Perry Anderson

Anderson argued against the prevailing Marxist view that absolutist states were essentially bourgeois. He contended that absolutism was a 'redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination,' designed to protect the nobility's class power as serfdom collapsed in the West and was intensified in the East . The state's apparent modernity—standing armies, bureaucracy, national taxes—did not make it capitalist. By comparing Western absolutism with Eastern European variants and the Ottoman Empire, Anderson showed how the same form produced divergent outcomes, a 'lineage' of absolutisms shaped by their specific feudal conditions.

The dispute was not merely about absolutism but about how to practice Marxist history. Anderson, influenced by Althusser, emphasized structural analysis and the relative autonomy of the political level. Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory (1978), attacked Althusserian structuralism as a betrayal of historical materialism's empirical and experiential foundations . Anderson responded in Arguments within English Marxism (1980), defending structural analysis while acknowledging Thompson's moral seriousness. Underneath lay a deeper disagreement: whether class is a structural category or a lived historical relationship .

In Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Anderson traced the tradition from Lukács and Gramsci through the Frankfurt School, Sartre, and Althusser. His central diagnosis was that after the defeat of proletarian revolutions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s, Marxist theory withdrew from political practice . The result was a 'hidden hallmark' of Western Marxism: it was a 'product of defeat' . Theory became increasingly academic and philosophical, focusing on superstructure and culture while losing contact with working-class struggle.

Anderson took over as editor in 1962 and transformed the journal into the leading vehicle for introducing Continental Marxist theory to English-speaking readers. He translated and championed Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser, and the Frankfurt School, raising the theoretical sophistication of the British left . Under his direction, NLR also became a space for major historical and political interventions, including his own essays on English exceptionalism and the absolutist state. He remained on the editorial board long after stepping down, and the journal remains a central institution of international left intellectual life .

Anderson argued that England's early bourgeois revolution in the seventeenth century produced a landed oligarchy that dominated the state without needing the absolutist centralization seen on the Continent. This 'English exceptionalism'—a capitalism presided over by a feudal-derived aristocracy—explained the peculiarities of British political development, including the absence of a strong centralized state and the resilience of aristocratic institutions. His early NLR essays on this theme, later collected in English Questions (1992), were among his most influential interventions, setting the terms for subsequent debate about Britain's historical 'peculiarity'.

He is both, and the distinction often collapses in his work. Anderson practices history as a theoretical enterprise: his comparative studies of antiquity, feudalism, and absolutism are driven by questions about the nature of the state, class power, and historical transition drawn from Marxist theory. Simultaneously, his theoretical interventions—on Western Marxism, on the 'ends of history,' on postmodernity—are grounded in historical evidence and informed by a historian's sensitivity to context and contingency . Terry Eagleton called him 'the most brilliant British Marxist intellectual,' a judgment that captures his dual identity as scholar and public thinker .