
diminishing political interference in the museum's
projects; history will now have a chance to triumph
over memory and personal cases. Sherman's study
traces such thinking back to first principles: it is
"experience" itself that is a form of representation. His
work is the blueprint of that process, a look at the
intricate and contested plans by which the past is
made.
MATT MATSUDA
Rutgers University
DENNIS DWORKIN. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain:
History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural
Studies. (Post-Contemporary Interventions.) Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. 1997. Pp. viii, 322. Cloth
$49.95, papcr $16.95.
EDWIN A. ROBERTS. The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in
Ideology and Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlcfield. 1997. Pp. xv, 296. Cloth $67.50, paper
$24.95.
If, in the years since World War II, Britain's global role
has been diminished, the country has nevertheless
remained a net exporter of ideas. Social history in the
United States owes much to the writing of E. P.
Thompson, while cultural studics as an acadcmic dis-
cipline originated in Britain at the outset of the
1960s-even if its current North American enthusiasts
are engaged in work distinct from that pioneered by
Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the early
days of Britain's New Left. Dennis Dworkin has cap-
tured the spirit of those days, tracing the origins and
development of a British tradition of what he terms
"cultural Marxism" between the mid-1940s and the
late 1970s. He admits that he is not the first to study
the academic work of the British Left. Indeed, his book
enters an already crowded field: Harvey Kaye has
written a fine account of The British Marxist Historians
(1984), while Patrick Brantlinger has examined British
antecedents of contemporary American cultural stud-
ies in Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain
and America (1990). Nevertheless, Dworkin rightly
sees his book as "the first intellectual history to study
British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent
intellectual tradition, not limited to one discipline or
figure within it" (p. 3).
Dworkin introduces the reader to his topic with an
excellent analysis of the Communist Party Historians'
Group, that 1940s informal meeting ground for the
likes of Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm that
DECEMBER 2000
1696 Reviews of Books
Dworkin insists must be seen as an "incubator for the
development of British cultural Marxist historiography
and historical theory" (p. 11). He explores the contri-
butions made by Hoggart and Williams to the project
of cultural Marxism in the 1950s, culminating in the
establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cul-
tural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. After
dissecting the seminal texts published by the Centre,
Dworkin charts the role played by the New Left Review
in familiarizing readers with continental Marxist the-
ory. He then deftly traces the development of the
writing of "history from below," beginning with the
publication of Thompson's Making of the English
Working Class (1963), and culminating in the History
Workshop movement of the mid-1970s and Thomp-
son's polemical attack on the work of Louis Althusser
in The Poverty of Theory (1978). Dworkin concludes his
study with Margaret Thatcher's ascension to power in
1979, claiming that her conscrvative reconstruction of
"the popular," the beginning of the end of existing
socialism in Eastern Europe, the emergence of new
social subjects, and the proliferation of post structural-
ist thought in the wake of the Foucauldian revolution
all markcd "the end of a decisive phase in cultural
Marxism's development" (p. 246).
The strengths of Dworkin's study are legion. He
offers an excellent account of the break made by a
number of intellectuals with the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, deftly moving among
the various players in the drama with a keen eye for
what motivated them. Moreover, although an ardent
enthusiast for the work of the cultural Marxists, Dwor-
kin is not afraid to be critical of that work: if at times
his tone is a trifle too celebratory, he also takes issue
with what he views to be History Workshop's antiquar-
ianism and sentimentalism and, furthermore, is not
afraid to wrestle with Thompson. But, most of all,
Dworkin has written an important study insofar as it
charts the evolution of a major strand of thought in
postwar Britain and does so in part by making excel-
lent use of unpublished papers and various interviews
that the author undertook for the study. One example
will suffice. By mining a transcript of the 1979 History
Workshop meeting at which Thompson's Poverty of
Theory was debated, and by relying on the testimony of
participants in that debate, Dworkin is able to recon-
struct not only the arguments made but the extraordi-
nary passion that accompanied them.
At times, Dworkin's enthusiasm for the events he
recounts prevents him from assessing their broader
significance. Many readers of this journal will remem-
ber the battles Thompson fought in the 1970s; today
they seem curiously remote and perhaps irrelevant to
contemporary intellectual discourse. While Dworkin
reconstructs those battles, he fails to inform his read-
ers why they should still be interested in them. More-
over, it is not clear why an exploration of British
cultural Marxism should cnd in thc 1970s (surely thc
work of Stuart Hall suggests that, despite its twists and
turns, the tradition Dworkin dissects continues), nor
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
why it should begin in the 1940s (surely there were
important antecedents to the Communist Party Histo-
rians' Group).
For the prehistory of what Dworkin terms cultural
Marxism, one turns to Edwin A. Roberts's book, a less
than satisfying contribution to the history of British
Marxism between the 1920s and 1950s. While Dworkin
is intcrcstcd in thosc cultural Marxists who cmcrged in
the wake of the wholesale flight from the CPGB in
1956, Roberts turns to those who held fast to the party
line in 1956, intellectuals who are now largely forgot-
ten. He explores the efforts made by Maurice Corn-
forth to promote a mix of native analytic philosophy
and continental Marxism. He also examines the con-
tributions of J. D. Bernal and -'. B. S. Haldane to the
"Social Relations in Science" movement in a chapter
about the Left and the attempt to establish and
institutionalize a native tradition of Marxist science.
Throughout his study, Roberts tries to show how these
men brought to their understanding of Marxism and
Leninism a number of very British theoretical and
methodological perspectives, instilled in them during
their own university education.
On one level, Roberts should be praised for attempt-
ing to rescue interwar Anglo-Marxists from the con-
descension of posterity (or at least from the wrath of
many of their post-1956 New Left counterparts). Al-
though both Stuart Macintyre (A Proletarian Science
[1981]) and Jonathan Ree (Proletarian Philosophers
[1984]) have discussed the work of a number of
Marxist activists and thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s,
neither focuses to the degree that Roberts does on
academics. Nevertheless, Roberts's study leaves much
to be desired. He insists that he wants "to rigorously
define and then prove the existence of an Anglo-
Marxist tradition" (p. 270). Sadly, he does neither.
Instead, he engages in a narrow intellectual history,
merely offering a summary of what often appear to be
randomly selected texts. Moreover, he offers no con-
vincing justification for why somc thinkers arc crucial
to the tradition he seeks to rescue and others are not.
Surely, if an Anglo-Marxist tradition did crystalize in
these years, equally important to it was the work of the
historian Donna Torr, the literary critic Alick West,
the art historian Francis Klingender, and the cultural
critic Christopher Caudwell-individuals who are ab-
sent from Roberts's study or who get only a passing
mention. Finally, Roberts's text is littered with errors:
the CPGB often becomes the CPBG, E. M. Forster
becomes E. M. Foster, Birkbeck College is now Berk-
beck, Anglization takes place, and the publisher
Croom Helm becomes Cloom Helm (in reference to a
book published by Oxford). Marxist thought in Britain
in the second quarter of the twentieth century deserves
better than this; indeed, it deserves the kind of atten-
tion Dworkin has lavished on the postwar years.
CHRIS WATERS
Williams College
DECEMBER 2000