Benedict Anderson

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Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 26 1936) is professor emeritus of International Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work titled 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.

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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
Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination ISBN 1844670376