Bio: (1938-) British historian and sociologist. Perry Anderson was the editor of New Left Review, Britain's most influential Marxist journal, from 1962 to 1982, and taught at American universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles. Anderson is one of the most important Marxist theorists of today.

Anderson's most important theoretical contribution comes from two books, both published in 1974 - Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State. In the first book, he explores the dynamics of the slave-owning system of production in antiquity and especially focuses on class struggles in the period of the declining power of the Roman Empire. He further explores how this dynamic influenced the emergence of various forms of feudalism in Europe.

In his book Lineages of the  Absolute State (1974b), Anderson explores the development of fourteenth-century feudalism. During that period, feudal relations in England and France weakened, but so did those relations in Eastern Europe. He believes that feudalism was reconstructed then because the domination of the aristocracy was transferred from the local feudal estates to the absolutist central state. The absolutist state implemented measures that protected the collective interests of the aristocracy, and it was these measures, although unintentional, that enabled the emergence of the bourgeoisie.

The increase in the power and wealth of both the state and the bourgeoisie was made possible by the monetization of taxes and land rents, the purchase of positions within the state administration, and the protection of domestic monopolies and colonial conquests. The different paths of development of feudalism in different states depended on several factors: the strength of the aristocracy in each state, the level of autonomy of cities, and military successes and failures. In this way, Anderson explained how the bourgeoisie emerged within certain absolutist states. Apart from being a theorist of Marxism, he has recently become known as a theorist of postmodernism.

Main works

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974);

Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974);

Considerations on Western Marxism (1976);

Arguments within English Marxism (1980);

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983);

The Origins of Postmodernity (1998);

The New Old World (2009);

The Indian Ideology (2012);

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (2014);

The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017);

The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017);

Brazil Apart: 1964-2019 (2019).