Perry Anderson’s books include Lineages of the Absolutist State, The Origins of Postmodernity, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West. He is a professor of history and sociology at UCLA and sits on the editorial board of New Left Review. He has written more than fifty pieces for the LRB, on subjects including his father’s career in the Chinese Customs Service, Lula’s Brazil, Michael Oakeshott, Anthony Powell, Dmitri Furman, the modern political histories of Italy, Turkey, France, and India and the failings of the EU.
What is the relationship between coercion and consent? Under what circumstances does power turn into authority, brute force into legitimate leadership? Can coercion work without consent? Can...
‘It is a sign of true political power when a great people can determine, of its own will, the vocabulary, the terminology and the words, the very way of speaking, even the way of...
Post-Modernism entered the public mind as a fast-value currency in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the field of architecture, where its association with gimmicky tropes of visual play...
For the past thirty years, New Left Review has been the most consistently interesting political journal in the country. And Perry Anderson, who used to edit it and still helps direct it, has been...
Joseph Schumpeter had a refreshing sense of socialism. For him, it had almost no fixed sense at all. ‘A society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be...
The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe...
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