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Perry Anderson: Essential Marxist Reading

In this reading list we compile works by Perry Anderson: one of the world's leading political theorists and Marxist historians.

22 August 2023

Perry Anderson: Essential Marxist Reading

Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, Lineages of the Absolutist State, American Foreign Policy and It's ThinkersConsiderations on Western Marxism, and The New Old World. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, teaches history at UCLA, and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.

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See all our Author Bookshelves here.

Different Speeds, Same Furies
There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language....
The H-Word
Few terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony.In the first full historical study o...
Ever Closer Union?
The European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of it...
The Indian Ideology
The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most pop...
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci
An explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in Gramsci’s thought, as revelatory today as on first publication in New Left Review in 1976. This landmark essay has been the subject of kee...
Paperback
Brazil Apart
What does Brazil’s lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America’s most populous society, and how has it come about? Perry Anderson, foremost observer of the Brazilian scen...
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers
Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...
Paperback
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of th...
Paperback
Lineages of the Absolutist State
Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...
Paperback
The New Old World
The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origin...
Spectrum
The focus of Spectrum is the range of contemporary ideas that runs from conservative to liberal to radical conceptions of state and society, rarely considered in the same optic. It looks at the the...
Paperback
The Origins of Postmodernity
Where does the idea of the postmodern come from? Who first conceived, and who developed it? How have its meanings changed? What purposes do they serve? These are the questions addressed in The Orig...
Paperback
A Zone of Engagement
The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics....
Paperback
English Questions
A set of reflections on British society and culture, this volume falls into two principal parts. The first consists of a pair of essays published in New Left Review in the sixties; “Origins of the ...
Paperback
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? I...
Paperback
Arguments Within English Marxism
The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working...
Paperback
Considerations on Western Marxism
This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Ru...
Paperback
The Question of Europe

The Question of Europe

Contemporary European politics seems to be gripped by a stifling conformism, an uninspiring uniformity of outlook which afflicts all the major parties. However, if there is one issue which does div...
Paperback
Mapping the West European Left
Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Ital...
Paperback

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