Abstract

Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was a giant on the Australian intellectual scene, and a major analyst of and contributor to the processes of cultural traffic between the antipodes and the centres of the world system. He was a lifelong Marxist, or historical materialist. Yet his scholarship also wore an open weave. Was he then a Marxist in politics? This essay argues that his historicism placed his thinking firmly with the owl of Minerva, rather than in the driver’s seat of history. Marxism, for Bernard Smith, was ex post facto, placing him with the tragic irony of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire rather than with the activist intent of the Theses on Feuerbach. Distance, for Smith, was everything