Perry Anderson

Perry Anderson
Perry Anderson at Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre, 2012
Born	Francis Rory Peregrine Anderson 11 September 1938 (1938-09-11) (age 78) London, England, UK
Pen name	Richard Merton
Occupation	British historian and political essayist
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Worcester College, Oxford
Literary movement	Post-1956 Western Marxism of the New Left
Relatives	James Carew O'Gorman Anderson (father) Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson (mother) Benedict Anderson (brother)

Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson (born 11 September 1938) is a British historian and political essayist. A specialist in intellectual history, he is often identified with the post-1956 Western Marxism of the New Left. He is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a former editor of the New Left Review. Anderson has written several books, the latest being American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (2015). He is the brother of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015).

Anderson was born in 1938 in London. His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson (1893–1946), known as Shaemas, an official with the Chinese Maritime Customs, was born into an Anglo-Irish family, the younger son of Brigadier-General Sir Francis Anderson, of Ballydavid, County Waterford. He was descended from the Anderson family of Ardbrake, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who had settled in Ireland in the early 18th century.

Anderson's mother, Veronica Beatrice Mary Bigham, was English; the daughter of Trevor Bigham, was the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1914-1931. Anderson's grandmother, Frances, Lady Anderson, belonged to the Gaelic Gorman clan of County Clare and was the daughter of the Irish Home Rule Member of Parliament Major Purcell O'Gorman, himself the son of Nicholas Purcell O'Gorman who had been involved with the Republican Society of United Irishmen during the 1798 Rebellion, later becoming Secretary of the Catholic Association in the 1820s. Anderson's father had previously been married to the novelist Stella Benson, and it was after her death in 1933 that he married again.