Political Forms and Historical Materialism

Abstract

The enterprise on which Perry Anderson is engaged is the production of a comparative history of the forms which political power has assumed in different parts of Europe (though not only of Europe); and of the purposes which that political power has served. In effect, he is aiming to produce nothing less than a history of political power and of the state in different social formations and modes of production, notably in slave-labour societies, under feudalism, and under capitalism, but not forgetting the "Asiatic mode of production", to which a 100-page "Note" is devoted in the second of the present volumes, and taking due account of many different geographical and national specificities. The two books now published carry the analysis from Antiquity to the eve of the overthrow of the Absolutist state in England in the 17th century, in France at the end of the 18th, and in Russia at the beginning of the 20th, a matter of some two and a half thousand years, with no part of Europe left out, and with chapters on the Ottoman Empire and Japanese feudalism.