Perry Anderson is a British Leftist intellectual, historian, and political essayist. He is often identified with the post-1956 Western Marxism of the New Left in Europe. He is Professor of
HistoryHistory is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and
SociologySociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
at the
University of California, Los AngelesThe University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
(UCLA) and an editor of the
New Left ReviewNew Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...
. He is also known as Francis Anderson. He is the brother of anthropologist and historian
Benedict AndersonBenedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983...
.
Achievements
He was an influence on the
New LeftThe New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of
E. P. ThompsonEdward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...
in the latter's
The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the
structural MarxismStructural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and...
of
Louis AlthusserLouis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual
Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in
New Left Review (January–February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview,
Arguments within English Marxism (1980).
As author
Anderson is the author of several books, including
The Origins of Postmodernity (1998) and
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984). He has also provided explorations of European history and social development in the volumes
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and
Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974).
While Anderson has faced many attacks in his native Britain for favoring continental European philosophers over British thinkers, he has not spared
Western European MarxistsWestern Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe, in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union...
from criticism; see his
Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). Nevertheless, many of his assaults have been delivered against postmodernist currents in continental Europe.
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism regards Paris as the new capital of intellectual reaction, quite at odds with others who treat postmodernism as a left heresy.
In an article for
The Atlantic MonthlyThe Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
,
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
claimed Anderson was both “the most profound essayist wielding a pen” and "on the wrong side of history."
Anderson frequently contributes to the
London Review of BooksThe London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
.
New Left Review
Editor of
New Left ReviewNew Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...
from 1962–1982 and 2000–2003, he currently serves on this journal's editorial committee.
Works on Anderson
- Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism, and the New Left. Merlin Press, 2004. ISBN: 978-0850365320.
- Gregory Elliott, Perry Anderson : The Merciless Laboratory of History. University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ISBN: 978-0816629664.
External links