The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner; Carlo Ginzburg, explorer of cultural continuity, and Marshall Berman, herald of modernity. A concluding chapter looks at the idea of the end of history, recently advanced by Francis Fukuyama, in its successive versions from the nineteenth century to the present, and considers the situation of socialism today in the light of it.

An assessment of the seminal thinkers at the border of history and politics

About the Author
Perry Anderson taught History at UCLA for thirty years and is an Editor at New Left Review. Recent books include Brazil Apart, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci and The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony.


Book Information
ISBN 9780860915959
Author Perry Anderson
Format Paperback
Page Count 402
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 785g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 155mm * 28mm