The historian Ramachandra Guha remembers Benedict Anderson, as a scholar, teacher and friend:
Benedict Anderson, who died earlier this week, aged 79, was the last of the great polymath social scientists. He was at once a political scientist, historian, sociologist, literary theorist, and biographer. He was also formidably multi-lingual, knowing half-a-dozen European languages and some four or five Asian languages too.
In the range of his learning, in his ability to so effortlessly cross disciplinary, temporal, and geographical boundaries, Benedict Anderson had only two peers: Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) and Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012). Gellner and Hobsbawm were European Jews forced to emigrate to England in the wake of the rise of the Nazis. Anderson was Irish, the son of a colonial official who served in, among other places, Yunan, Manchuria, and Shanghai. He himself studied at the University of Cambridge, before moving further west, to Cornell University in upstate New York, where he taught for some 35 years.
In the wake of Podemos’ direct challenge to the two-party system in Spain, we have an exclusive extract from Pablo Iglesias’ Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of Democracy in Europe. In it, Iglesias discusses Podemos’ success in challenging the dominant political and economic consensus in Spain while connecting wider audiences to political ideas too often barricaded in academia.
To mark 'International Migrants' Day', we publish an article by London2Calais, an group of activists who have been organising supplies and activities in solidarity with those trapped in 'the Jungle' refugee camp. With the global number of refugees having passed the 20million mark for the first time since 1992, they highlight the interconnected political drivers of the exodus - largely western imperialism, regional and national authoritarianism, predatory global capitalism, and a violent, exclusionary border regime.