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

In 1962 Anderson became editor of the New Left Review, a position he held for twenty years. As scholars of the New Left began to reassess their canon in the mid-1970s, Anderson provided

• Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (1974). London: New Left Books. ISBN 090230870X.
• Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974). London: New Left Books. ISBN 0902308165.
• Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). London: Verso. ISBN

Anderson bore the brunt of the disapproval of E. P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the structuralist Marxism o

• Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism, and the New Left. Merlin Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-85036-532-0.
• Alex Callinicos, 'Perry Anderson and Western Marxism', International Socialism, 23 (1984).

• Archive of Perry Anderson's articles for The Nation
• Archive of Perry Anderson's articles for The New Left Review
• The New Statesman Profile – Perry Anderson