Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.
He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter’s The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, 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).
Books in order of publication:
Works
Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (1974). London: New Left Books.
Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974). London: New Left Books.
Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). London: Verso.
Arguments within English Marxism (1980). London: Verso.
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983). London: Verso.
English Questions (1992). London: Verso.
A Zone of Engagement (1992). London: Verso.
The Origins of Postmodernity (1998). London: Verso.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005). London: Verso.
The New Old World (2009). London: Verso.
The Indian Ideology (2012). New Delhi: Three Essays Collective.
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (2014). London: Verso.
The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017). London: Verso.
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017). London: Verso.
Brazil Apart: 1964-2019 (2019). London: Verso.
Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West (2021). London: Verso.
Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust, and other Literary Forms (2022). London: Verso.
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