Perry Anderson

He was born in London on 11 September 1938. His father, James Anderson, from an Anglo-Irish family, was an official of the Chinese Maritime Customs, and his elder brother was the political scientist Benedict Anderson. He was educated at Eton and Worcester College, Oxford, and early on wrote rock criticism under the pseudonym Richard Merton.

In 1962 he became editor of New Left Review, a post he held for twenty years. His group, which had parted from Thompson's "first New Left", had by 1968 drawn in Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists and became known as the second New Left. In "Origins of the Present Crisis" (NLR, January–February 1964) Anderson observed that the British left had neither a structural study of its own society nor any global history of twentieth-century British society. The present crisis, he argued, could only be understood through the differential formation of British capitalist society since the seventeenth century, the total trajectory of its class structure, which had to anchor any socialist strategy.

The resulting Nairn-Anderson thesis, developed with Tom Nairn, held that Britain's early development into a capitalist society was so successful that it failed to overturn archaic social structures and institutions such as the power of the aristocracy. Whereas continental states like Germany built efficient administrations and education systems through a "second" bourgeois revolution, in Britain, as Anderson put it, "the triumphs of the past become the bane of the present." E. P. Thompson answered in "The Peculiarities of the English" (1965), faulting the pair for ignoring communism's influence on the British left and for reducing English history to class categories; Anderson replied in "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" (1966).

In 1974 Anderson published two major volumes of analytical history: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, on the creation and endurance of feudal social formations, and Lineages of the Absolutist State, on monarchical absolutism, together surveying European history from classical times to the nineteenth century. In the foreword to the first he called for a critical engagement with Marx and Engels and argued that Marxist inquiry must integrate non-Marxist scholarship to avoid dogmatism.

Considerations on Western Marxism, written in 1974 and published in 1976, defined the tradition running from Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, Sartre and Althusser by its "structural divorce from political practice". In the classical tradition of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, theory had been organically connected to its authors' roles as leaders or militants of working-class organisations; the failure of proletarian revolution outside Russia in 1918–1923, consolidated by Stalinism and fascism, severed that link. Marxist theory therefore retreated from economic laws and political strategy into philosophy, method and culture, produced in universities at a growing distance from the working class, in an esoteric language and with a latent pessimism. Anderson set against it the Trotskyist tradition of persecuted exiles who tried to keep the classical unity of theory and practice, and concluded that the student and worker uprisings since May 1968 had opened a period in which theory and mass practice might be reunited, which would mean the extinction of Western Marxism itself.

When Thompson attacked Althusser and his British followers in The Poverty of Theory (1978), Anderson answered with the more conciliatory but ambitious Arguments within English Marxism (1980). Though criticised for favouring continental thinkers, he turned on postmodernist currents in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), depicting Paris as the new capital of intellectual reaction. After a professorship at the New School in New York in the 1980s he became Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA, and he returned as editor of the relaunched New Left Review from 2000 to 2003, remaining afterwards on its editorial committee.