Perry Anderson

{{for|the Canadian ice hockey player|Perry Anderson (ice hockey)}}

{{Infobox academic

| name = Perry Anderson

| image = Perry Anderson at Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre.jpg

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| caption = Anderson in 2012

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| birth_name = Francis Rory Peregrine Anderson

| birth_date = {{birth-date and age|11 September 1938}}

| birth_place = London, England

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| occupation = Historian and political essayist

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| alma_mater = Worcester College, Oxford

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| school_tradition = New Left

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| spouse = {{marriage|Juliet Mitchell|1962|1972|reason=divorced}}

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| relatives = Benedict Anderson (brother)

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}}

Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson (born 11 September 1938) is a British intellectual, political philosopher, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites Anderson's work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.{{Citation needed|date=April 2023}}

Anderson is perhaps best known as the moving force behind the New Left Review. He is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Anderson has written many books, most recently Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and other Literary Forms and Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. He is the brother of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015).

Background and early life

Anderson was born in London on 11 September 1938.{{cite book |last1=Elliott |first1=Gregory |title=Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History |year=1998 |publisher=U of Minnesota Press |isbn=978-0-8166-2966-4 |page=1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TmeeV9POhgsC&pg=PA1 |language=en}} His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson (1893–1946), known as Séamas, an official with the Chinese Maritime Customs, was born into an Anglo-Irish family, the younger son of Brigadier-General Sir Francis Anderson, of Ballydavid, County Waterford.Sir Bernard Burke, Peter Townsend, Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry (1969), p. 41 He was descended from the Anderson family of Ardbrake, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who had settled in Ireland in the early 18th century.Perry Anderson, [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n15/perry-anderson/a-belated-encounter A Belated Encounter] (Anderson's short biography of his father James){{cite web|title=Journal of the Old Waterford Society 1994|url=http://snap.waterfordcoco.ie/collections/ejournals/101014/101014.pdf}} P. 7, para. 9.{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/genealogicalhera00burkuoft|title=A genealogical and heraldic history of the landed gentry of Ireland|first1=Bernard|last1=Burke|first2=Arthur Charles|last2=Fox-Davies|date=29 August 1912|publisher=London : Harrison|via=Internet Archive}}

Anderson's mother, Veronica Beatrice Mary Bigham, was English,[http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/2231/1/WollmannBenedictAnderson-Wollman-Spencer.pdf "The Influence of Benedict Anderson".] the daughter of Trevor Bigham, who was the Deputy Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, 1914–1931. Anderson's 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,James Frost, [http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/frost/chap9_macgormans.htm "The History and Topography of the County of Clare – Pedigree of MacGorman (O'Gorman)"], Clare County Library.[http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/frost/chap9_ui_bracain.htm "The History and Topography of the County of Clare – Ui Bracain..."], Clare County Library.{{cite web|title=John O'Hart, Irish Pedigree's, or, The Origin and Stem of the Irish Nation|year=1892 |publisher=Dublin, J. Duffy and Co.; New York, Benziger Brothers |url=https://archive.org/details/irishpedigreesor_01ohar }} 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.{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/s3unitedirishmen00madduoft|title=The United Irishmen, their lives and times. With several additional memoirs, and authentic documents, heretofore unpublished; the whole matter newly arranged and revised. 2d series|first=Richard Robert|last=Madden|date=29 August 1858|publisher=Dublin, J. Duffy|via=Internet Archive}}Kieran Sheedy, [http://www.irelandmidwest.com/clare/history/historyessays.htm "The United Irishmen of County Clare"], County Clare – Historical Essays. Anderson's father had previously been married to the novelist Stella Benson, and it was after her death in 1933 that he married again.

Anderson was educated at Eton and Worcester College, Oxford, where he took his first degree.Gregory Elliott (1998), [https://books.google.com/books?id=TmeeV9POhgsC Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, University of Minnesota Press], p. 1. Early in his life, Anderson made a brief foray into rock criticism, writing under the pseudonym Richard Merton.{{cite book|page=60|quote=Prudence was displayed in the use of a pseudonym for two Andersonian forays onto the terrain of rock music, under the signature of Richard Merton, who opted for the Stones rather than the Beatles, and the Beach Boys rather than Bob Dylan.|title=Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History|last=Elliott|first=Gregory|year=1998|publisher=U of Minnesota Press|isbn=0816629668}}

Career

In 1962 Anderson became editor of the New Left Review, a position he held for twenty years. As scholars of the New Left began to reassess their canon in the mid-1970s, Anderson provided an influential perspective.{{Cite book |title=The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians |last=Parker |first=David |editor=Cannon, John |editor-link=John Cannon (historian) |year=1988 |publisher=Basil Blackwell Ltd. |location=Oxford; New York |isbn=063114708X |pages=[https://archive.org/details/blackwelldiction0000unse_u4p6/page/8 8–9] |url=https://archive.org/details/blackwelldiction0000unse_u4p6/page/8 }} 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 absolutism. Within their respective topics they are each vast in scope, assessing the whole history of Europe from classical times to the nineteenth century. The books achieved an instant prominence for Anderson, whose wide-ranging analysis synthesised elements of history, philosophy, and political theory.

In the 1980s, Anderson took office as a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. He returned as editor at NLR in 2000 for three more years, and after his retirement continued to serve on the journal's editorial committee. As of 2019, he has continued to make contributions to the London Review of Books,{{Cite web |url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/perry-anderson |title=Perry Anderson in the LRB Archive |author=London Review of Books |year=2012 |publisher=LRB Ltd. |access-date=29 May 2012 }} and pursued teaching as a Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.{{Cite web |url=http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty?lid=252 |title=Perry R. Anderson, UCLA Faculty |author=UCLA Department of History |year=2012 |publisher=UCLA |access-date=29 May 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120412005907/http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty?lid=252 |archive-date=12 April 2012}}

Influence and criticism

Anderson 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 structuralist 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",{{Cite journal | last = Anderson | first = Perry | title = Socialism and pseudo-empiricism | journal = New Left Review | volume = I | issue = 35 | pages = 2–42 | publisher = New Left Review | date = January–February 1966 | url = http://newleftreview.org/I/35/perry-anderson-socialism-and-pseudo-empiricism }} and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).

While Anderson faced many attacks in his native Britain for favouring continental European philosophers over British thinkers, he did not spare Western European Marxists from criticism, such as in his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). Nevertheless, many of his assaults were delivered against postmodernist currents in continental Europe. In his book In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Anderson depicts Paris as the new capital of intellectual reaction.

Works

[https://archive.org/details/passagesfromanti0000ande Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism] (1974). London: New Left Books. {{ISBN|090230870X}}.
[https://archive.org/details/lineagesofabsolu0000perr_e3i1 Lineages of the Absolutist State] (1974). London: New Left Books. {{ISBN|0902308165}}.
Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). London: Verso. {{ISBN|0860917207}}.
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci [1976] (2017). London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1786633729}}.
Arguments within English Marxism (1980). London: Verso. {{ISBN|0860917274}}.
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}}.
[https://archive.org/details/originsofpostmod0000ande The Origins of Postmodernity] (1998). London: Verso. {{ISBN|1859842224}}.
[https://archive.org/details/spectrum0000ande 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}}.
[https://archive.org/details/americanforeignp0000ande American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers] (2014). London: Verso. {{ISBN|178168667X}}.
The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017). London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1786633682}}.
Brazil Apart: 1964-2019 (2019). London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1788737944}}
Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West (2021). London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1839764417}}
Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and other Literary Forms (2022). London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1804290798}}.
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (2024) London: Verso. {{ISBN|978-1804297674}}

References

External links

[http://www.thenation.com/authors/perry-anderson Archive of Perry Anderson's articles for The Nation]
[http://newleftreview.org/authors/perry-anderson Archive of Perry Anderson's articles for The New Left Review]
[http://www.newstatesman.com/node/134374 The New Statesman Profile – Perry Anderson]
{{YouTube|jjTKsRfVM9Q|Television interview on "Conversations with History", 2001}}
[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/perry-anderson/gandhi-centre-stage "Gandhi Centre Stage" from the London Review of Books, 2012-07-05]