World War I played host to political forces arising from two distinct historical periods. On the battlefields of Europe, the imperialism of the nineteenth century met the mechanized killing machines of the twentieth. Lord Herbert Kitchener, a veteran of the Boer War who also served in Sudan and Egypt, found himself incapable of understanding a conflict in which the majority of casualties, around 70 percent, were caused by artillery. “I don’t know what’s to be done. This isn’t war,” he is said to have remarked.

More inexplicable than the nature of the war has been its causes. In its immediate aftermath, official accounts of the conflagration, backed up by the Versailles treaty, laid blame firmly at the feet of Germany. But in the century since, a vast literature has emerged offering highly heterogeneous analyses of the conflict. Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War is Perry Anderson’s intervention in this debate, which he sees as represented most perceptively by six historians, each from one of the belligerent nations — France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and the United States. The panoptic essay, taking on a writer’s biography, entire body of work, and its reception, is a specialty of Anderson, who has for sixty years been one of the Anglophone world’s preeminent Marxists.

The author of seventeen books, many of which are essay collections, Anderson has written with erudition on a broad range of themes and topics, including the formation of Eurasian nation-states, the failures of Western Marxism, America’s foreign policy intellectuals, and Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell. If a unified thread connects his work, it is an attempt to defend the value of his brand of Weberian-inflected Marxism — with its focus on elite institutions, class, and the relationship between economic competition between states and imperialism — as an analytic framework for interpreting the world. It is with this lens that he scrutinizes the six historians under his consideration.