Perry Anderson (b. September 1938, London[1]) is a British Leftist intellectual, historian, and political essayist. He is often identified with the post-1956 Western Marxism of the New Left in Europe. He is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and an editor of the New Left Review. He is also known as Francis Anderson. He is the brother of anthropologist and historian Benedict Anderson.
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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 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 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).
Anderson is the author of several books, including The Origins of Postmodernity (1998) and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1984). He has also provided explorations of European history and social development in the volumes Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974).
While Anderson has faced many attacks in his native Britain for favoring 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 regards Paris as the new capital of intellectual reaction, quite at odds with others who treat postmodernism as a left heresy.
In an article for The Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens claimed Anderson was both “the most profound essayist wielding a pen” and "on the wrong side of history."
Anderson frequently contributes to the London Review of Books.
Editor of New Left Review from 1962–1982 and 2000–2003, he currently serves on this journal's editorial committee.
He is the brother of the political and historical scientist Benedict Anderson. Their father, James O'Gorman Anderson, came from Waterford in Ireland. James' father, Brigadier-General Sir Francis James Anderson, was from descended from a Scottish family in Ireland, while his mother Lady Frances O'Gorman came from the old Gaelic clan of Mac Gorman of Co. Clare. (Mac Gorman became corrupted to O'Gorman over time). She was directly descended from Melaghlin Mac Gorman, who was granted the Barony of Ibrickane in Co. Clare by Henry VIII in 1544. Perry's great-grandfather was the Irish Home Rule Movement MP, Major Purcell O'Gorman, while his great-great grandfather was Nicholas Purcell O'Gorman, secretary of the Catholic Association.[2] [3]