British historian, essayist, and — more consequentially than any other single figure — the editor who for most of sixty years has determined the intellectual direction of New Left Review. Anderson took over the journal in 1962 at the age of twenty-four, bought out its debts, and began the work that defines it: long essays, in English, on the serious Marxist and left-liberal thought of Europe, Latin America, and Asia, published at a length and seriousness the British weekly press would not carry. He has edited the Review in two long stretches (roughly 1962–82 and 2000 onward, the latter now shared with Susan Watkins) and produced, alongside the editorial work, one of the more impressive bodies of historical and critical writing by a living anglophone Marxist.
His early scholarly work set out to give English socialism the structural history he thought it lacked. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) are a two-volume comparative sociology of European state formation from the late Roman Empire through the seventeenth century — classical, feudal, and absolutist modes of production traced across Eastern and Western Europe — that still anchor graduate syllabi in historical sociology. Behind these sits the earlier polemic, worked out with Tom Nairn in the pages of NLR in the 1960s, that Britain had failed to make a proper bourgeois revolution, and that its monarchy, gentry, empire, and enfeebled Left all followed from that missing rupture. E.P. E.P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory replied, bitterly; the argument between them set the terms of a generation of British left historiography.
Later books narrow the focus and sharpen the polemic. Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) is a tight, unsparing audit of what he calls the migration of Marxism from workers' movements to the academy between Lukács and Althusser, identifying philosophical abstraction, political defeatism, and metropolitan isolation as its three constituting weaknesses — an argument Gabriel Rockhill, from a very different angle, would later intensify. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), English Questions (1992), and The New Old World (2009, on European integration) are collections of essays on contemporary theorists — Habermas, Bobbio, Rawls, Runciman, Rorty — whom he tends to read with immense care and then dispatch. American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (2015) is his book-length anatomy of the post-1945 US imperial project; The H-Word (2017) a genealogy of the concept of hegemony from Thucydides to Gramsci. His brother Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities — the two Andersons are arguably the most influential pair of Marxist siblings of the twentieth century.
Anderson's prose is the distinguishing instrument: long, periodic, unhurried, and pitilessly exact. He has taught for decades at UCLA. He has never run out of things to say about Europe, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, or India, and a generation of non-American anglophone intellectuals have used New Left Review under him as the one serious magazine in English that treats the rest of the world as if it were thinking on its own behalf.