Institute of International Studies; University of California, Berkeley
The longstanding editor of the New Left Review and cofounder of Verso books, Perry Anderson has been described as "one of the foremost contemporary Marxist thinkers." Olympian in both substance and style, Anderson's oeuvre extends from English exceptionalism to European absolutism, from the politics of Latin American transitions to the shifting contours of Western Marxism, from the origins of postmodernism to exterminism and the Cold War. His magisterial two-volume work on European absolutism and the transition to feudalism, published when he was in his mid-thirties, was properly described in the New York Review of Books as a "formidable intellectual achievement," distinctive for its "breathtaking range of conception and architectural skill." As a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, Perry Anderson enjoys a widely acknowledged salience in European public intellectual life. His work has always been marked by an enviable inter-nationalism, whether his longtime interest in the Lusophone world, his cosmopolitan editing of the New Left Review or in what he calls his "intra-mural" surveys of the intellectual world of the revolutionary Left.
Born in London in 1938, Anderson moved to China where his father was stationed while in the employ of the Imperial Maritime Customs. After spending the war years in the United States, the family returned to the south of Ireland where he was raised. Anderson went up to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1956 where his interests shifted from "modern greats" to philosophy and psychology to modern languages (Russian and French). His arrival at Oxford coincided with the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis and with the efflorescence of the British New Left, in which he became a central actor. If there are discontinuities and ruptures within Anderson's intellectual career, there are also profound continuities, not least in his attention to the longue durée of historical and political change. His recent works include The Origins of Postmodernity, The Question of Europe and an important synoptic account of left-wing politics entitled "Renewals" published in the millennial issue of the New Left Review. Perry Anderson teaches History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
See Perry Anderson's 2001 Sanford S. Elberg Lecture, "Internationalism: Metamorphoses of a Meaning" and the Interview with Anderson.
About the Sanford S. Elberg Lecture in International Studies
© Copyright 2001, Regents of the University of California
Site questions: Email iis_webmgr at berkeley.edu..