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By Root 1722 0

or since. Since secondary-school examinations required far less in the way of specialized knowledge than universities, let alone research, they left adventurous pupils with relatively more time for their own explorations – and at that age almost everything is there to be discovered. Moreover, an English sixth form demanded less effort than a continental one, if only because one had to choose between the arts and the sciences, and therefore dropped half the continental syllabus. After arriving at a university nobody who takes the degree seriously has anything like the enterprising teenager’s time to read about everything, rapidly, voraciously, and with endless curiosity. But what did I do with all this reading?

The short answer is: I tried to give it a Marxist, that is to say an essentially historical, interpretation. There was not much else to do for an impassioned but unorganized and necessarily inactive communist teenage intellectual. Since I had not read much more than the CommunistManifesto when I left Berlin – action came before words – I therefore had to acquire some knowledge of Marxism. My Marxism was, and still to some extent remains, that acquired from the only texts then easily available outside university libraries, the systematically distributed works and selections of ‘the classics’ published (and translated in heavily subsidized local editions) under the auspices of the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. Curiously, until Stalin’s notorious Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1939), which contained a central section on ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, there was no formal compendium of Soviet communist orthodoxy in these matters. When this section appeared, I read it with enthusiasm, allowing for its pedagogic simplifications. It corresponded pretty much to what I, and perhaps most of the British intellectual reds of the 1930s, understood by Marxism. We liked to think of it as ‘scientific’ in a rather nineteenth-century sense. Since, unlike in continental lycées and Gymnasia, philosophy was not a central part of higher secondary education, we did not approach Marx with the philosophical interests of our continental contemporaries, let alone with their knowledge of philosophy. This helped to anglicize my way of thinking quite rapidly. What Perry Anderson has called ‘western Marxism’, the Marxism of Lukács, the Frankfurt School and Korsch, never crossed the Channel until the 1950s. We were content to know that Marx and Engels had turned Hegel the right way up, without bothering to find out just what it was they had stood on its feet. What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world in constant flux.

As I read my diary of 1934–5, it is perfectly clear that its writer was getting ready to be a historian. What I was trying to do above all else was to elaborate Marxist historical interpretations of my reading. And yet I was doing so in a way I almost certainly would not have done, had I continued my education on the continent. The ‘materialist conception of history’ was, of course, central to Marxism. However, Britain in the 1930s was one of the rare countries in which a school of Marxist historians developed, and I think this was partly due to the fact that on the arts side of British sixth forms literature took the space left vacant by the absence of philosophy. British Marxist historians began, more often than not, as young intellectuals who moved to historical analysis from, or with, a passion for literature: Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, Leslie Morton, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and indeed myself. This may help to explain the otherwise surprising influence of the anti-Marxist F. R. Leavis on many who became communists. Cambridge communists who read English swore by him.

My own Marxism developed as