Question

write about leftist ideology in english literature

Answer 1

Answer:

The British understanding of the term independent is unusual. But the British state form is itself unusual: determinedly set against formal definition, it has relied on a constitutional culture, that is, a structural but unwritten, and so historically unregistered, set of values. This has given it an unusual openness to the informal rule of money and left an unusually fraught struggle for political agency. Independence might be understood as a release from this anti-formal and ahistorical authority which has relied on a strict management, or de-formalisation, of writing. This means that legal authority and literary precedent are mutually reliant to an unusually high extent, and helps us see how the story of the recent strengthening of the national understood as popular resistance to a hopelessly marketised UK is also the story of the waning of constitutional culture as literacy management. What has been routinely underestimated by a British left otherwise quite attuned to ‘unevenness’ is the importance of the specificity of this state form: more than just a structure evolved to protect a national ownership class, it has been, quite fundamentally, a principle of capital rationalisation defined by resistance to the national as registered in historical or written form. And although it has become an academic orthodoxy to dismiss as naive any description of the British constitution as unwritten, this orthodoxy has only limited validity. It is true that if all the judgements and statutes throughout the Commonwealth could be somehow gathered together, a constitution might be said to be written — but only in the same way as any text could be made up by gathering isolated words or sets of words from around the world (see Nairn 2000). Not only is the constitution unwritten in any serious sense, its authority derives from its being unwritten — and this constant displacement of text has relied on a surrogate codification, which, especially since the urgent need to reject political writing at the end of the eighteenth century, has taken the form of the body duplicitously known as English Literature.