Few historians could rival Perry Anderson’s ability to write intelligently on questions as diverse as ancient Greece, culture and political theory, and contemporary developments from Brazil to Italy. But if the British historian’s erudition has made him stand out in the world of letters, so, too, has his life-long commitment to socialist politics. Indeed, most appraisals of Anderson focus on this latter point, rather less examining the historical arguments and epistemological underpinnings that inform his studies.

But we can get a better understanding of Anderson when we adopt the approach toward intellectual history which he himself employs. This first means reading the intellectual’s work as an “intentional totality,” aiming to detect its contradictions and omissions, whether conscious or otherwise. But it is also important to historicize his approach, by shedding light on its intellectual, social, and political context.

With Anderson, we can do this particularly fruitfully when we look at his attempts to grapple with the history of Marxism — and in particular, the “Western Marxist” tradition that developed outside of the state-socialist countries. In combination with his often-withering judgements on the various Western Marxists, Anderson pursued his own search to overcome its legacy — not as an idle exercise in intellectual history, but in a bid to pull up the roots of the Left’s many shortcomings.