Perry Anderson Writes Marxist History on the Grandest Scale
The British historian and New Left Review editor Perry Anderson set out to trace the history of European class societies from antiquity to the present. Anderson’s uncompleted project is a landmark in the development of Marxist historiography.
Perry Anderson argued that the modern capitalist state was the result of a historically determined sequence that began with the fall of Rome. He compared two aspects of Europe’s complex totality, the East and West, across two millennia. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
In his memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries, the political scientist Benedict Anderson referred to his “more intelligent, slightly younger” brother. He had reason to be proud too. Perry Anderson was well known for his writings on the modern state, while Benedict was celebrated for his writings on nationalism.
Their chosen fields reflected their life experiences. As children, their lives were regularly uprooted, moving from China to California, Colorado, and Ireland, before they won scholarships to Eton, the famous English boarding school. They felt like outsiders. As adults, detachment served them well in studying those political constructs — states and nations — that usually instill sentiments of devotion and belonging in their peoples.
At Eton, the Anderson brothers were looked down upon by their wealthy contemporaries. Yet they and other scholarship-funded students also looked down upon their wealthy peers. Both groups were “snobbish,” as Benedict put it, though perhaps not equally so, given the social freedoms afforded to the ultrawealthy.
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