Perry Anderson | |
---|---|
Born | Francis Rory Peregrine Anderson 11 September 1938 (age 86) London, England |
Occupation(s) | Historian and political essayist |
Spouse | |
Relatives | Benedict Anderson (brother) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Worcester College, Oxford |
Academic work | |
School or tradition | New Left |
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 ]
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 Brazil Apart:1964-2019 and The H-Word:The Peripeteia of Hegemony. He is the brother of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015).
Anderson was born in London on 11 September 1938. [1] 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. [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]
Anderson's mother,Veronica Beatrice Mary Bigham,was English, [6] 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, [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] Anderson's father had previously been married to the novelist Stella Benson,and it was after her death in 1933 that he married again. [3]
Anderson was educated at Eton and Worcester College,Oxford,where he took his first degree. [12] Early in his life,Anderson made a brief foray into rock criticism,writing under the pseudonym Richard Merton. [13]
In 1962 Anderson became editor of the New Left Review ,a position he held for twenty years. [14] As scholars of the New Left began to reassess their canon in the mid-1970s,Anderson provided an influential perspective. [14] 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. [14]
In the 1980s,Anderson took office as a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. [14] 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 , [15] and pursued teaching as a Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California,Los Angeles. [16]
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(January 2021) |
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", [17] 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.
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Juan O'Gorman was a Mexican painter and architect.
Fredric Ruff Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association, formed in the wake of the French Revolution, to secure representative government in Ireland. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
Verso Books is a left-wing publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review (NLR) and includes Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on its board of directors. According to its website, it's the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year. Harper's called it "Anglo-America's preeminent radical press," and The Sunday Times called it "a rigorously intelligent publisher."
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper", which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country. He was the elder brother of the historian Perry Anderson.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen. First formed in Belfast by Presbyterians opposed to the landed Anglican establishment, the Society, despairing of reform, sought to secure a republic through a revolutionary union with the country's Catholic majority. The grievances of a rack-rented tenantry drove recruitment.
Thomas Cunningham Nairn was a Scottish political theorist and academic. He was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He was known as an essayist and a supporter of Scottish independence.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known as political Marxism.
Robert Paul Brenner is an American economic historian. He is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are early modern European history, economic, social and religious history, agrarian history, social theory/Marxism, and Tudor–Stuart England.
Peter Gowan was a Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University, activist, published author and public speaker. He was a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and was one of the founders of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.
Political Marxism (PM) is a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It is also referred to as a form of neo-Marxism or Western Marxism.
The theory of historical trajectory is part of Karl Marx's historical materialism. This theory has been analyzed by Erik Olin Wright, whose work has been cited in relation to it. According to Wright, while Marx's theory of social change is often regarded as obsolete, it is nonetheless an important and likely still the "most ambitious attempt to construct a scientific theory of alternatives to capitalism". What Marx attempted was to develop a deterministic theory of "long term impossibility of capitalism". According to Marx, the very same problems that should make capitalism fail should also provide the means for the new, more democratic and egalitarian society to arise.
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
Neo-Marxism is a collection of Marxist schools of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to Post-leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Purcell O'Gorman was an Irish nationalist politician and Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, elected as a member of the Home Rule League to represent Waterford City. He was elected only once, in the 1874 United Kingdom general election, and served until 1880.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, analyzes the concept of "class consciousness," and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.
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.