Archive of Perry Anderson

 An excerpt from Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) by Perry Anderson.

Perry Anderson probes Edward Thompson's work on William Morris and his defense of utopianism.  

This text is excerpted from Considerations on Western Marxism, written in 1974 as the introduction to a reader on Western Marxism whose publication was ultimately delayed before appearing as a standalone volume in 1976.

The capture of the postmodern by Jameson has set the terms of subsequent debate. It is no surprise that the most significant interventions since his entry into the field have likewise been Marxist in origin. The three leading contributions can be read as attempts to supplement or correct, each in its own way, Jameson's original account. Alex Callinicos’s Against Postmodernism (1989) advances a closer analysis of the political background to the postmodern. David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity (1990) offers a much fuller theory of its economic presuppositions. Terry Eagleton's Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) tackles the impact of its ideological diffusion. All these works pose problems of demarcation. How is the postmodern to be best periodized?

In the Mosaic of Islam Perry Anderson and the acclaimed historian of Islam Suleiman Mourad aim to introduce the long history of Islam and its reception, from Muhammad to the present, in an open and accessible manner. In this extract from the book, Anderson and Mourad discuss the antagonism between Shiʿis and Sunnis, the causes and effects of the Arab Spring, Israel's place in the Middle East, and the history of Pan-Arabism.

Perry Anderson's analysis of Obama's foreign policy was first published in New Left Review in September 2013 and forms a part of American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers.