Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History Book

An internal critique. Elliott measures Anderson against his own prior incarnations, against the constraints of the Marxist inheritance, and against his contemporaries in the movement.

It is a useful reminder that Anderson fell prey to certain characteristic illusions of the Far Left'Khrushchevism, Third Worldism, Wilsonism, Studentism, Guevarism, Maoism'before settling at last, after the end of the socialist experiment, on world-historical pessimism.

The book ends just before "Renewals", the essay Anderson wrote for the new New Left Review in 2000. The book has not missed much. The pace of its subject's ideological revisions has slowed. Anderson has not moved since 1988.

It's a good reminder to pick up Anderson's older as well as his newer work. I read "The Origins of the Present Crisis" and "Components of the National Culture", reprinted in his English Questions. I should read "Problems of Socialist Strategy" and "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci". Perhaps you should too.

Fairly good. Perhaps too idealist a book for me. There is precious little materialism here; much thought, little fact. Elliott has Anderson's stylistic tics (French, Italian, and uncommonly difficult Latinisms) but none of his bracing clarity. Better read more Anderson than more Elliott.