There is a wonderful metaphor in Alastair Macintyre’s After Virtue, in which the philosopher asks us to imagine a world hit by some terrible calamity that caused scientific and technical knowledge to be almost destroyed. What was left was smashed into thousands upon thousands of disconnected pieces, and the inhabitants of this world had to piece together their understanding of science and technology from what was lost, trying to line up the remnants of the earlier age as best they could.
Scrabbling, ignorant, and in the darkness, they would sometimes get things right. More often, however, they would get things seriously wrong. Most of all, they had lost any sense of science as a system, depriving them not only of the existing knowledge, but how to generate new ideas and make new discoveries.
It’s an image that haunts me, repeatedly, when surveying the state of the left today. We don’t live in quite such desperate straits – clearly, we’ve inherited an enormous amount from our own past, and, in particular, the major institutions of the left retain some of their capacities to shape and influence society and ideas. But it seems we have lost something that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm highlighted forty years ago in his much-maligned essay The Forward March of Labour Halted?. This is the loss (or radical diminution) of what we can think of as a continuous movement, whose many parts may be separate but whose parts have some clear articulation and engagement with each other.
