Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 261936) is professor emeritus of International Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his book Imagined Communities, in which he systematically describes, using an historical materialist or Marxist approach, the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries. He is also widely regarded as an authority on twentieth-century Indonesian history and politics.

He argues that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, 'print-capitalism'). Anderson's historical materialist approach may be contrasted with Liah Greenfeld's methodological individualist or Weberian approach in "Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity".

He was born in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother. He was brought up mainly in California, and studied at the University of Cambridge. He is the brother of the Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson.

Works

• Java in a Time of Revolution ISBN 0801406870
• Debating World Literature ISBN 1859844588
• Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia ISBN 0801497582
• Imagined Communities ISBN 0860913295 (first ed. 1983)
• The Spectre of Comparisons
• Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination ISBN 1844670376

External links

• A short biography
• "The Nation as Imagined Community" An excerpt from Imagined Communities
• "Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters?" , by Anderson in the New Left Review.
• "When the Virtual Becomes the Real": A Talk with Benedict Anderson, (Spring 1996).
• "Democratic Fatalism in South East Asia Today" by Anderson, (May 11, 2001).
• Review of Imagined Communities by Fadia Rafeedie.
• "The Current Crisis in Indonesia" Interview with Benedict Anderson by William Seaman.
• "Sam's Club" Anderson on Anti-Americanisms, a book review in BOOKFORUM, (december/january 2005).
• Archive of articles written by Anderson in the New Left Review, (requires subscription).
• Interview with Anderson: "I like nationalism's utopian elements" (University of Oslo)
• Review of Under Three Flags by Meredith L. Weiss.

American academics | British academics | 1936 births | Living people | Cornell University faculty

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