Perry Anderson
Components of the National Culture
A coherent and militant student movement has not yet emerged in England. But it may now be only a matter of time before it does. Britain is the last major industrialized country which has not produced one. The immediate priorities for any such movement are obvious: the fight against the authoritarianism of universities and colleges, alliance with the working-class and struggle against imperialism. These are the issues which are the natural focus of struggle for a mass student revolt. There is, however, another front which will have eventually to be opened. This is a direct attack on the reactionary and mystifying culture inculcated in universities and colleges, and which it is one of the fundamental purposes of British higher education to instil in students.
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Incommensurate Russia
With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.
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Counterpuncher
Retrospective on the liberated life and work of Alexander Cockburn, whose last book, A Colossal Wreck, completes a dazzling triptych. Shaping influences of family, place and political epoch on a singularly radical temperament, and the keen-edged prose in which it found expression.
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Consilium
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Imperium
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Homeland
Deadlocks of American politics viewed within a longer optic, as outcomes of interlocking determinants—regime of accumulation, sociological shifts, cultural mutations, catalytic minorities—within an all-capitalist ideological universe.
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Ronald Fraser, 1930–2012
Tribute to the author of Blood of Spain, locating the impulse behind his oeuvre in a commitment to explore lived experience. Reconstructions
of work, war, politics and subjectivity, from Napoleonic era to post-Fordist present.
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After the Event
Replying to critics, Anderson renews his critique of European narcissism, before turning to the dynamics of the EU debt crisis, and Berlin’s role in producing and exacerbating it.
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Lucio Magri
Homage to an outstanding figure of the European Left, who fought to preserve the link between radical thought and mass politics as Italy’s Communist tradition dissolved around him.
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The Mythologian
Perry Anderson on Patrick Wilcken, Claude-Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. Deciphering the life and thought of the anthropological mage.
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On the Concatenation in the Arab World
From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.
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Two Revolutions
How to explain the opposed outcomes for communism in Russia and China, after 1989? Classes and leaders, anciens régimes and external settings, examined in comparative perspective.
