Perry Anderson

For the Canadian ice hockey player, see Perry Anderson previously been married to the novelist Stella Benson, and
(ice hockey).
it was after her death in 1933 that he married again.[3]
[1]
Perry R. Anderson (born September 1938, London)
Anderson was educated at Eton and Worcester College,
Oxford, where he took his rst degree.[1]

2 Career
In 1962 Anderson became editor of the New Left Review,
a position he held for twenty years.[12] As scholars of the
New Left began to reassess their canon in the mid-1970s,
Anderson provided an inuential perspective.[12] He published two major volumes of analytical history in 1974:
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism focuses on the creation and endurance of feudal social formations, while
Lineages of the Absolutist State examines monarchical abPerry Anderson at the Holberg Prize Symposium, Bergen, Norsolutism. Within their respective topics they are each vast
way, 25 November 2008
in scope, assessing the whole history of Europe from classical times to the nineteenth century. The books achieved
is a British historian and political essayist. A specialist in
an instant prominence for Anderson, whose wide-ranging
intellectual history, he is often identied with the postanalysis synthesised elements of history, philosophy, and
1956 Western Marxism of the New Left. He is Professor
political theory.[12]
of History and Sociology at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA) and a former editor of the New Left In the 1980s he took oce as a professor at the New
Review. Anderson has written several books, the latest School for Social Research in New York.[12] He returned
being The Indian Ideology (2012), a polemic against the as editor at NLR in 2000 for three more years, and after
Indian nation-building project. He is the brother of polit- his retirement continued to serve on the journals editorial
committee. He still writes, including frequent contribuical scientist Benedict Anderson.
tions to the London Review of Books,[13] and continues to
teach as a Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.[14]

Background and early life

Anderson was born in 1938. His father, James Carew

O'Gorman Anderson (18931946), known as Shaemas,
an ocial with the Chinese Maritime Customs, was born
into an Anglo-Irish family, the younger son of BrigadierGeneral Sir Francis Anderson, of Ballydavid, County
Waterford.[2] He was descended from the Anderson family of Ardbrake, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who had settled
in Ireland in the early 18th century.[3][4][5] His mother,
Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson, was English.[6] His
grandmother, Frances, Lady Anderson, belonged to the
Gaelic Gorman clan of County Clare and was the daughter of the Irish Home Rule Member of Parliament Major Purcell O'Gorman,[7][8][9] himself the son of Nicholas
Purcell O'Gorman who had been involved with the
Republican Society of United Irishmen during the 1798
Rebellion, later becoming Secretary of the Catholic Association in the 1820s.[7][10][11] Andersons father had

3 Inuence and criticism

He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E. P. Thompson
in the latters The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the structural 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 Andersons
view of aristocratic dominance of Britains historical trajectory, as well as Andersons seeming preference for
continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses
to Thompsons polemics, rst in an essay in New Left
Review (JanuaryFebruary 1966) called Socialism and
Pseudo-Empiricism and then in a more conciliatory yet
ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism
1

(1980).
While Anderson has faced many attacks in his native
Britain for favouring continental European philosophers
over British thinkers, he has not spared Western European Marxists 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 Anderson regards Paris as the new capital of intellectual reaction, quite at odds with others who treat postmodernism as a left heresy.

EXTERNAL LINKS

[3] Perry Anderson, A Belated Encounter (Andersons short

biography of his father James)
[4] Journal of the Old Waterford Society 1994 (PDF). P. 7,
para. 9.
[5] Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry
of Ireland.
[6] The Inuence of Benedict Anderson.</
[7] James Frost, The History and Topography of the County
of Clare - Pedigree of MacGorman (OGorman)", Clare
County Library.
[8] The History and Topography of the County of Clare
Ui Bracain..., Clare County Library.

Works

Anderson is the author of numerous books, including:

Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (1974). London: New Left Books. ISBN 090230870X.

[9] John O'Hart, Irish Pedigrees, or, The Origin and Stem
of the Irish Nation.
[10] The United Irishmen, their lives and times"/
[11] Kieran Sheedy, The United Irishmen of County Clare,
County Clare - Historical Essays.

Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974). London:

[12] Parker, David (1988). Cannon, John, ed. The Blackwell
New Left Books. ISBN 0902308165.
Considerations on Western Marxism (1976).

Dictionary of Historians. Oxford; New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd. pp. 89. ISBN 063114708X.

Arguments within English Marxism (1980). London: [13] London Review of Books (2012). Perry Anderson in the
LRB Archive. Lrb.co.uk. LRB Ltd. Retrieved 29 May
Verso. ISBN 0860917274.
2012.

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983). London: Verso. ISBN 0860910768.

English Questions (1992). London: Verso. ISBN
0860913759.
A Zone of Engagement (1992). London: Verso.
ISBN 0860913775.
The Origins of Postmodernity (1998).
Verso. ISBN 1859842224.

London:

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

(2005). London: Verso. ISBN 1859845274.
The New Old World (2009). London: Verso. ISBN
9781844673124.
The Indian Ideology (2012). New Delhi: Three Essays Collective. ISBN 9788188789924.
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (2015).
London: Verso.

References

[1] Gregory Elliott (1998), Perry Anderson: The Merciless

Laboratory of History, University of Minnesota Press, p.
1.
[2] Sir Bernard Burke, Peter Townsend, Burkes Genealogical
and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry (1969), p. 41

[14] UCLA Department of History (2012). Perry R. Anderson, UCLA Faculty. History.ucla.edu. UCLA. Retrieved
29 May 2012.

6 Further reading
Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism, and the
New Left. Merlin Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-85036532-0.
Gregory Elliott, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History. University of Minnesota Press,
1998. ISBN 978-0-8166-2966-4.

7 External links
Archive of Perry Andersons articles for The Nation
Archive of Perry Andersons articles for The New
Left Review
The New Statesman Prole Perry Anderson
Television interview on Conversations with History, 2001 on YouTube
Gandhi Centre Stage from the London Review of
Books, 2012-07-05

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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