TEHRAN – “In the Tracks of Historical Materialism” by Perry Anderson has been published by Cheshmeh.

Originally published in 1983, the book has been translated by Alireza Khazai.

What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid-seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? 

“In the Tracks of Historical Materialism” looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. 

It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. 

By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic recession of Marxist influences in the Latin cultures where it was traditionally strong – France or Italy. 

Its main theoretical challengers there proved to be successive forms of structuralism and post-structuralism. 

The common coordinates of these – tracing the outer bounds of the work of Levi-Strauss or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida – are surveyed and criticized, in the light of the inherent limitations of the language model from which they derived. 

In Germany, on the other hand, the theoretical scene has been largely dominated by the accumulating work of Habermas, with its roots in the Frankfurt School. 

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Perry Anderson’s book “In the Tracks of Historical Materialism”.

MMS/YAW