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Contesting the
Global Order
SUNY series in New Political Science
—————
Bradley J. Macdonald, editor
 Contesting the
Global Order
The Radical Political Economy
of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein

GREGORY P. WILLIAMS
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2020 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Williams, Gregory P., author.

Title: Contesting the global order: the radical political economy of Perry Anderson
and Immanuel Wallerstein / Gregory P. Williams, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY
series in New Political Science | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479651 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479675
(ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937137

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Colleen
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Radical Political Economy for an Age of Uncertainty 1

Chapter 1 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 17

Chapter 2 Ideational Lineages 37

Chapter 3 The Year that Changed Everything 55

Chapter 4 Ideas Need Institutions 67

Intermission I: Immanuel Wallerstein’s New Pair of Glasses 91

Chapter 5 There Is No Alternative 99

Chapter 6 Shed a Tear for East European Communism? 121

Intermission II: Perry Anderson’s Clear-Headed Radicalism 141

Chapter 7 Do Not Believe What Great Powers Say 147

Conclusion: The Point Is to Interpret, and Then Change,

the World 165

Notes 179

Bibliography 227

Index 245
 Acknowledgments

Writing may be solitary, but books remain collective endeavors. I now

have a sense of the impact of others’ ideas and support.
It is a pleasure to see this book as part of SUNY Press’s series
in New Political Science. I thank Michael Rinella at SUNY Press and
Bradley J. Macdonald, the series editor, for their support. I also thank
Yvonne Deligato at Binghamton University Archives for her help with
the Wallerstein Papers collection. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library
at Columbia University kindly supplied a digital copy of an important
text. Another source supplied documents on the condition of anonymity.
In addition to the reviewers, several others read manuscript chapters or
entire drafts, including Robert Denemark, Georgi Derluguian, Jane Anna
Gordon, Martin Jay, Mladen Medved, and Bryan D. Palmer.
I thank my protagonists, who inspired this study. Perry Anderson,
preferring that scholars emphasize textual analysis, declined to be inter-
viewed but wished me well. Immanuel Wallerstein sat for an interview.
Sadly, he has since passed. Others will be contemplating his, and Ander-
son’s, ideas for some time.
This book began as a dissertation at the University of Connecticut.
I am especially grateful for my advisor, Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, a kind
soul with an original mind. At a time of change in the discipline, Ernie
showed that political science research can be both academically and
personally meaningful. Other committee members also contributed advice
and ideas that helped the work come together. They included Shareen Hertel,
David L. Richards, Mark A. Boyer, and Charles R. Venator Santiago. I also
learned a great deal from the late J. Garry Clifford, an original member of
the committee, whose writings and lectures were captivating.

ix
x Acknowledgments

As this study became a book project, colleagues in my department at

the University of Northern Colorado offered wise advice, both intellectual
and practical. I am especially indebted to Richard Bownas and Stan Luger.
My family offered words of encouragement. I thank my parents,
James and Elizabeth Williams, as well as my brother, Andrew Williams.
The loving support of my wife, Colleen O’Connell Williams, made this
project enjoyable and worthwhile.
 Introduction
Radical Political Economy for an Age of Uncertainty

On September 24, 2008, four months before the end of his presidency,
George W. Bush gave his first prime-time televised address on economic
affairs. It was a Wednesday. The economy was in crisis. One after another,
large financial institutions were collapsing or requesting government assis-
tance. Countrywide fell in January, followed by Bear Stearns in March.
That summer, several European banks folded. Governments in North
America and Europe coordinated efforts on monetary policy. Then came
September. Within weeks, disaster struck Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers,
A.I.G., and Washington Mutual.
The president announced that he would lead a bipartisan effort to
restore stability to the economy and confidence in markets. He promised
that the government, during this extraordinary time, would act quickly
and without partisanship. President Bush attributed the successive collapses
to instability brought on by irresponsible lending and overly optimistic
assessments of the housing market. Regulatory agencies, he noted, should
have done more to head off this economic emergency, which, even though
it had struck suddenly, should not have taken officials by surprise.1
Over the coming months, two accounts of the crisis would emerge.
For convenience, we can call these the prevailing explanation and the
unconventional explanation. Although they were generally quite different,
and although individual opinions clashed, these accounts were not mutu-
ally exclusive. In fact, they shared an important trait: each represented a
genuine merger of economic and political modes of inquiry. They were,
in other words, in the tradition of political economy.

1
2 Contesting the Global Order

The prevailing explanation attributed what came to be known as the

“Great Recession” to a confluence of relatively recent factors. It explained
that the banks had underestimated financial market risk, households had
saved too little, and mortgages were too easily approved. Moreover, accord-
ing to this account, some bankers were manipulating not only the price
of loans between banks but also currency exchange rates. Simultaneously,
many big banks were overleveraged, which meant that they had taken on
large amounts of debt to buy assets (betting that an asset’s value would grow
faster than interest would accumulate). In addition, foreign debt, coupled
with a decline in U.S. hegemony, weakened the American economy. Then,
according to the prevailing narrative, a series of events sent the system
into a tailspin: a spike in oil prices, followed by a housing crash, followed
by a stock market crash. This narrative was valuable because it accounted
for a specific chain of events leading up to catastrophe.2
The unconventional account attributed the events of that year to cap-
italism’s propensity for crisis. It highlighted longstanding global economic
interconnections and patterns of faster and slower growth. It emphasized
materials used for industry and the decline of natural resources in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This narrative also thought about
the legacy of colonialism and an unfair relationship between laboring
classes and those that owned factories, banks, and other businesses. It
conceptualized the 2008 crisis from a bird’s eye view—at the level of the
global capitalist system.3 It was valuable because it accounted for long-
term patterns that gave rise to the crisis.4
This work is a journey into the second narrative. It arrives amid
growing concern that the international order (economic and political),
widely considered stable, has been greatly shaken. This study does not
address the 2008 crisis in detail, which is merely a recent example of
global capitalist instability. Instead, this book investigates the intellectual
tradition that produced the unconventional narrative through an analysis
of two of its pioneers, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and
the British historian Perry Anderson. Wallerstein founded the Fernand
Braudel Center at Binghamton University, the journal Review, and was a
main force behind the development of world-systems analysis. Anderson
edited the New Left Review (NLR) for decades and remains an influential
force at the journal and its book publishing house, New Left Books (which
publishes as Verso). With careers that stretched beyond six decades, their
responses to major political events can provide insights into the study of
political economy today. Each left an important mark on our scholarly
 Introduction 3

understanding of political economy. Each struggled to break free from

traditional historical and social scientific thinking, and then struggled
against misunderstandings and criticism. By virtue of their scholarly
efforts and institutional positions, each left a legacy that generations of
researchers have followed.
Wallerstein, Anderson, and other scholars of political economy work
in a field with a rich and diverse history. It used to be that governance and
economics were regarded as a single subject of study. But since the late
nineteenth century, specialization has meant that economics and politics
were often studied apart from one another. In order to make sense of a
complex world, specialization seemed sensible. But disciplinary divisions
also made it appear as though issues of trade and currency were distinct
from bureaucracy and lawmaking. In Western universities, economists
turned their attention to the functions of capitalism, while political sci-
entists focused their efforts on the state and the concept of democracy.
Yet for almost as long as politics and economics have been studied in
isolation, there have been intellectuals who rejected such specialization. In
the twentieth century, many sought to avoid choosing between politics or
economics. Political economy came to be an intellectual resistance against
increasing specialization. In the study of global politics, this resistance was
called international political economy (IPE). It took institutional form in
the 1970s, when a group of economists and political scientists sought to
formally bridge their fields. They conceived of IPE as broader than any
specific discipline because it encompassed all the ways that politics and
economics interacted on a world scale.
For Benjamin Cohen, the “Magnificent Seven” of IPE were Robert
Cox, Robert Gilpin, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, Charles Kindle-
berger, Stephen Krasner, and Susan Strange.5 These intellectuals created
journals such as International Organization. And they established insti-
tutional homes for IPE in organized sections of the British International
Studies Association (BISA) and its American counterpart, the International
Studies Association (ISA). Soon, IPE had its own university courses and
textbooks.
Some scholars of IPE, including Cox and Strange, were critical of
capitalism. But many others saw the anticapitalist writings of social histo-
rians to be ideologically biased, and thus flawed. This was especially true
for the American tradition of IPE.6 This group of intellectuals often favored
short-term trends derived from observational, empirical data, which, over
time, led practitioners to embrace quantitative methods or formal models.
4 Contesting the Global Order

Many American scholars adopted what they believed to be an unbiased,

scientific approach to political economy. Its members hoped that their
data-driven orientation could lead to the production of covering laws,
true for all times and places. Perhaps as a consequence, many adherents
to the American tradition assumed a narrow understanding of political
economy. According to one study, International Organization published
fewer and fewer articles dealing with big questions (of interdependence or
regimes) relevant for international development; by the 1990s, articles on
the applications of game theory on liberal democracies were much more
common.7 After the 2008 crisis, generally, though not without exception,
adherents to the American tradition espoused the prevailing explanation.
The British tradition was very different. It avoided scientism and
what it considered the American fetishization of evidence testing. But
mostly, the British tradition was different because it tended to ask different
questions about hegemony and systemic transformation—what Cohen has
called the Really Big Questions of political economy.8 British IPE favored
description and often normatively positioned itself against U.S. hegemony
and capitalism. In response to 2008, therefore, adherents to the British
tradition were more likely to espouse the unconventional explanation.
Emerging simultaneously to the British and American versions of
IPE was a tradition of radical political economy (RPE).9 Its members,
almost without exception, espoused the unconventional explanation of the
2008 crisis. But it was nonetheless a lively intellectual assemblage. Among
the writers who pioneered this tradition were British Marxists such as
Anderson, along with Robert Brenner, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and
E. P. Thompson. Others were world-systems scholars like Wallerstein,
along with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank. RPE
is sometimes referred to as the “Left Out” tradition because, in addition
to its ideological orientation, many radicals were omitted from Cohen’s
intellectual history of IPE.10 RPE is not, however, a discreet category:
some scholars may prefer the label Critical IPE, since radicalism is also
an “emancipatory” project, broadly defined;11 and others could be labeled
part of the British tradition.12
However classified, radicals have always thought about systemic
transformation, hegemony, and the growing interconnectedness of nation-
states. Radical writings were different, however, in three
­­ respects. One,
they descended from an older lineage of social history that was concerned
with class struggle, social injustice, and the material foundations of power
relationships (among social groups and among nations). Marx was, of
 Introduction 5

course, an influence, but many radical writers avoided self-identifying as

“Marxist” precisely because they had moved so far away from Marx’s own
views. Marxism is commonly associated with a preference for economic
forces (such as wages or trade) over political institutions (such as the state).
Social historians had a richer view of this relationship, one that conceived
of the interplay between political and economic forces. Furthermore, Brit-
ish Marxism and world-systems analysis were each influenced by social
history that came after Marx. Some scholars self-identified as Marxists,
and some did not. But all thought about justice in society, and often took
up issues of class disparities, labor rights, and other populist concerns.
These authors included Hungarian thinkers such as Karl Polanyi and Georg
Lukács, French writers such as Fernand Braudel and Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Italians such as Antonio Gramsci. The American C. Wright Mills and
other Columbia Essayists influenced the development of world-systems.
As social historians, radical writers often avoided disciplinary labels
and sought to influence the wider public. Many thought of themselves
as public intellectuals, which Stanley Aronowitz defined as a persistence
at espousing “unauthorized ideas.”13 Radical writers alternated between
writing for an academic audience and a general readership. Some shunned
the academic world altogether (although the truly independent intellectual
has become rare).14
Two, radical political economy was also different in that its prac-
titioners were activist intellectuals, concerned with the emancipation of
peoples. As part of the New Left that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s,
radicals wished for a more egalitarian, noncapitalist future. They wrote
in support of subordinate groups in society, and they were skeptical of
governments, large businesses, and other actors wielding power. They were
outraged at how narratives of equality and democracy veiled realities of
global injustice and the suppression of the lower strata. In their opinion,
most social scientific tools of investigation in the 1960s simply did not
account for the gap. They distrusted the pro-capitalist West and were disap-
pointed by the social democracies and socialist parties of Western Europe,
yet they were also angered by the brutality and absurdity of Stalinism.
Inspired by the global protests of 1968, many came to believe capitalism
was unstable. As scholar-activists, many thought they could transform the
system from within (or at least fashion a replacement as it disintegrated).
The political activist stance of radical political economy in some
ways made them more like philosopher-historians from earlier gener-
ations. They shared with thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche, E. H. Carr, and
6 Contesting the Global Order

John Garraty the view that self-proclaimed neutrality was elusive and
potentially dangerous.15 The economist Gunnar Myrdal made this point
when he wrote: “Useful economics can never be free of ideology and
value judgements. The problem is to keep them in harness.”16 Radicals
took this notion a step farther by contending that scholars could not be
separated from their findings. Radicals worried about histories that had no
meaning other than the delivery of facts.17 They thought that the solution
to the problems of history could only be solved with more history. Many
embraced Nietzsche’s category of critical history:18 by interrogating the
origins of our present circumstances, radicals thought that the condition
of humanity could be improved.19 In fact, radicals believed that their
political commitments enhanced the objectivity of their studies. Like
James Rosenau, they acknowledged a simple truth: even though science
teaches that research should be value free, it is the observer who gives
meaning to facts.20
Alongside their sense of justice, a third distinguishing characteristic
of radicals was their embrace of totalities, which they interpreted to mean
a commitment to the social whole. By social whole, radicals meant the
collective impact of all of the various parts of society. They conceived
of institutions, social norms, trade relations, diplomacy, or even war as
interconnected, and, likewise, avoided studying any one factor individually.
In writing about totalities, radicals thought a great deal about long-
term historical processes, considering political phenomena over decades,
centuries, and even millennia. If most scholars can accept the notion of
short-term trends, they thought, then why should long-term trends be
any different? Radical political economy also tended to favor large-scale
spatial analysis: political, economic, and cultural changes did not occur at
the level of the nation-state, but at the regional or world scale. Therefore,
although they thought the notion of stages in political and economic
development was critically important, they conceived of that development
in terms of stages of entire social systems.
These intellectuals were positivists in the sense that they believed the
past and present could be objectively understood. They debated, however,
about their ability to know the future, not because they doubted their
understanding but because many considered the future to be inherently
uncertain. Still, their objective standing did not mean a nomothetic orien-
tation; they did not think social laws, applicable in all places at all times,
were possible. Yet neither was radical political economy idiographic in
orientation; its adherents did not think that findings from one place and
 Introduction 7

time were inapplicable to other places and times. Thus, radical political
economy generally held the view that social regularities could be found
with geographical and temporal boundaries. The character of feudalism
in Asia, for example, was different than that of Western Europe.
Prior to 2008, a symbol of capitalist instability, it may have seemed
as though the radical tradition was obsolete. In the 1960s, many of its
proponents believed that capitalism was on the verge of collapse and that
socialism would take its place. Yet in the eyes of many commentators, in
Western governments as well as in academia, history has moved in precisely
the opposite direction. East European communist party states, exposed for
their cruelty, fell apart in democratic revolutions. Simultaneously, advanced
capitalist nations saw a decline in socialist parties, a rollback of the welfare
state, and an increase in the popularity of free market capitalism. These
developments, according to supporters of the capitalist West, would not
only reduce the likelihood of interstate war but create opportunities for
peaceful cooperation. Furthermore, proponents said, economic advance-
ment would improve living conditions everywhere. This narrative became
so prevalent that even its opponents had to admit its widespread appeal.
By Anderson’s own admission, the 1990s was a “grand slam” for capitalist
advancement.21 At the end of the twentieth century, many believed that
there were no rivals to capitalism.22
Yet the crisis of 2008 demonstrated the continued relevance of the
radical tradition, as crises tend to do. When times are prosperous, or
at least arguably prosperous, the radical critique of capitalism may be
less convincing. During times of difficulty, radicalism becomes more
appealing. Events of the twenty-first century have called into question
the principles of free market capitalism. Far from symbolizing an age of
sustained peace and cooperation under a unifying market, recent years
have been turbulent. Many postcolonial nations remain politically and
economically troubled, and face crises of governance, clean water, and
rising seas. Wealthy regions have seen growing wealth and wage inequality
as well as aggressive austerity programs. The Occupy Movement and the
Arab Spring, as well as electoral expressions of dissatisfaction with ruling
parties, are indicative of restless citizenry. Far Left and Far Right parties
and candidates have gained a level of prominence that, not too long ago,
would have been unthinkable. For some, commonly associated with the
“Left,” populism has manifested in demands for wages, welfare, or rights.
For others, considered part of the “Right,” populism has come in the form
of demands for immigration restrictions, often in xenophobic terms. These
8 Contesting the Global Order

movements, though with different impulses, reflect the sentiment that,

perhaps, the post–Cold War world did not match up with the rhetoric
used by European and American policymakers and intellectuals. Suddenly,
the international economic and political order appeared not to contain
crises but to itself be in crisis.
Some may find it tempting to claim, or accuse radicals of claiming,
that earlier predictions of socialism had been vindicated. In 2012, one
journalist for BBC’s Newsnight suspected as much in an interview with Eric
Hobsbawm. He thought that the historian, in light of the economic crisis,
was clutching at straws, looking everywhere for the death of capitalism
and the birth of socialism. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth.
Hobsbawm replied: “I’m not clutching any straws because I’m pessimis-
tic. . . . I suspect that we are looking forward to a rather stormy period in
the next twenty or thirty years.”23 This in fact was a common conclusion
for radicals. Such a view may seem self-defeating, but, as clear-headed
intellectuals, radicals preferred accuracy (even depressing accuracy) over
fantasy (however good it may feel).
Although previously known for their seemingly constant predictions
of the arrival of global socialism, many in the late twentieth and twen-
ty-first centuries spoke somberly about future prospects for socialism.
Instead of encouraging potential revolutionaries to take action, some have
suggested that now is the time for contemplating alternative futures.24
Socialists, in other words, should more thoroughly develop their plans
for postcapitalist governance.

This work takes the position that political failure, and the subsequent
dearth of optimism, was an opportunity for intellectual growth. This
book argues that although the course of history in the twentieth century
did not move in the direction they predicted or wished, Wallerstein’s and
Anderson’s sensitivity to current events made their works relevant for the
study of international political economy as well as for those populations
who did not have vocal or powerful advocates. Reflecting on the present,
in other words, can lead to creative interpretations of the world. Political
failure can become a kind of laboratory for revision.
In the 1960s, both Wallerstein and Anderson were hopeful about the
progress of labor movements at home and nationalist movements abroad.
Protests of 1968 led them to believe that socialism could soon become a
 Introduction 9

reality. Yet the resurgence of free-market capitalist ideology in the 1980s

demonstrated that their predictions were not about to come true. Waller-
stein responded by rejecting optimism and pessimism altogether. He also
stopped making predictions about a socialist future. A postcapitalist system,
he thought, might indeed be less exploitative; but the odds were just as
good that it would be more exploitative. Anderson’s response was quite
different. He was greatly disappointed by the ever-increasing dominance
of capitalist ideology in the twentieth century. The best the Left could do,
he thought, was to weather the storm and wait for an organized socialist
movement or for capitalism to somehow fall apart on its own accord.
Though not optimistic, Wallerstein and Anderson did not give up.
They neither clung to old beliefs in imminent socialism, nor acquiesced
to capitalism’s seeming dominance. They continued to write about inter-
national transformations, from the ancient world, to feudalism, to the
modern capitalist interstate system, and to some kind of postcapitalist
system. They took to explaining current events and cultural attitudes,
and to exposing the ideology of powerful governments. Political events
forced Wallerstein and Anderson to confront the reality of capitalism’s
continuation despite its predicted demise.
Such a study is valuable because Wallerstein and Anderson stayed
focused on those Really Big Questions of IPE. Scholars of political economy
and international relations have long pondered the issue of order in the
international system and how it changes over time. The economic crisis
of 2008 renewed the pertinence of such questions. Are we witnessing
a crisis within capitalism? Or, are we witnessing a crisis of capitalism?
Symbolically, 2008 represents doubt in the stability of capitalism as well
as the nation-state system. An investigation into two thinkers devoted
to the transition to and away from capitalism can offer some practical
advice for the present.
Specifically, this work deals with three topics relevant for the study
of international transformation. These are: totalities as an object of
study; the origins and operations of capitalism; and the role of agency
in determining behavior. On the first, this work reviews options for the
study of totalities. As I shall point out, Wallerstein saw totalities as closed,
which meant that he conceived of totalities as defined by historical and
geographical boundaries. Another name for Wallerstein’s totalities was
world-systems. Anderson pursued totalities in an open-ended process he
called totalization; he saw current events as the culmination of centuries
or millennia of historical forces. Both visions can be of value to scholars
10 Contesting the Global Order

of political economy, many of whom question the utility of the nation-state

for the study of transnational activism, trade, and environmental regimes.
Second, Wallerstein belonged to that relatively small group of scholars
who defined capitalism functionally and as requiring the endless accumu-
lation of capital (or, stored value). He saw capitalism’s origin as a historical
accident which could just as easily have not happened. Anderson did not
explicitly and systematically define capitalism, but he typically (though not
always) used the term to refer to the private provision of goods and services
produced by wage labor. Capitalism, for him, was the inevitable outcome
of the West European dialectic between slavery in the ancient world and
feudalism in the Middle Ages. Consequently, Wallerstein and Anderson
viewed late capitalism differently, and also had opposite reactions to the
fall of East European communism. Like the study of totalities, this back-
and-forth between Wallerstein and Anderson offers lessons to scholars on
the consequences of alternative ways of conceptualizing capitalist processes.
Third, Anderson and Wallerstein developed complex accounts of the
relative ability of individuals to affect the world around them. Wallerstein
believed that individuals could not overthrow a system when it was healthy,
and argued that human agency increased during times of systemic crisis.25
Anderson, even though he stressed the causal power of structures in his-
tory, believed that human agency had increased over time. In his opinion,
if Left groups could develop strong organizations they could potentially
overthrow the capitalist system. Wallerstein and Anderson thus shared
somewhat similar views on the power of individuals. With a convergence
of their (historically contingent) interpretations of human agency, there
may be reason to think, in the twenty-first century, that we can choose
our economic system.
This work also reflects on the unification of theory and practice
in the social sciences. In recent years, scholars of international political
economy have pursued unification.26 Many have drawn inspiration from
Alexander George’s Bridging the Gap, and, more recently, the writings of
Joseph Nye and Robert Jervis,27 both of whom have expressed concern
over a breach between scholarship and policymaking. One scholar has
criticized the “cult of irrelevance” in academia, and has gone so far as to
recommend that the policy usefulness of one’s research be a criterion in
tenure decisions.28 But for whom should scholarship be relevant? Should
scholars, for example, direct their research to the needs of non-policy-
makers? To subordinate groups around the world? To the wealthy?
 Introduction 11

The works of Wallerstein and Anderson point to an alternative way

to unify theory and practice in the social sciences. They represent a type
of intellectual who believes that scholarly endeavors should aid groups
excluded from the political process. They sought to bridge theory and
practice, but not on behalf of governments.
An examination of Wallerstein and Anderson can uncover visions
of capitalism, totalities, and agency, and can provide models for writers of
twenty-first century IPE who are concerned with the concept and practice
of transformation. This study seeks to learn from its protagonists and
apply those lessons to the twenty-first century.29 It looks at how political
circumstance informed and shaped their thinking. It does not inspect the
effect of popular culture on Anderson or Wallerstein, nor does it inves-
tigate their private lives. It instead describes the political events of their
day, the political projects they participated in and led, and the problems
that they as radicals faced in the academy.30
This investigation of ideas employs an interpretivist approach, in
which the goal is not to isolate variables or develop causal hypotheses
but to clarify actors’ understandings. It assumes that intellectuals do not
employ ideas with prepackaged meanings, but wrestle with old ideas and
create new ones to make sense of the puzzling experiences that they con-
front. What were the content and character of the political imaginations of
Wallerstein and Anderson? How did they articulate these views? Although
interpretation can come in many forms, this interpretivist analysis rests
on two pillars: meaning making and contextualization.31
Interpretive research assumes that humans are meaning-making
actors, which is to say that the issues and ideas that Wallerstein and Ander-
son wrote about do not have fixed connotations. Instead, Wallerstein and
Anderson gave meaning to concepts. It is up to the researcher to grasp
how people understood a concept at a particular time and a particular
place. Often, Wallerstein’s and Anderson’s ideas were expressed in the
public sphere. They sought to shape scholarly and public conversations
by influencing how people thought about the Cold War, capitalism, and
socialism. Both intellectuals thus engaged in social narratives—that is,
the stories of society—and how these stories affect the present.32 They
found the dominant Western Cold War narratives about development and
capitalism not only unconvincing but harmful for society. They thought
society needed more accurate explanations of the past, even the distant
past, to better grasp the present.
12 Contesting the Global Order

Likewise, context is important for interpretive research. In this study,

context refers to the political events and intellectual environments that
surrounded Wallerstein and Anderson. It assumes that scholars do not
write from some abstract space removed from the everyday world. They
react to and are shaped by the political and scholarly scene in which
they live. Yet scholars are not mere reflections of their context. They also
shape their milieu.33 (This style of research closely follows Anderson’s and
Wallerstein’s own methods: they, too, looked to context for clues into what
writers or statesmen may have been thinking at a given time.) One must
think about how humans envisioned the world around them, and how
certain actions were possible or impossible.34
Biographers also interact with their subject matter. In personality, in
writing style and location, in presuming to include some facts while leaving
out others, researchers make an imprint on their material. Today, social
scientists often use the term reflexivity to refer to biographer-subject aware-
ness.35 Carr perhaps anticipated this idea when he wrote, straightforwardly
if imprecisely: “[The] work of the historian mirrors the society in which he
works. It is not merely the events that are in flux. The historian himself is
in flux.”36 This portrayal of Wallerstein and Anderson is written with the
present in mind. The major themes of this study—on totalities, capitalism,
and agency—are addressed intermittently, appearing and reappearing at
points when Wallerstein and Anderson refined their scholarly views.37
Through developing a history of radical lives, this study may help
others chart a course forward. The assumption is not, absurdly, that any
single book could transform international politics. The assumption is
merely that all people, regardless of class or education, rely on ideas about
how the world works and how it ought to work. As the columnist George
Monbiot put it: “Ideas, not armies or even banks, run the world. Ideas
determine whether human creativity works for society or against it.”38 From
where do we get ideas for the twenty-first century? This work originates
with the view that we should step back and reconsider twentieth-century
radicals. Wallerstein and Anderson were among those who sought to create
a more peaceful and egalitarian society and a vibrant, critical intellectual
culture. By appraising their life trajectories, we subsequent thinkers can
understand why they believed what they believed about scholarship and
politics. And by building on their research, it may be possible to shape
the world and how we study it.
Two books have been written in English about Anderson; a third is
a history of the New Left Review.39 All of them discuss his contributions
 Introduction 13

to Marxism and his impact on Marxist historians. This work emphasizes

other aspects of Anderson, especially his methods and their relevance
for political economy. No comprehensive inquiry of Wallerstein exists in
English, although many articles take stock of his influence on social sci-
ence.40 Scholars of international relations are often familiar with a subset
of Wallerstein’s writings, but very few may know how his world-systemic
orientation grew out of his earlier personal and professional experiences,
or how he elaborated on world-systems late in life. In fact, the intellectual
trajectories of Anderson and Wallerstein were more complex and nuanced
than has been generally acknowledged.
Chapter 1 describes the ideological battles of the interwar and
postwar periods, which were the historical backdrop to Wallerstein’s and
Anderson’s formative years. For Wallerstein, the place was New York,
which became home to the United Nations when he was a teenager. New
York felt like the “capital” of the world-economy: although he traveled,
Wallerstein believed he experienced other cultures and perspectives largely
because of the city. By contrast, Anderson achieved his cosmopolitanism
through constant travels: China, America, Ireland, and Britain. Both paths
enabled these curious minds to think about the world’s poor and politically
deprived. And in their early writings, Wallerstein and Anderson used their
global orientations to criticize policies at home and to contemplate the
decolonizing world. They wrote soberly about the tough road ahead for
socialists. But as young intellectuals, they remained optimistic about the
prospects for progressive forces around the world.
Next, this work explores those radicals with a major influence on
Wallerstein and Anderson. Both read Karl Marx. Both regarded more
recent Marxists as more significant for their development. For Wallerstein,
it was Frantz Fanon, Fernand Braudel, and Karl Polanyi who, collectively,
taught that conclusions reached in the European context were a poor fit
for the decolonizing world. They prompted a reconsideration of how social
science conceived of history and geography. For Anderson, it was Edward
Gibbon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Lukács, and Lucio Colletti, whose work
enabled thoughtful deliberation about humanism and structuralism. It was
through notable minds that Wallerstein and Anderson came to develop
their own understandings of the world.
The third chapter discusses 1968 as a major turning point for Waller-
stein and Anderson. Each had grown frustrated at the lack of progress of
Left parties at home and shortfalls in newly independent states abroad.
Yet the revolutions of 1968 altered their thinking. Socialism now seemed
14 Contesting the Global Order

­ ossible. Anderson’s enthusiasm, however, exceeded Wallerstein’s. As editor

p
of the New Left Review, Anderson was surrounded by like-minded com-
rades, and believed his journal could be part of the vanguard for revolution.
Wallerstein, who served as a negotiator between student protesters and
Columbia University’s administration, considered 1968 as that time when
the Left temporarily stopped the Right from advancing (in universities,
and in society). Both intellectuals welcomed global protest as an expres-
sion of dissatisfaction on the part of everyday citizens. Symbolically, 1968
represents the peak of Wallerstein’s and Anderson’s optimism.
Chapter 4 is devoted to their reinterpretations of modern capitalism.
The protests of 1968 led Wallerstein and Anderson to believe socialism was
a real possibility. In response to that year, Wallerstein wanted to ensure that
universities remained places from which the Left could encourage third
world nationalist movements. Anderson wanted to aid socialist strategy.
For each, the path to success was the same. They were convinced that the
crucial problem was a lack of knowledge about how humanity came to
its modern circumstances, characterized by global capitalism and national
states. Thus, through scholarly writings and institutional activities, they
reinterpreted modern European history. In 1974, they separately published
what are called “totalizing” histories of modern capitalism. And as of
1976, the year Wallerstein became the inaugural director of Binghamton
University’s Fernand Braudel Center, they each led cultural institutions too.
Paradoxically, as they sought to initiate change, their respective research
programs and institutions were imbued with a worldview that greatly
minimized human agency.
Twice, this manuscript takes a break from its larger narrative to delve
into related issues. In the first intermission, Wallerstein’s evolution from
state-based to world-systemic analysis is portrayed in three snapshots,
from 1967 to 1973. Here, readers see the issues with which he wrestled
to make sense of the surrounding world.
Chapter 5 discusses how Wallerstein and Anderson responded to
the decline of the excitement of 1968 and to the emergence of neolib-
eralism in the 1980s. Each came to new realizations about the relative
power of humans within an overarching capitalist structure. Wallerstein’s
and Anderson’s nuanced visions of human agency grew more complex in
the 1980s. Neoliberalism caught each by surprise, but their reactions to
Thatcher and Reagan could not have been more different. Each came to
new realizations about the relative power of humans within an overar-
ching capitalist structure. Wallerstein saw the very concepts of optimism
 Introduction 15

and pessimism—and subsequently, the actions of activists—as irrelevant

to the longevity of the system. For him, nothing could stop the system
from undoing itself. Anderson, by contrast, thought that capitalism’s
demise would come at the hands of committed revolutionaries. Internal
journal documents reveal that he was greatly disappointed by the lack of
socialist advancement and doubted his ability to lead the New Left Review
as a vanguard organization. Thus, as Wallerstein grew more committed
to the study of the operations of capitalism, Anderson saw the dream of
socialism slipping away.
Chapter 6 compares their different responses to the end of East
European communism. Wallerstein remained certain that capitalism was
endangered, but Anderson was shaken by the apparent lack of cohesiveness
of the Left and the great organization of the Right. Despite their opposing
viewpoints, Wallerstein and Anderson returned to their intellectual proj-
ects of the 1970s. The end of one-party communism in Eastern Europe
deepened the divide between Wallerstein and Anderson. In fact, they
had opposite responses to the movements of 1989. Wallerstein was sure
that 1989 revealed the weaknesses of liberalism, and he became more
convinced that capitalism would collapse. For his part, Anderson’s pes-
simism increased. Though not supportive of communist parties, he was
nonetheless shocked by the speed at which free-market thinking spread
through the former Warsaw zone. But he was perhaps more disappointed
at fellow leftists who seemed to have given up their resistance to capitalism.
Ironically, this was also a criticism directed at Anderson. The comparison
demonstrates how intellectuals who imagine capitalist processes in similar
ways can have such divergent interpretations on its future.
The second intermission shows Anderson’s pessimism, labeled as
a clear-headed radicalism, through his understanding of hegemony. A
recurring theme, though never in the foreground, Anderson drew an
intellectual sketch of hegemony across time, raising eyebrows that he had
given up on the possibility of world-historical change. Little evidence sug-
gested capitulation. A more surprising outcome was his implication that
powerful political leaders can choose hegemony, albeit partially dependent
on structural economic conditions.
Chapter 7 uncovers some surprising similarities in their reasoning
and conclusions. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Wallerstein’s and
Anderson’s research converged once again. They returned to their macro­
historical projects of the 1970s, writing histories of the modern world.
And, improbably, they began expressing similar views of human agency.
16 Contesting the Global Order

Wallerstein, who considered capitalism to be in its final stage, argued

that humans had the ability to create a postcapitalist world-system. And
Anderson, who thought capitalism was as strong as ever, nonetheless main-
tained that human agency had increased in the modern world. Strangely
enough, if the twentieth century can be characterized by Wallerstein’s
and Anderson’s differences, the early twenty-first can be characterized by
their similarities.
This study closes by taking stock of Wallerstein’s and Anderson’s
relevance for the twenty-first century, and points to radical political econ-
omy’s continued relevance for social science today. Although this story
strives to remain optimistic, it is ultimately about political hardship. It
describes Wallerstein’s and Anderson’s optimism for a better world, which
they believed would be realized by the destruction of capitalism and the
implementation of socialism on a world scale. In the 1970s, they saw their
writings on the history of capitalism as a commentary on Cold War politics.
In particular, they thought that a shift away from state-­centric perspec-
tives to the study of totalities could produce more accurate portrayals of
the present. Their projects and their optimistic attitudes, however, came
to a halt in neoliberalism’s rise to dominance in the 1980s. Each thinker
was forced to confront a political reality far from what he expected. Yet
political disappointment is fertile terrain for observers today, who can
learn how intellectuals such as Wallerstein and Anderson adjusted to failed
expectations. For Anderson, adjustment meant acknowledging capitalism’s
dominance while maintaining his political determination. For Wallerstein,
adjustment meant that he stopped predicting the arrival of future socialism
and yet continued to anticipate the end of capitalism. When they returned
to their macrohistorical projects begun in the 1970s, they did so with
diminished expectations. Still, their new writings had a heightened sense
of the ability of humans to change the world. Far from being a product
of the past, radical political economy has been continually remade by its
innovators in light of contemporary problems.
 Chapter 1

Cosmopolitan Beginnings

In geography and lineage, the life stories of Immanuel Wallerstein and

Perry Anderson were rather different. Wallerstein, a self-described “com-
plete New Yorker,”1 found the city to be his entry to the world. New
York was full of diverse peoples and languages, and became the home of
the United Nations in Wallerstein’s teenage years. Anderson, by contrast,
achieved his cosmopolitanism through constant travels: China, America,
Ireland, and England. Both paths, however, enabled these curious minds
to think about the world’s poor and politically subordinate. From their
earliest writings, Wallerstein and Anderson used their global orientation to
criticize policies at home and contemplate the future of the decolonizing
world. Wallerstein wrote about the American backlash against national
self-determination and assessed various independence movements in
Africa. Anderson examined the historical roots of domination in the world
and within Britain. Whereas the former considered future prospects for
postindependence stability, the latter was predominantly concerned with
how social hierarchies were established.

The Capital of the World-Economy

The 1930s was a time of great political change. A global economic

depression undermined public confidence in the stability of capitalism,
and, in the West, the Soviet experiment divided Left public intellectuals.
Fissures between pro-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists deepened throughout
the thirties as disenchantment with Stalin grew. After Hitler and Stalin

17
18 Contesting the Global Order

signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, many pro-Stalinists dropped their

support. In U.S. public debate, America’s participation in World War II,
allied with the Soviet Union, temporarily reversed this trend, although
further disappointment, and eventually shock, over Stalin would become
the prevailing view of the Left.
Oscillation between pro-Stalinism and anti-Stalinism was due partly
to a lack of information about Stalin’s leadership, coupled with the hope
that communism could be realized in the Soviet Union. Much of the
American Left was preoccupied with antifascism rather than championing
communism. Stalin, moreover, very ably garnered widespread support
in the United States by positioning the Soviet Union as the only truly
antifascist government. In fact, the peak of Stalin’s popularity in the West
corresponded with his Revolution from Above, which ranks among the
most brutally repressive domestic programs in history.2 Stalin’s crimes were
not widely understood in the United States, where intellectuals debated
whether reports of repression were exaggerated for political purposes.
There was also a reluctance to think that the Soviet Union, which had
been a beacon of hope for workers and those advocating for equality, had
turned on its own people. This was not mere denial: the most critical of
reports failed to capture the scale of Stalin’s crimes.3
This debate raged fiercely among leftists in New York City, where
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was born on September 28, 1930. He
described New York, with its diverse culture, as being “absolutely essen-
tial” for his intellectual development.4 His parents were Lazar and Sara
(Günsberg) Wallerstein. From separate places in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, they met in Berlin, and had a child, Robert. (Though born nine
years apart, Robert and Immanuel would become close as adults.) Lazar,
a rabbi who became a physician, grew concerned about life in Berlin.
The family moved to New York in the early 1920s. As a boy, Immanuel
took an early interest in languages. His parents mostly spoke English
at home, but they conversed with friends and relatives in German and
other dialects from Central Europe. He was exposed to German, Spanish,
Portuguese, and French.
For Wallerstein, being Jewish meant that his family was on the Left.
In his mind, to be Jewish also meant that one was sensitive to the rights
of peoples and to the principles of national self-determination. However,
he considered himself unusual in that he never saw a logical distinction
between the rationale for an Israeli state and the rationale for a Palestinian
or an Algerian one. Later, he reflected: “[O]ne of the reasons why I felt a
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 19

great empathy for the Palestinian cause from the beginning was because
I couldn’t see any difference between their arguments and those that the
Jews had made.”5
As a youth, Wallerstein was conflicted in the disputes among interwar
leftists. He sympathized with the anti-Stalinism of social democrats, who
worried about willingness of Western communists to adopt positions of
East European communist parties that betrayed genuine communist prin-
ciples. He also sympathized with the American communists, who accused
social democrats of being unwilling to mount a genuine opposition to
capitalism. These arguments, according to Wallerstein, “created dilemmas
with which I have had to wrestle ever since.”6
One such dilemma for Wallerstein was how peoples could be freed
from constraints imposed by great powers. He thought the world feder-
alist movement might have ideas for how to provide a more equitable
distribution of power. Wallerstein’s first article, “Revolution and Order,”
appeared in Federalist Opinion, the publication of world federalists.7
The piece, which appeared in print the same year he received his BA
from Columbia University, displayed an early concern for the interests
of subordinate peoples. At the time, global federalists thought mostly in
terms of creating peace between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Wallerstein believed his fellow federalists should consider world govern-
ment from a third world perspective. In his opinion, world federalists
needed to address the “legacy of hostility, suspicion, fear and wounded
dignity” imposed by the West onto the third world. An appeal to order
would not be enough, nor, he thought, should it be enough to quell the
third world’s revolutionary passions. For him, it was up to federalists to
truly understand the issues of the dispossessed.8
One avenue Wallerstein took to understand the world’s poor was
through organizations such as the Young Adult Council (YAC) and the
World Assembly of Youth (WAY). In 1951, WAY met in the United States.
The following year, the meeting was held in Dakar. It became one of
many trips he took to the region. Membership in the organization enabled
Wallerstein to meet politically active people, many of whom would go
on to lead African states after independence.9 Although he took several
trips to Africa in the fifties and sixties, Wallerstein also maintained his
contacts by virtue of living in New York. Ghana was admitted to the
United Nations in 1957. Guinea joined in 1958, followed by several others
in the sixties. Every fall, delegates would come to the General Assembly.
Wallerstein was often invited to United Nations receptions, and, as an
20 Contesting the Global Order

adult, deepened ties forged in his youth. To him, New York seemed like
“the center of Africa.”10
Wallerstein spent much of this time in New York. He earned his
undergraduate degree in 1951. Wallerstein was then unhappily drafted
into America’s Korean War, and sent to defend the Panama Canal.11 (He
had previously attended meetings of the American Veterans Committee
because it was politically active.) Afterward, he returned to New York and
Columbia University for graduate school.
The sociology department was a leading institution for a new field of
study that came to be known as political sociology. The faculty included
Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Paul Lazarfeld, and C. Wright Mills,
who became a mentor for Wallerstein. According to Wallerstein, the depart-
ment “thought of itself, and was thought of, as the center of the sociological
world.”12 Yet he differed from many of his colleagues on ideological and
methodological grounds. With regard to the latter, he was different in that
he neither sought universal laws nor did he advocate case uniqueness in
his studies.13 He would later describe his vision of research as heretical
to social science at the time.14 Still, his position within the institutional
framework of Columbia University, as well as its location in New York,
provided a stable place from which he could espouse radical ideas.
Though he was encouraged by the strength of postwar independence
movements, Wallerstein worried about their prospects for success in light
of U.S. hegemony. He expressed these reservations in a 1954 master’s
thesis on the xenophobia of America’s Far Right.15 With the advent of
the Cold War, anti-Stalinism and anticommunism came to prominence
in the United States. Wallerstein thus joined the community of New York
intellectuals who wrote about extreme anticommunist attitudes espoused
by some conservatives.16
Wallerstein saw a deep fissure within American conservatism. He saw
sophisticated conservatives under attack by practical conservatives, categories
he borrowed from Mills.17 The tradition of sophisticated conservatism
descended from Puritanism, and stressed individual self-reliance and self-
worth through work and honest practices. Sophisticated conservatives,
according to Wallerstein, were also likely to favor the protection of civil
liberties and local governance.18
The practical conservative, on the other hand, came from a place
apparently beyond rationality. This political style was an appealing rhetor-
ical device because it seemed to make simple and sensible propositions.
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 21

For example, the practical conservative would act as if there were no

harm in asking citizens to take loyalty oaths, something Wallerstein saw
as fundamentally dangerous. The practical conservative, he wrote, “would
abolish the Fifth Amendment, because it stands in the way of cleaning
out the Reds.”19 The practical conservative was, in other words, fearful,
kneejerk, and suspicious.20 By advocating dramatic change in the name
of protecting the homeland, practical conservatives had declared “war”
on their sophisticated counterparts.21
At the time, Wallerstein thought that Senator Joseph McCarthy
most embodied the rhetoric of the practical conservative. McCarthy
declared that the United States faced both foreign and domestic threats,
but noted that citizens should be especially mindful of the latter. In the
age of McCarthy, the chief domestic threat to America was the Left, but
all political opponents were potential targets.
Methodologically, Wallerstein studied McCarthyism by analyzing
the senator’s speeches and polling data. In an attempt to gain access to
records of speeches, he sent a letter to the senator. Not without a sense
of humor, he posed as a devotee: “I am a veteran just out of service and
returned to school. I have been discussing with some of my fellow veterans
your fight for Americanism in government. As soon as we tried to find
out more information about what has been going on while we were in
service, we discovered the papers were not being fair in reporting your
great work. We are very anxious to get hold of copies of speeches you
have made since 1950 when you first exposed the mess in Washington.
We want to study these speeches, reproduce them and circulate them.”22 It
is not clear if the senator’s office responded, but in the meantime Waller-
stein performed content analysis on several speeches. The data came from
records held by Daniel Bell.23
To explain McCarthyism, Wallerstein emphasized two main fac-
tors: status politics and the paradoxical foreign policy of isolationist-­
interventionism. On the former, Wallerstein directed readers to the people
McCarthy routinely attacked: Anglo-Saxon political elites, well educated
and in positions of power. On the latter, which Wallerstein referred to
as the anti-military militarist, we find that the practical conservative was
suspicious of the powers of the Army, but also spoke of the “inevitability
of the third world war.”24
The heart of McCarthyism, as Wallerstein told it, was anti-intel-
lectualism. Intellectuals were nice targets because they both occupied
22 Contesting the Global Order

decision-making positions in the State Department, and were the ones

sympathetic to communism during the 1930s. Practical conservatives
portrayed intellectuals as phony elites, with fake British accents and
practicing diplomacy while lavishing in their femininity and homosexu-
ality. Practical conservatives questioned the ability of State Department
intellectuals to fight communism.25 According to Wallerstein, intellectuals
may have been unusual scapegoats, but they were, in a post-Nazi world,
easier scapegoats than Jews. McCarthy, in fact, worked hard to avoid being
seen as anti-Semitic and as an offshoot of Nazism.26
For Wallerstein, McCarthyism thus sought to start a kind of coun-
terrevolution against the developing postwar scene. He categorized McCa-
rthyism as an antirevolutionary, regressive force, aimed at suppressing
nationalist, anticolonial, movements. Wallerstein worried that practical
conservatism might displace sophisticated conservatism: “The decision,
whichever way it ultimately goes, will have a decisive impact upon the
world situation.”27
Wallerstein believed that the final outcome was important because
it could “contribute to the solution of man’s problems here and now.”28
Thus, although the thesis was an analysis of the United States, he saw it
as connected to the postwar international order.29
The most pressing problem in the world, according to Wallerstein,
was the transition of the colonized zones to national self-governance.
Dominant powers such as the United States had a choice: they could be
effective facilitators of such a transition, or, they could slow or damage
the process. Spending time in Africa made Wallerstein more aware of the
influence of great powers on the rest of the world. Transfixed, he stayed at
Columbia, took a doctorate in 1959, and then joined the faculty. During
these years, Wallerstein concentrated on African decolonization and inde-
pendence. “It was Africa,” Wallerstein recalled, “that was responsible for
challenging the more stultifying parts of my education.”30
Preparations for a doctoral dissertation, “The Emergence of Two
West African Nations: Ghana and the Ivory Coast,” shaped Wallerstein’s
research agenda for more than a decade.31 Drawing on interviews with
some two hundred leaders of voluntary associations in Accra and Abidjan
(the capitals of Ghana and Ivory Coast), he examined the role of nation-
alism in the formation of the two then-newly independent states. At the
time, nationalist movements in Africa were about reducing inequality and
achieving some measure of political fairness.32
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 23

Notably, Wallerstein attributed the social structure of Ghana and

Ivory Coast to European imperialism. As he saw it, the differences in how
Britain and France managed their colonies were minimal in comparison
to the difference between European rule and self-rule. At first, colonial
administrators kept to their forts. But when European powers carved up
Africa in the late nineteenth century and assumed direct control, they
profoundly changed the colonized peoples. As he saw it, postcolonial
governance was a product of the total and fundamental change imposed
by outsiders.33 In Ghana and Ivory Coast, these changes came in the form
of a market economy and urbanization.
Wallerstein’s dissertation demonstrated that he conceived of develop-
ment as relational. By relational, one means that a city, a state, or a region
does not change mostly on its own but as the result of its relationships
to other places. Wallerstein saw tribal elites, nationalist leaders, and even
European colonial administrators as operating within a larger, historically
contingent, international structure, produced by an interaction between
the two worlds. The relationship was not simply one of independent
development, or one of pure domination and subordination. Instead, the
Westernization of Africa had been complex, and took place within what
he called a “changing world context.”34
Though Wallerstein stressed interconnections, his research relied
on the national state. Unlike Anderson, who was drawn to states by the
devotion they inspired, Wallerstein found the state to be a useful tool. To
him, nation-states simply appeared to be the most consequential actors in
the world. He wrote: “[T]he nation is the most significant unit of social
structure, the only complete social system existing in the modern world.”35
Wallerstein recognized the great uncertainty that lay ahead for Ghana
and Ivory Coast. One difficulty was that African states had a truncated
revolutionary period. Europe had hundreds of years to process its changes,
but in Africa, revolutions of politics, society, and technology happened at
once. Nonetheless, he remained optimistic about their prospects, which
he saw as representative of the prospects for the continent.36
Wallerstein’s orientation, shown through his writings on McCarthy-
ism as well as African decolonization, was toward the world’s political
subordinates. Wary of U.S. power, supportive of African nationalism, he
never considered social research to be dispassionate or detached from the
current events. The years spent living in New York, interacting with other
cultures, followed by trips to Africa, shaped Wallerstein’s identity. Yet even
24 Contesting the Global Order

though Wallerstein’s childhood cultivated cosmopolitanism, it was very

much a New York cosmopolitanism. Later, Wallerstein concluded that
New York was in fact the “capital” of the world-economy.37

British Marxism, Not Nationalism

Perry Anderson failed to identify with any particular city or country.

Although born in London, Anderson believed he should have been born
in China.38 His father spent the major part of his career working for
Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC), and it was only by coincidence that,
on September 11, 1938, Francis Rory Peregrine Anderson was born in
London.39 His family called him Rory.40 Anderson’s sentiment of being
out of place, even at birth, is illustrative of his vision of world politics.
Childhood experiences, he thought, led him to avoid adopting the national
allegiances or patriotism that people commonly develop in their youth.
To the contrary, he believed that he took on a cosmopolitan identity,
removed from any particular national state. Thus, Anderson’s cosmopol-
itanism was the product of experiencing diverse peoples absent a central
meeting place, such as New York.
Anderson’s Left orientation came in part from an inherited intellec-
tual curiosity and a familial disposition toward the oppressed. The first
born was Richard Benedict “Ben” O’Gorman Anderson, then Perry, and
the youngest was Melanie Catherine Sainthill Anderson.41 Perry’s mother,
Veronica (Bigham) Anderson, descended from a line of English business-
men and civil servants. His father, James Carew O’Gorman “Shaemas”
Anderson, came from a mix of Irish and English folk that were more
politically engaged. The O’Gormans were Catholic Irish nationalists that,
according to Anderson’s brother Benedict, made it all but impossible to
identify as English.42 Shaemas Anderson supported Sinn Fein in Ireland,
criticized fellow Britons working in Chinese Maritime Customs, and
empathized with the suffering of local Chinese. Of the three Anderson
children, however, only Benedict later became an Irish citizen, a decision
he made more out of love for father than love for country.43
In the 1940s, a natural sensitivity for the downtrodden combined
with potent life experiences, which would shape Anderson’s intellectual
views. In 1941, under pressure from Veronica and unhappy with his post
in Shanghai, Shaemas Anderson decided to head home. The Andersons
traveled by way of San Francisco and spent the rest of the war in California
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 25

and Colorado. The war in the Atlantic made passage home too dangerous.44
Moreover, the war in the Pacific and Japan’s takeover of Chinese Maritime
Customs likely ruled out any consideration of returning to China. While
in the United States, Anderson’s father worked for the California bureau
of Britain’s Office of Political Warfare. The family moved to Ireland in
1945. Shaemas Anderson, whose health had been in decline for some
time, died the next year.45
The Anderson brothers attended Eton. In Benedict’s recollection, their
mother had a low opinion of the Irish educational system and pushed
her sons to attend an English boarding school. She also noted that they
would need scholarships now that family income mostly came from their
late father’s pension.46 Most works describe Perry and Benedict as coming
from means, a conclusion supported by their father’s position and their
ability to rescue the New Left Review (discussed later in this chapter).47
Benedict’s remarks, however, suggest that family resources were not unlim-
ited, especially when it came to paying for a prestigious boarding school.
The brothers won spots on the limited roster of scholarship students,
and they quickly found that their Eton experiences were rather different
than sons of rich Britons and what Benedict called the “brown-skinned
‘princes’ from the ex-colonies.” The rich boys looked down on their
lower status peers, and the scholarship boys regarded their rich peers as
dumb and lazy. Both groups were “snobbish” in their own way, Benedict
noted.48 Perry recalled how, by this point, his accent had changed several
times: in California, he was regarded as English; then in England, he was
regarded as American; then in Ireland, he was regarded as English once
again; and finally, while at school in England, he was regarded as Irish.
Frequently relocations, in addition to teasing from fellow schoolchildren,
reinforced his cosmopolitanism.49 Equally significant was the influence of
books (while on breaks, he and Benedict would read sometimes seven
to eight hours a day),50 as well as art (the theatre and radio programs).51
In 1956, Perry Anderson began his first year at Oxford. Within weeks,
two events happened that changed his life forever. He and other members
of the university’s student Left would refer to the year as a conjuncture,
which, according to one-time comrade Stuart Hall, meant that 1956 was
“not just a year.”52 It was a seminal moment, for international Left and
for twentieth-century world politics. That year, the Soviets suppressed the
Hungarian Revolution, and the British and French occupied Suez. The
campus was alive with activity. Divisions and political allegiances were
exacerbated within the student population, which was already debating the
26 Contesting the Global Order

expansion of European communism, colonialism, Vietnam, and turmoil in

the Middle East. Anderson reflected: “It was virtually impossible, I think,
for any lively young person not to be very quickly and deeply politicized
by that experience.”53
Although many students supported Britain’s war on Egypt, Ander-
son and the student Left opposed both their own government and the
Soviets. Anderson considered himself New Left because he rejected old
binaries, social democracy versus one-party communism. He and the other
students did not think they could trust Western capitalist governments,
which suppressed workers at home and subjugated peoples abroad. They
also could not trust Soviet leaders. Stalin had been dead for three years.
Yet Moscow had not genuinely reversed course under Khrushchev, and
the clampdown in Hungary was antithetical to the principles of socialism.
Nor did Anderson and others think they could trust Western socialist gov-
ernments. France was led by the socialist Guy Mollet, who, they thought,
betrayed his international Left supporters by siding with Great Britain in
the Suez. Quite simply, they declared the trusted model of the Old Left
dead; in their opinion, it needed to be replaced by a more sophisticated
understanding of world politics. In short, they thought of themselves as
“new” because they did not trust either side of the Cold War Establishment.
For Hall, 1956 marked the end of a “political Ice Age.”54
The student Left was frustrated by what they perceived to be an
inattentiveness by the British government. They expressed their views in
the journals New University and Universities and Left Review (ULR). Based
at Oxford, ULR was edited by Stuart Hall, along with Gabriel Pearson,
Raphael Samuel, and Charles Taylor. They considered their position to be
a fresh perspective on the British welfare state, which had proven itself
“monstrously irrelevant” to those who came of age in the postwar years.55
In 1960, New University published an essay by Anderson and Robin Black-
burn, who would remain a friend and ally of Anderson’s for decades. In
the same issue, Anderson, who thought English audiences should read
continental thinkers, also translated an article by Jean-Paul Sartre.56
The Oxford Left arrived at a time of declining public support for the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Waning interest came after
two decades of popular and intellectual enthusiasm for Left ideas and
organizations. In the 1930s and 1940s, the number of radical publications
in poetry, literary studies, science, economics, and politics multiplied.57
Groups like the Left Book Club published popular radical texts, while the
Communist Party Historians Group provided an institutional home for
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 27

radical intellectuals.58 Public opinion in Britain shifted to the Left during

the war, an experience duplicated in the United States, with opinions
about Stalin and the Soviet Union becoming more favorable. In 1942, the
British Communist Party boasted 65,000 members. The party held two
seats in Parliament in 1945, and was looked upon favorably by a number
of sympathetic Labour members.59 The Left’s mood in the early postwar
years was quite optimistic: fascism had discredited the Right, and the wild
swings of capitalism had shaken the Center.60
The temporary alliance of the West with the Soviet Union was forged
by a common commitment against fascism. After the war, with fascism
eradicated, relations dramatically shifted once again. Chances for the Left’s
ideological triumph also declined. In the way that the Right had been
harmed by proximity to fascism, the Left was harmed by proximity to
Stalinism. In truth, Stalin had upended the values of communism. Beliefs in
classlessness and equality suddenly became associated with their opposite:
tyranny, cronyism, and a lack of individual freedom. Stalin’s success lay
in that he praised communist principles while subverting those principles
in practice. Thus, a standard narrative played out on both sides of the
Atlantic, one that associated Stalin with Marxism. To this day, public dis-
course (especially in the United States) often identifies one with the other.
Notwithstanding Attlee’s Labour government from 1945 to 1951, the
Left did not win the day. Over a five-year period, the Communist Party
lost half its members, and faced public hostility.61 Still, the Left’s ideas
were not eradicated. Despite the Right’s resurgence, Marxist intellectual-
ism expanded. Even as the Party lost influence, Left journals continued
to open up.
In addition to Oxford’s student-inspired journals, new publications
such as Past and Present and the New Reasoner became a home for diverse
ideas. The Historians Group created Past and Present in 1952, with John
Morris as editor and Eric Hobsbawm as assistant editor. The New Reasoner
(for three issues, named the Reasoner) was founded in 1956 by John Saville
and Edward (E. P.) and Dorothy Thompson. Unhappy with the Commu-
nist Party’s supine support of Soviet policies, and unable to publish their
criticism in established Party publications, they wanted the journal to
be an unfiltered outlet for Party members. The explosion of journals, in
other words, was a sign of divisiveness among Leftists. The CPGB could
not quell dissent within its ranks, even by threatening expulsion. Several
prominent intellectuals resigned, including Saville, Thompson, Christopher
Hill, and Rodney Hilton.
28 Contesting the Global Order

Anderson became active as an intellectual at this moment of turmoil.

There was friction between the established Left and the student Left. The
conflict was more than a clash of personalities: it was a contest over the
meaning of the New Left and what its members would do to advance
socialism. For some, the difference between the Historians Group and the
Oxford Left was not just age, but political context: World War II separated
their political generations, and, with the threat of fascism seemingly gone,
younger Leftists were less willing to support even the strongest antifascist
governments.62
By 1959, the declining sales and financial troubles incentivized the
merger of Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner. The new
journal was the New Left Review, often called by its initials, NLR, or simply
the Review. It was a marriage of necessity. As far as the participants were
concerned, the publications came from different worlds. Yet despite the two
journals being very different, every editorial board member except Ralph
Miliband, who strongly protested the merger, voted in favor of combining
their resources.63 Hall became the journal’s new editor and worked with
an editorial board of twenty-five members.
Despite his inexperience, Anderson ascended quickly within the
NLR’s organizational structure. With his time at Oxford over, he was
perhaps looking for the kind of institutional home that academics such
as Wallerstein enjoyed. But unlike Columbia University, the NLR was not
a place for associating with ideological opponents.
In 1960, Anderson did not contribute a single piece to the NLR
(nor had he published in either of its predecessors). In 1961, he published
three articles.64 Late that year, with declining sales and increasing bills,
Hall resigned to write on his own.65 The Review was in serious financial
distress, and Anderson, as a figure of relative means, was able to help.
Therefore, Perry and Benedict Anderson, along with Ronald Fraser, paid
off the NLR’s debts in return for some editorial concessions.66 In 1962,
Anderson became principal editor with the right to reduce the Review’s
large editorial board and appoint new board members.67 That year, he had
published in every issue.68
Even with some financial relief,69 the NLR’s editorial transition was
not smooth. The new team was inexperienced, and, as editor, Anderson
intended to take the journal in a very different direction. Previously, the
NLR served as a place for organizing and activism.70 Hall conceived of
the NLR as a social enterprise and as a leader of New Left clubs around
Britain. The journal was secondary to the movement. It was not overly
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 29

centralized and did not wish to be. It purposefully lacked, he reflected,

“tight organization structure” and “rules, regulations, party programme or
‘line.’ ”71 The journal was not simply a forum for interpreting the world.
Yet Anderson believed it should concentrate on the ideas that inspired
activism. Others could organize protests or recruit activists. What the New
Left needed, according to Anderson, was a proper understanding of the
present. Political commitments of the present ought to be understood by
engaging the past in a structural and all-encompassing way. The present
did not appear haphazardly, but through a series of historical events, which
if understood properly, can aid those who wish for change. To be a part
of the New Left, Anderson later reflected, meant that one should think
“through a series of public questions which are also intellectual and theo-
retical questions about the history of the New Left, but also about empire,
the Soviet Empire and the British Empire.”72 In Anderson’s worldview, a
deep understanding of the past was required in order to shape the present.
In the sixties, the British New Left was no longer unified as it once
had been. The moment of 1956 had faded.73 The Left’s dysfunctional state
could most prominently be seen, Anderson thought, by the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This was a political program the Left should
have won. After witnessing the advent and spread of nuclear weapons (by
now, in two types, atomic and hydrogen), many young people felt compelled
to protest.74 CND became very popular for a few years but declined just
as quickly. The CND failed, he explained, because it could not provide a
general theory of the Cold War. Capitalist states, on the other hand, had
a very strong explanation: the Cold War was a battle against communist
dictatorship, just as World War II had been against fascist dictatorship. The
West’s explanation, according to Anderson, was popular for its simplicity:
“Communism became synonymous with evil and dangerous.”75
It would be the job of the NLR, Anderson believed, to help fashion
a counternarrative that the Left could use against the capitalist West. The
New Left needed to show that the Cold War was not an ideological battle
with Marxism. It needed to show that Stalin did not represent genuine Left
ideas, and that communism was not really a threat to human freedom.76
With this ambition, Anderson and the NLR published in three
areas: British society; the third world; and bringing continental Marxism
home to Britain. The new editors thought that they could shift what they
perceived as the British public’s narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction
by importing continental Marxism and by emphasizing political change
in the third world. The editors announced this new direction in a note
30 Contesting the Global Order

to readers, calling it “irresistibly obvious” that prospects for socialism at

home were caught up in the larger global struggles for freedom. They
wrote: “Socialism remains the vocation of our time; the dethronement
of capital has proved both possible and necessary.”77 The NLR should be
international because the major socialist revolutions were outside Europe
and the decolonization movement possessed great potential for socialism.
Thus, Anderson and the editors saw their international perspective as
consistent with classical socialism and as allowing for objective analysis
of various countries, including Great Britain.78
Yet the NLR’s writers considered themselves outsiders, “as if [Britain]
were a ‘foreign’ country.”79 Anderson’s childhood moves gave him a certain
distance. Without such “romantic attachments” to a place, Anderson’s
perspective was, in many respects, hardly different from that of a foreign
visitor. Great Britain might as well have been China or France. In part,
this was a logical extension of an existing practice. Many members of the
British Left in the 1950s had spent much of their lives outside Britain. Two
notable examples are Hall, who was Jamaican, and Sadiq al-Mahdi, who
was Sudanese; others too, had joined the student Left at Oxford, while
away from their home countries.
In 1964, the NLR began running a series of articles on Britain by
Anderson and Tom Nairn. Though published individually, their writings
became known as the Nairn-Anderson theses.80 The theses were the NLR’s
first attempt at developing a narrative of England’s past to shape its present
trajectory.81 For Nairn and Anderson, developing such a history also meant
utilizing thinkers from the continent, and thus, in their view, breathing
new life into British intellectualism.
They began with a startling premise: that Western Marxism had not
penetrated British intellectual life. It was not that Anderson recognized no
existing English Marxism, but that he regarded its formation as a radical
liberalism rather than a genuine Marxism. A few thinkers, such as Christo-
pher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and Raymond Williams, stood out to Anderson
as notable exceptions. But even as he acknowledged a limited role for an
indigenous English Marxism, he sought to minimize its significance. For
example, one essay from 1968 recognized Hill as genuinely Marxist, but it
strangely suggested that only in the sixties did he produce what English
socialism thus far had not: “a serious, scientific, intellectual achievement.”82
By the time it was reprinted decades later, in English Questions, Anderson
had softened his tone, describing all three as significant thinkers whose
contributions to English Marxism began before the arrival of the New Left.83
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 31

Still, there may be some truth to thought that the NLR was import-
ing ideas previously “external” to most of the British Left.84 Nairn and
Anderson wanted to replicate the national-identity projects of Gramsci,
Sartre, and Lukács, and bring to Britain what their forebears had brought
to Italy, France, and Germany.85
Most influential in this period was Antonio Gramsci.86 From the Ital-
ian thinker, Nairn and Anderson learned about hegemonic power, rooted
in notions of force and consent (or, fear and love, in Machiavelli’s terms).
Gramsci deemed the bourgeoisie a hegemonic class, a term Anderson applied
to elites (aristocratic and bourgeois) in the British context. As Anderson
understood hegemony, political power was closely connected to the realm
of culture, the latter being essential to the former. If socialists were to win
the state, they would have to win the culture too. Still, Anderson’s overall
relationship with Grasmci’s writings was complicated. He later attributed
the “Gramscian direction” of the theses to Nairn, noting that his own use
of Gramsci was really infused with “Sartrean and Lukácsian subtones.”87 In
the seventies, Anderson wrote an article on the “extreme contradictions”
within Gramsci’s writings that, apparently, Nairn-Anderson had missed.88
Even though Anderson was no Gramscian, he would return to discuss
Gramsci’s writings over subsequent decades, a sign of the importance
(and, for Anderson, frequent misuse) of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.89
Unlike Wallerstein, who focused on the American Right’s rhetorical
strategies, Anderson’s writings on Britain emphasized the historical forces
that gave the Right an advantage. The problem Anderson described in his
1964 essay “Origins of the Present Crisis” had to do with an “increasing
entropy” of British society.90 For him, the decline of empire led to the
stagnation of British industry, education, infrastructure, and morale.
International economic decline, beginning with the completion of imperial
expansion, was the chief factor precipitating the crisis. As entropy increased,
so too did nationalist fervor and the celebration of past achievements.
In Anderson’s opinion, Conservative leadership in the 1950s took on an
aristocratic character of “neo-Edwardianism,” projecting a diplomatic atti-
tude of supremacy whose only relevance was its historical legacy. By the
1950s, Anderson wrote, the upper class had been reduced to play-acting,
wistfully conjuring past global dominance.91
In such circumstances, Anderson remarked, one should expect the
Left to be more popular. Why did the working class not achieve ruling
supremacy despite its “great numerical superiority” over other classes?92
The answers to these questions, he thought, would help the Left assess
32 Contesting the Global Order

the strength of capitalism in Britain as well as the ability of hegemonic

classes to maintain their hegemony despite the revolts of the working
class. He came to think that the relative weakness of the British Left, and,
in particular, the Labour Party, had to do with the historical character of
the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
According to Anderson, the merchants in Britain only halfheartedly
revolted against the nobility in the seventeenth century. The bourgeois
revolution was, in reality, a limited uprising that became co-opted by the
aristocracy. Instead of overthrowing its master, the bourgeois class was
rather easily tempted by the aristocratic lifestyle and limited opportunities
for joining its ranks. (It was a bourgeois revolution “only by proxy” among
factions of rural landowners who disputed the role of the monarchy.)93 For
Anderson, the revolution succeeded in bringing about the transformation
to capitalism, but left “almost the entire social structure intact.”94
Elites (bourgeois and aristocratic), in Anderson’s argument, consti-
tuted a hegemonic class, capturing a force of power based on cultural norms
of identity. Here, he borrowed Gramsci’s definition: hegemony was “the
dominance of one social bloc over another, not simply by means of force
or wealth, but by a wider authority whose ultimate resource is cultural.”95
The hegemonic class was unusual in that it could form its own identity,
the identities of lower classes, and the national image as a whole.
Anderson found that a hegemonic class might block ideologies
produced by bourgeois and working classes. The ruling class in Britain
perpetuated what he likened to a quasi-feudal arrangement of social ech-
elons that were reinforced by cultural cues. Aristocratic styles, attitudes,
and behavior provided the standard for upward mobility, which seemed
unattainable to most workers yet appeared just within reach for labor
leaders. Ideologically, the ruling classes (eventually a fusion between the
bourgeoisie and aristocracy) developed a conservatism characterized by
a desire for wealth and reverence for institutions.96 The establishment
in Britain, in other words, set priorities for the lower classes to keep
them from upending the political order. Simultaneously, elites adopted
a cloak of equality in the political realm: domestic leaders, unlike those
in the empire, took on an appealing egalitarian character. They were not
identified as professional politicians, bureaucrats, or military leaders, an
amateurism that worked to their advantage. Social norms, ideology, and
leadership made the upper class culturally attractive and, through its
appeal, hegemonic.
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 33

For Anderson, to the extent that the hegemonic class was strong, the
working class was weak. British proletarians never seemed quite capable of
revolution. The aristocratic-bourgeois fusion made upward mobility of the
proletariat naturally more difficult. Furthermore, Anderson commented,
England’s workers had the unhappy distinction of being the world’s first
industrial proletariat. Consequently, it had to devise an organizational
structure and plan of action from scratch. He believed this fact made
the proletariat not immature, but “premature,” with no socialist thinking
or strategies at its disposal.97 Thus, workers in England had no precedent
or theory to follow.
Over time, leaders of working-class organizations became, for
Anderson, unable to envision a radically different world. Britain’s working
class was thus a corporate class. Unlike the hegemonic class that remade
social and political relations in its own image, the corporate class sought
to increase its power within conditions it did not create and, most terri-
bly, did not fundamentally question. The proletariat in England achieved
consciousness, he admitted, but never an accompanying political will. In
fact, Anderson thought the proletariat’s lack of self-direction could be
summed up by the party tasked with representing its views. Unlike any of
the other European working-class parties, Britain’s proletarian party was
not called Socialist, Communist, or Social Democratic. The Labour Party
was a declaration of interests, not an expression of how British society
ought to be structured.98
The empire, moreover, had since the nineteenth century been an
additional barrier to meaningful Left reforms. Though members of the
working class did not materially benefit from colonialism, they, like any
group, were susceptible to imperial romanticism. According to Anderson,
the ruling classes successfully played on nationalist sentiments to quell
proletarian restlessness. In the twentieth century, world wars served this
same purpose, just not as effectively.99 After World War II, Anderson
explained, Labour’s postwar parliamentary majority created institutions
such as the National Health Service. Yet this success was short-lived.
Paradoxically, Keynesian capitalist programs had wiped out widespread
unemployment and buoyed the working class. This undermined the Left’s
case for socialism: for the previous half-century, he noted, the Left had
portrayed capitalism to be incapable of preventing poverty.100
Anderson concluded that for Labour to transform Britain in the
1960s it must first become a genuine socialist party.101 However small,
34 Contesting the Global Order

there was an opportunity for the working class to achieve some political
standing proportional to its demographic size. An awareness of barriers
was a prerequisite to surmounting them. The Left, consequently, would do
well to encourage Labour to set its sights higher. The only way to success,
Anderson believed, was not for Leftists to hope for incremental improvement.
The way forward was to transform the corporate class into a socialist one,
which would then go about dismantling the hegemonic class looming above.
The future of Leftists, from any class position, was caught up in the future
of workers. By pairing the entirety of socialism with Stalinism, Western
Cold War rhetoric instilled negative attitudes about socialism at home.102
The capitalists’ narrative was so compelling, in fact, that it threatened the
survival of Left organizations and journals. For Anderson, the Left should
stand up for its convictions. Its survival depended on it.
Anderson did not discuss the global implications of Conservative
electoral success, perhaps because of Britain’s decline on the world stage.
Nonetheless, he, like Wallerstein, saw a close connection between domestic
class struggles and the struggles between the developed and postcolonial
worlds. Earlier in the decade, Anderson published a three-part series on
the conclusion of Portuguese colonialism.103 What he found was that,
unlike the upper classes in Britain, which placed cultural and political
barriers in front of potentially insurgent workers, Portugal’s ruling appa-
ratus had not found a way to manage its potentially restless colonies
in Africa. Portugal did not sufficiently invest at home or in its colonies
in Mozambique and Angola, nor did it have an ideological program in
place to pacify the public. There was virtually no co-option, at home or
abroad. The state was unprepared for the age of decolonization. As soon
as nationalist movements erupted in neighboring areas, anticolonialism
broke out in Portugal’s territories too.104
The contrast between Britain and Portugal, although never directly
addressed by Anderson, was clear: narratives could mean the difference
between co-option and revolution. Anderson believed that liberation,
whether of class or nation, required narratives of liberation. The absence
of any defense by Portuguese imperialists ensured that the European power
had virtually no African support. But in Britain, the ruling elite’s complex
program of nationalism and anticommunism, along with a widespread
material increase in well-being, ensured that the hegemonic class retained
its status. As postcolonial history has demonstrated, a revolutionary
mindset is only a starting point for reform. Still, Anderson and the NLR
 Cosmopolitan Beginnings 35

were convinced that if the Left were to have any success it needed a more
compelling historical narrative.

Conclusion

With dissimilar childhoods, Wallerstein and Anderson adopted similar

extranational political stances. Furthermore, they used their cosmopolitan
orientations to criticize conservative domestic politics and write about
opportunities (and difficulties) for the postcolonial world. They wrote
soberly about the tough road ahead for socialists. Yet, as young intellec-
tuals, they were hopeful about the future. It seemed possible for the Left
to advance in the West and for colonial retreat to give way to vibrant,
independent, nations. Wallerstein and Anderson took note of obstacles, but,
after witnessing the great political and ideological changes from the 1930s
to the early 1960s, they had reason to believe that better days lay ahead.
 Chapter 2

Ideational Lineages

Born into families on the Left, Immanuel Wallerstein and Perry Anderson
became teenagers at a time of hopeful anticipation for the working class
at home and for colonized peoples abroad. Political events encouraged
optimism, albeit a cautious optimism. As they contemplated current events,
their thinking was also informed by notable American and European
leftists whose writings encouraged complex views of the past and present.
Wallerstein and Anderson have at various points identified major
sources of inspiration, many of whom they also got to know personally. Yet
it was a thinker long past, Edward Gibbon, who had a profound impact
on a teenaged Perry Anderson. Gibbon proved to be a captivating writer
across six volumes of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is notewor-
thy that neither Wallerstein nor Anderson looked primarily to Karl Marx,
though Anderson conceived of his writings as updating Marx’s theories
for the twentieth century. Although both young radicals would later be
identified as Marxists (in words of praise and accusation), Wallerstein never
found the label appealing; instead, he took a page from Frantz Fanon in
adopting and discarding Marxist terminology as he wished.
Neither modeled his scholarship mainly on twentieth-century English
intellectual circles. The geographical center of influence was farther east,
in Paris and Budapest: Wallerstein derived his concept of the totality from
Fernand Braudel and Karl Polanyi; for Anderson, it was Jean-Paul Sartre
and Georg Lukács, especially the former’s term totalization. The four
thinkers, who conceived of totalities in divergent ways, believed that true
understanding of our collective past and present came through holism,
through seeing the world as complex, made up of interrelated economic,

37
38 Contesting the Global Order

political, social, and cultural parts. A proper discussion of the totality, and
how Wallerstein and Anderson gave meaning to this term, is saved for
chapter 4. Here, we see how France, Hungary, and the decolonizing world,
among other places, contributed to radical thought in divergent ways. We
also see how influential writers neither replicate the ideas of their forbears
nor invent the world anew. In applying the ideas of others, Wallerstein
and Anderson needed to invent new ways of thinking, adjusting to the
present. This chapter is about old ideas. Subsequent chapters are about
modifying those ideas and inventing new ones.

A Reading List for the World (-System)

Several intellectuals inspired Wallerstein to think in unconventional

terms. He was drawn to leftists, especially those who resisted disciplinary
categorization. The most significant in Wallerstein’s twenties and thirties
were (in birth order): Karl Polanyi, Fernand Braudel, and Frantz Fanon.1
Wallerstein knew each of them personally. The Noble Prize–winning
chemist Ilya Prigogine was perhaps more influential, although his effect
would happen later, since he and Wallerstein did not meet until 1980.
Wallerstein also learned much from his colleagues and collaborators. But
many of those, at Columbia University and elsewhere, were intellectual
partnerships that did not shape his thinking in the same way as a mentor
or classic text.2
Wallerstein was ambivalent about Marx. He did not write much
about the early Marxists, and when he did, he often pointed out flaws
or contradictions.3 He thought Marx was too much in the tradition of
classical economics, too deterministic in his expectations. Wallerstein
regarded both Marxism and liberalism as children of the Enlightenment
in their shared trust in human progress, which enthusiasts perceived as
desirable, evolutionary, and inevitable.4 Of course, Wallerstein and Marx
were aligned in their desire to see capitalism end, though here, too, the
former parted company: whereas Marx saw revolutionaries as necessary
for capitalism to end, Wallerstein would eventually come to see systems
as concluding on their own accord (due to internal contradictions). Later
in life, when he was asked if he preferred to be labeled a Marxist or a
radical, Wallerstein had a standard joke: “I’m perfectly happy with being
called a radical, and being called a Marxist depends on what you mean
by ‘Marxist.’ And I usually say there are four views of me as a Marxist:
 Ideational Lineages 39

there are those who say I’m a Marxist and that’s a good thing; there are
those who say I’m a Marxist and that’s a bad thing; and there are those
who say I’m not a Marxist and that’s a good thing; and there are those
who say that I’m not a Marxist and that’s a bad thing. I can identify with
people who have argued all of these things, and I don’t worry about that.”5
Wallerstein was ambivalent because he thought the world had changed
since 1883, the year of Marx’s passing. He believed human beings, condi-
tioned by their times, were far less capable of reaching universal conclu-
sions (for all people at all times) than was commonly assumed. And, just
as Marx’s knowledge was limited to the nineteenth century, Wallerstein
considered himself bound to the twentieth.6 Human understanding, in
his view, was mostly confined to the historical epoch in which one lived.
Wallerstein’s feelings about Marx mirror those of another mentor,
Frantz Fanon, who also resisted such a classification. Frequently identified
with Marx or Freud, Fanon, in Wallerstein’s telling, always demurred: “[I]f
someone accused Fanon of being a Marxist, he would respond by saying
that he was a Freudian. But if someone accused him of being too Freudian,
he would respond by saying that he really was a Marxist. Fanon didn’t care
too much of this question of labels, and I think that he was as much of
a Marxist as I am and, at the same time, as little of a Marxist as I am.”7
Wallerstein met Fanon in Accra, when the latter served Algeria’s
provisional government as ambassador to Ghana. It was 1960, the Year of
Africa. Seventeen colonial territories would achieve independence on the
continent. Wallerstein thought Fanon was “full of life and passion.”8 He,
like Wallerstein, wrestled with Marx’s legacy, particularly regarding lessons
about class terminology. Fanon’s sense of classes was greatly influential to
Wallerstein, who nonetheless acknowledged that the former never directly
outlined a perspective on class struggle. “And yet,” Wallerstein contended,
class struggle was “central to [Fanon’s] world-view and to his analyses.”9
In the 1950s, European communist parties mostly spoke about urban
classes in conflict, the industrial bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat. But
in Africa and much of the rest of the world, these categories hardly seemed
relevant.10 When Fanon applied Marxist terms to the colonial world, he
redefined them, diverging from the European context. Wallerstein found
that Fanon and his critics spoke past one another on the meaning and
effects of bourgeoisie, proletariat, peasantry, and lumpenproletariat. (In
one case, he determined that Fanon’s use of “peasant” was roughly the
equivalent of “proletarians” in the writings of two critics.)11 Throughout
his career, Wallerstein’s insistence on defining and debating the ­meaning
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 I AM ME.

GRUBSTAKE. See

DICK POWELL'S ZANE GREY THEATRE. 2632.

LAWMAN.

THE GRUDGE. See

PETER GUNN.

WHISPERING SMITH.

THE GRUDGE FIGHT. See

GOMER PYLE-USMC.

THE TALL MAN.

THE GRUESOME BASEMENT. See

GRINDL.

GRUESOME TWOSOME. Mayflower Pictures.

72 min., sd., color, 35 mm. © Mayflower
Pictures, Inc.; 28Aug67; LP36746.

GRUESOME TWOSOME. See

DICK TRACY.

LIFE OF RILEY.

GUARD DUTY. See

 SAFETY MANAGEMENT FILM SERIES.

LA GUARDA CUIDADOSA. (The solicitous

guard) Encyclopaedia Britannica
Films. 28 min., sd., color, 16 mm.
(El Espanol por el mundo) © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, Inc.;
25Mar66 (in notice: 1965); MP16146.

THE GUARDFISH STORY. See

SILENT SERVICE. Series no. 1, 5639.

THE GUARDIAN. See

LASSIE.

PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES.

THE GUARDIAN ANGELS. See

STAGECOACH—WEST.

GUARDRAIL CRASH TEST FOR SAFETY.

General Motors Corp. 20 min., sd.,
b&w, 16 mm. (Proving ground studies
of vehicle and highway safety series)
© General Motors Corp.; 22Oct64;
MP14553.

GUATEMALA CITY. See

MAVERICK.

GUATEMALA: NATION OF CENTRAL AMERICA.

 Encyclopaedia Britannica Films.
17 min., sd., b&w, 16 mm. © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, Inc.;
1Mar61 (in notice: 1960); MP11518.

THE GUERILLA. See

THE AMERICANS.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER. Columbia

Pictures Corp. 108 min., sd., color,
35 mm. © Columbia Pictures Corp.;
31Dec67; LP35733.

GUESSING GAME. Encyclopaedia Britannica

Educational Corp. 7 min., sd.,
color, 16 mm. © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Educational Corp.;
12May69; MP19291.

THE GUEST. See

THE RIFLEMAN.

GUEST APPEARANCE. See

DR. KILDARE.

GUEST ARTIST. See

LOVE AND MARRIAGE. Production no. 13.

GUEST: BOBBY LEWIS. See

 MIDWESTERN HAYRIDE.

A GUEST FROM ENGLAND. See

LIFE OF RILEY.

GUEST IN THE BARRACKS. See

GOMER PYLE-USMC.

GUEST IN THE HOUSE. See

THE DONNA REED SHOW.

FRED ASTAIRE'S PREMIERE THEATRE.

MY THREE SONS.

THIS IS ALICE.

GUEST IN THE NURSERY. See

THE DONNA REED SHOW.

GUEST OF HONOR. See

THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.

MANHUNT.

GUEST WITH A GUN. See

HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE.

THE GUESTS. See

 THE OUTER LIMITS.

GUESTS, GUESTS, WHO WANTS GUESTS? See

THE DONNA REED SHOW.

GUEST/GUESTS.
For other titles beginning with Guest
or Guests See:

THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW.

THE DANNY KAYE SHOW.

FACE THE NATION.

HOLLYWOOD TALENT SCOUTS.

THE JOHN GARY SHOW.

THE JONATHAN WINTERS SHOW.

THE JUDY GARLAND SHOW.

THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR.

SPOTLIGHT.

THE STEVE ALLEN COMEDY HOUR.

THE SUMMER BROTHERS SMOTHERS SHOW.

GUESTWARD HO. Desilu Productions.

Approx. 30 min. each, sd., b&w,
16 mm. © Desilu Productions, Inc.
Babs and the cow. © 1Aug60; LP22922.

Babs and the guest. © 25Jan61;

LP22938.

Babs and the lion. (Babs & the

mountain lion) © 19Sep60; LP22925.

Babs the manager. © 28Mar61; LP22947.

Babs' vanity. © 21Oct60; LP22928.

The beatniks. © 10May61; LP22953.

Bill the candidate. © 17Jan61;

LP22937.

Bill the fireman. © 23Mar61; LP22946.

Dimples goes Hollywood. © 7Dec60;

LP22933.

Frontier week. © 29Nov60; LP22932.

Hawkeye the mother. © 8Feb61; LP22940.

Hawkeye's first love. © 30Jan61;

LP22939.

Hawkeye's stadium. © 16Feb61; LP22941.

The honorary Indian. © 21Feb61;

LP22942.

The Hooton statue. (Hooton's

statue) © 7Mar61; LP22944.
The Hootons build a barbecue.
© 2Mar61; LP22943.

The Hootons fire Lonesome.

© 13Oct60; LP22927.

The Hooton's second car. © 26Apr61;

LP22951.

The Hootons vs. Hawkeye. © 12Apr61;

LP22949.

Injun Bill. © 18Nov60; LP22931.

Lonesome's gal. © 5Apr61; LP22948.

Manhattan merry-go-round. © 9Jan61;

LP22936.

The matchmakers. © 1Nov60; LP22929.

The model mother. © 9Aug60; LP22923.

No place like home. © 16May61;

LP22954.

No vacancy. © 23Dec60; LP22935.

The spirit of Christmas. © 11Nov60;

LP22930.

The Thanksgiving story. © 28Sep60;

LP22926.

Too many cooks. © 15Dec60; LP22934.

 Two guests from the East. © 14Mar61;
LP22945.

The wild west show. © 4May61; LP22952.

The wrestler. © 19Apr61; LP22950.

You can't go home again. © 26Aug60;

LP22924.

THE GUIDE. Stratton Productions.

120 min., sd., color, 35 mm.
Eastman color. A screen treatment
by Pearl S. Buck & Tad Danielewski
based on R. K. Narayan's novel,
The guide. © Stratton Productions,
Inc.; 4Dec64; LU3342.

GUIDE DOG. See

LASSIE.

A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN. Twentieth

Century-Fox Film Corp. 92 min.,
sd., color, 35 mm. Panavision.
Based on the book by Frank Tarloff.
© Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.;
24May67; LP34449.

GUIDED MOUSE-ILLE. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

7 min., sd., color, 35 mm. (Tom and
Jerry cartoon) © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Inc.; 1Sep66; LP33603.

THE GUIDED TOUR. See

 ANGEL.

GILLETTE CO. TELEVISION COMMERCIALS.

GUIDEPOSTS TO SPEAKING AND WRITING.

(Filmstrip) Reid Irving. 10 filmstrips,
color, 35 mm. © Reid Irving;
20Nov56; MP9877.

GUIDING AND DEVELOPING EMPLOYEES.

American Management Assn. 27 min.,
sd., color, 16 mm. (Developing
supervisory leadership skills)
Appl. ti.: Guiding and developing
subordinates. © American Management
Assn., Inc.; 30Nov66 (in notice:
1967); MP17225.

GUIDING AND DEVELOPING SUBORDINATES. See

GUIDING AND DEVELOPING EMPLOYEES.

GUILLOTINE. See

THRILLER.

THE GUILT. See

87TH PRECINCT.

THE GUILT OF MATT BENTELL. See

THE BIG VALLEY.

THE GUILT OF MOLLY KANE. See

 THE NURSES.

GUILT SHALL NOT ESCAPE NOR INNOCENCE

SUFFER. See

FOR THE PEOPLE.

THE GUILTY. See

BONANZA.

MAN WITHOUT A GUN.

THE GUILTY AND THE INNOCENT. See

THE TEXAN. 71.

GUILTY CONSCIENCE. See

THE RIFLEMAN.

THE GUILTY HEART. See

THE DU PONT SHOW WITH JUNE ALLYSON.

Production no. 3428.

THE GUILTY MEN. See

THRILLER.

GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY. See

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CRYSLER THEATRE.

THE GUILTY VICTIM. See

 GRAND JURY.

GUINEA LOOKS WEST. See

EYEWITNESS.

GUISEPPE MCHALE. See

MCHALE'S NAVY.

THE GUITAR PLAYER. See

THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.

THE GUITAR PLAYER RETURNS. See

THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.

THE GULF BETWEEN. See

FLIPPER.

THE GULF COAST REGION: THE SOUTH'S

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. McGraw-Hill
Book Co. 15 min., sd., color, 16 mm.
(United States geography, social
studies series) Eastman color.
© McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.
21May63; MP13281.

GULLIBLE GOLDIE. See

THE BETTY HUTTON SHOW. 5237-27.

GULLIVER. See
 COMBAT!

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. See

THE 3 WORLDS OF GULLIVER.

THE GUN. See

THE AMERICANS.

COMBAT!

KRAFT SUSPENSE THEATRE.

A GUN AND A PRAYER. See

SHOTGUN SLADE.

GUN DUEL. See

LARAMIE.

A GUN FOR MOTHER'S DAY. See

M-SQUAD.

A GUN FOR WILLIE. See

DICK POWELL'S ZANE GREY THEATRE.

THE GUN FROM BOOT HILL. See

MAN WITHOUT A GUN.

THE GUN HAWK. Allied Artists Picture

 Corp. 92 min., sd., 35 mm. A Bern-Field
production. © Allied Artists
Pictures Corp.; 12Sep63; LP26161.

A GUN IS FOR KILLING. See

THE TALL MAN.

A GUN IS NOT A GENTLEMAN. See

DEATH VALLEY DAYS.

GUN PLAY. Paramount Pictures Corp.

9 min., sd., color, 35 mm. (Sports
in action) © Paramount Pictures
Corp.; 1Jan63 (in notice: 1962);
LP24860.

GUN SHY. See

GUNFIGHT IN ABILENE.

MAVERICK.

THE RIFLEMAN.

THE GUN SMUGGLERS. See

MANHUNT.

GUN STREET. Harvard Film Corp.

Released by United Artists Corp.
67 min., sd., b&w, 35 mm. © Harvard
Film Corp.; 23Nov61; LP21200.

GUN TOTIN' PAPA. See

 CISCO KID.

GUN FIGHT! See

ABC SCOPE.

GUNFIGHT AT COMANCHE CREEK. Allied

Artists Pictures Corp. 92 min.,
sd., color, 35 mm. Color by DeLuxe.
Panavision. © Allied Artists
Pictures Corp.; 1Jun63; LP26351.

GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL. See

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP.

GUNFIGHT IN ABILENE. Universal Pictures.

86 min., sd., color, 35 mm.
Techniscope. Based on the story Gun
shy, by Clarence Upson Young. © Universal
Pictures; 20May67 (in notice:
1966); LP36899.

THE GUNFIGHTER. See

THE ROAD WEST.

THE TEXAN. 35.

GUNFIGHTER R.I.P. See

GUNSMOKE.

THE GUNFIGHTERS. See

 TATE. No. 2212.

GUNFIGHTERS OF ABILENE. Vogue Pictures.

Released by United Artists Corp.
67 min., sd., b&w, 35 mm. © Vogue
Pictures, Inc.; 17Dec59; LP15185.

GUNFIGHTERS OF CASA GRANDE. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

92 min., sd., color,
35 mm. A Gregor production, in association
with Tecisa. Metrocolor.
CinemaScope. From a story by Borden &
Patricia Chase. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Inc.; 31Dec64; LP30049.

GUNFIRE. See

THE RIFLEMAN.

THE GUNMAN. See

LAWMAN.

GUNMAN'S REVENGE. See

TALES OF WELLS FARGO.

THE GUNMEN. See

BONANZA.

GUNN. Geoffrey Productions. Released

by Paramount Pictures Corp. 95 min.,
sd., color, 35 mm. Based upon
characters created by Blake Edwards.
© Paramount Pictures Corp. & Geoffrey
 Productions, Inc.; 7Jun67; LP34616.

GUNNAR YENSEN. See

SHOTGUN SLADE.

GUNPOINT. Universal Pictures Co.

86 min., sd., color, 35 mm.
© Universal Pictures Co., Inc.;
14May66 (in notice: 1965); LP35475.

THE GUN RUNNER RAID. See

RAT PATROL.

THE GUNRUNNERS. See

GUNSMOKE.

GUNS AT BATASI. Twentieth Century-Fox

Productions. 102 min., sd., b&w,
35 mm. CinemaScope. Screenplay by
Robert Holles based on his novel
The siege of Battersea. © Twentieth
Century-Fox Productions, Ltd.;
3Sep64; LP29235.

GUNS FOR BIG BEAR. See

SUGARFOOT.

GUNS FOR EMPIRE. See

RIVERBOAT.

GUNS FOR GARIBALDI. See

 DICK POWELL'S ZANE GREY THEATRE. 2640.

GUNS FOR KING JOSEPH. See

THE CALIFORNIANS. Production

no. 25-B (62).

GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN. Cipra Films,

Ernesto Enriquez & Filmes Cinematografica.
Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Franscope. Based on
A wall for San Sebastian, by William
Barby Faherty. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Inc.; 31Jan68; LP35287.

THE GUNS OF ABALONE. See

THE BOB CUMMINGS SHOW.

GUNS OF DARKNESS. Cavalcade Films.

Released by Warner Bros. Pictures.
95 min., sd., b&w, 35 mm. Based on
the novel Act of mercy, by Francis
Clifford. © Cavalcade Films, Ltd.;
18Aug62; LP27102.

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE. Open Road Films,

England. Released in the U.S. by
Columbia Pictures Corp. 155 min.,
sd., Eastman color, 35 mm. A Highroad
presentation. CinemaScope.
Based on the novel by Alistair MacLean.
© Open Road Films, Ltd.,;
1Jul61; LP20445.
GUNS OF THE BLACK WITCH. Alta Vista
Productions. Released by American
International. 83 min., sd., Eastman
color by Pathé, 35 mm. © Alta Vista
Productions; 18Nov61; LP21775.

GUNS OF THE LAWLESS. See

BRONCO.

GUNS OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Mirisch

Productions. Released by United Artists
Corp. 106 min., sd., color, 35
mm. Panavision. © Mirisch Productions,
Inc.; 28May69 (in notice: 1968);
LP37137.

GUNS OF THE TIMBERLAND. Ladd Enterprises.

Released by Warner Bros.
91 min., sd., Technicolor, 35 mm.
A Jaguar production. From the novel
by Louis L'Amour. © Ladd Enterprises,
Inc.; 5Mar60 (in notice: 1959);
LP20180.

GUNS OF WYOMING. See

CATTLE KING.

GUNSHOT. See

GILLETTE CO. TELEVISION COMMERCIALS.

FDRG-5-61 (F).

GUNSLINGER. CMW Productions. Approx.

60 min. each, sd., b&w, 16 mm. Produced
 in cooperation with CBS Television
Network. © Emirau Productions, Inc.

Appointment in Cascabel. © 21Feb61;

LP20187.

Buried people. © 6Feb61; LP20185.

The death of Yellow Singer. © 9May61;

LP20392.

The diehards. © 18Apr61; LP20193.

The golden circle. © 11Apr61; LP20192.

The hostage fort. © 13Feb61; LP20186.

Johnny Sergeant. © 2May61; LP20391.

The new Savannah story. © 16May61;

LP20194.

Rampage. © 14Mar61; LP20189.

The recruit. © 21Mar61; LP20190.

Road of the dead. © 28Mar61; LP20191.

The zone. © 28Feb61; LP20188.

GUNSLINGER. Santa Clara Productions.

Released by American Releasing Corp.
77 min., sd., Pathecolor, 35 mm.
© Santa Clara Productions, Inc.;
10May56; LP18380.
THE GUNSLINGER. See

CASEY JONES. 4.

JOHNNY RINGO. 2351.

GUNSMOKE. Arness & Co. 30 min. each,

sd., b&w, 16 mm. © Arness & Co.

About Chester. © 24Feb61 (In notice:

1960); LP18830.

Big Tom. © 8Jan60 (in notice: 1959);

LP16052.

The blacksmith. © 17Sep60; LP17762.

Bless me til I die. © 18Apr61 (in notice:

1960); LP20314.

Box o' rocks. © 4Dec59; LP15545.

Brother love. © 30Dec60; LP18827.

Chester's dilemma. © 16May61; LP20316.

The deserter. © 3Jun60 (in notice:

1959); LP16754.

False witness. © 11Dec59; LP15546.

Harriet. © 3Mar61 (in notice: 1960);

LP20311.

Hinka do. © 29Jan60 (in notice:

1959); LP16297.
 Jailbait Janet. © 26Feb60 (in notice:
1959); LP16298.

Long hours, short pay. © 26Apr61

(in notice: 1960); LP20315.

The peace officer. © 14Oct60; LP18826.

Potshot. © 10Mar61 (In notice: 1960);

LP20312.

Small water. © 24Sep60; LP17763.

Stolen horses. © 7Apr61 (in notice:

1960); LP20313.

Tag, you're it. © 18Dec59; LP15547.

Tall trapper. 20Jan61 (in notice:

1960); LP18829.

Til death do us. © 15Jan60 (in

notice: 1959); LP16053.

The tragedian. © 22Jan60 (in notice:

1959); LP16054.

Unloaded gun. © 13Jan61 (in notice:

1960); LP18828.

Unwanted deputy. © 4Mar60 (in notice:

1959); LP16299.

GUNSMOKE. Arness & Co. 30 min. each,

sd., b&w, 16mm. © Columbia Broadcasting
System, Inc.

Big man. © 24Mar61; LP19844.

Brother whelp. © 6Nov59; LP15226.

Colorado sheriff. © 16Jun61 (in

notice: 1960); LP19945.

Groat's grudge. © 1Jan60 (in notice:

1959); LP16051.

Hard virtue. © 3May61 (in notice:

1960); LP20234.

The imposter. © 9May61; LP20237.

Little girl. © 31Mar61; LP19845.

The love of money. © 23May61 (in notice:

1960); LP20235.

Melinda Miles. © 30May61 (in notice:

1960); LP20236.

Miguel's daughter. © 27Nov59; LP15544.

Minnie. © 14Apr61 (in notice: 1960);

LP20233.

Odd man out. © 20Nov59; LP15543.

Old faces. © 17Mar61 (in notice:

1960); LP19843.
 Saludos. © 30Oct59; LP15225.

Tail to the wind. © 16Oct59; LP15223.

Thick 'n' thin. © 25Dec59; LP16050.

GUNSMOKE. Arness Production Co.

Approx. 60 min. each, sd., b&w,
16 mm. © Arness Production Co.

Abe Blocker. © 19Nov62; LP23640.

Anybody can kill a marshal.

© 5Mar63; LP25031.

Apprentice doc. © 4Dec61; LP21780.

Ash. © 12Feb63 (in notice: 1962);

LP25029.

The Bassops. © 18Feb64 (in notice:

1963); LP29357.

The boys. © 22May62; LP22375.

Carter caper. © 8Nov63; LP27856.

Cody's code. © 16Jan62 (in notice:

1961); LP21421.

Cotter's girl. © 14Jan63 (in

notice: 1962); LP25028.

The cousin. © 29Jan63 (in notice:

1962); LP25030.
Coventry. © 14Mar62 (in notice:
1961); LP22173.

The dealer. © 10Apr62; LP22177.

The do-bader. © 2Jan62 (in notice:

1961); LP21419.

Durham bull. © 27Mar62 (in notice:

1961); LP22175.

Easy come. © 21Oct63; LP27153.

Ex-con. © 25Nov63; LP27857.

Extradition, part I. © 2Dec63;

LP27858.

False front. © 17Dec62; LP24892.

The far places. © 1Apr63; LP25726.

The glory and the mud. © 30Dec63;

LP27859.

Harpe's blood. © 18Oct61; LP21779.

I call him Wonder. © 18Mar63; LP25671.

Jeb. © 20May63; LP26271.

Kitty-cornered. © 13Apr64; LP29102.

Lacey. © 10Jan62 (in notice: 1961);

LP21420.
Long, long trail. © 1Nov61; LP21417.

Lover boy. © 30Sep63; LP27151.

A man a day. © 26Dec61; LP21418.

Mayblossoms. © 10Feb64 (in notice:

1963); LP29355.

Nina's revenge. © 12Dec61; LP21893.

No hands. © 3Feb64 (in notice: 1963);

LP29099.

Now that April's there. © 16Mar64;

LP29101.

Old comrade. © 21Dec62; LP24893.

Old York. © 29Apr63; LP25541.

The other half. © 25May64; LP29105.

Owney Tupper had a daughter.

© 30Mar64 (in notice: 1963);
LP29100.

Panacea Sikes. © 8Apr63 (in notice:

1962); LP26095.

Phoebe Strunk. © 5Nov62; LP23639.

Prairie wolfer. © 13Jan64 (in notice:

1963); LP29202.

The prisoner. © 15May62; LP22374.

 The promoter. © 20Apr64; LP29103.

The renegades. © 8Jan63 (in

notice: 1962); LP25079.

Reprisal. © 7Mar62; LP22176.

The squaw. © Arness Production Co.

(in notice: Arness & Co.); 8Nov61;
LP21778.

Tell Chester. © 15Apr63; LP25540.

The trappers. © 29Oct62; LP23638.

Us Haggens. © 3Dec62; LP26785.

The warden. © 11May64; LP29104.

The widow. © 21Mar62 (in notice:

1961); LP22174.

GUNSMOKE. Arness Production Co.

Approx. 60 min. each, sd., b&w,
16 mm. © Columbia Broadcasting
System, Inc.

Bentley. © 6Apr64 (in notice: 1963);

LP29106.

Cale. © 2May62; LP22372.

Caleb. © 23Mar64; LP29107.

Catawomper. © 6Feb62 (in notice:

 1961); LP21894.

Chester's Indian. © 9May62; LP22373.

Comanches is soft. © 29Feb64; LP29108.

Collie's free. © 15Oct62; LP23641.

Daddy went away. © 6May63; LP25544.

The ditch. © 23Oct62; LP23514.

The dreamers. © 24Apr62; LP22183.

Father love. © 9Mar64 (in notice:

1963); LP29358.

Friend. © 20Jan64 (in notice: 1963);

LP29218.

The gallows. © 28Feb62; LP22181.

Half straight. © 13Feb62 (in notice:

1961); LP22178.

He learned about women. © 20Feb62

(in notice: 1961); LP22179.

Homecoming. © 18Mar64; LP29110.

The hunger. © 12Nov62; LP23642.

Jenny. © 9Oct62; LP23517.

Journey for three. © 1Jun64; LP29111.

The kite. © 25Feb64 (in notice:
1963); LP29203.

Milly. © 21Nov61; LP21415.

The odyssey of Jubal Tanner.

© 13May63; LP26272.

Old Dan. © 23Jan62 (in notice:

1961); LP21416.

Once a Haggen. © 27Jan64 (in notice:

1963); LP29354.

The quest for Asa Janin.

© 28May63; LP26273.

Quint Asper comes home. © 25Sep62;

LP23515.

Quint-cident. © 22Apr63; LP25543.

Root down. © 2Oct62; LP23516.

Scot free. © 5May64; LP29109.

The summons. © 17Apr62; LP22182.

Tobe. © 10Oct63; LP27152.

Trip West. © 27Apr64; LP29204.

Wagon girls. © 3Apr62 (in notice:

1961); LP22180.

The way it is. © 27Nov62; LP23643.

 With a smile. © 25Mar63; LP25542.

GUNSMOKE. Columbia Broadcasting System.

Approx. 60 min. each, sd., b&w,
16 mm. © Columbia Broadcasting System,
Inc.

All that. © 25Oct61; LP20849.

Aunt Thede. © 10Dec64; LP29954.

The avengers. © 15Dec65; LP32259.

Bad lady from Brookline. © 15Apr65

(in notice: 1964); LP31036.

The bad one. © 22Jan63 (in notice:

1962); LP25032.

Baker's dozen. © 18Dec67; LP35694.

Bank baby. © 12Mar65 (in notice:

1964); LP31035.

Big man, big target. © 20Nov64;

LP29951.

Blind man's bluff. © 18Feb63

(in notice: 1962); LP25078.

Blood money. © 15Jan68; LP36663.

Blue heaven. © 21Sep64; LP29606.

The bounty hunter. © 26Oct65; LP32126.

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