Benedict Anderson

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper" disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966 which led to his expulsion from that country. He was the elder brother of historian Perry Anderson.

Anderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an Irish and Anglo-Irish father and English mother. His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson, was an official with Chinese Maritime Customs. The family are descendants of the Anderson family of Ardbrake, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who settled in Ireland in the early 1700s. His mother's family is a descendant from Lancaster.

Anderson's maternal grandfather Trevor Bigham was the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1914 to 1931. One of Anderson's grandmothers, Lady Frances O'Gorman, belonged to the Gaelic Mac Gormáin clan of County Clare and was the daughter of the Irish Home Rule MP Major Purcell O'Gorman. Major O'Gorman was the son of Nicholas Purcell O'Gorman who had been involved with the Republican Society of United Irishmen during the 1798 Rising, later becoming Secretary of the Catholic Association in the 1820s. Anderson also had roots in County Waterford through his O'Gorman side. Benedict Anderson took his middle names from the cousin of Major Purcell O'Gorman, Richard O'Gorman, who was one of the leaders of the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848.

Anderson's family moved to California in 1941 to avoid the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War and then to Ireland in 1945. He studied at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship and went on to attend King's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he became an anti-imperialist during the Suez Crisis, which influenced his later work as a Marxist and anti-colonialist thinker.

Anderson earned a classics degree from Cambridge in 1957 before attending Cornell University, where he concentrated on Indonesia as a research interest and received his Ph.D. in government studies in 1967. His doctoral advisor at Cornell was Southeast Asian scholar George Kahin.

The violence following the September 1965 coup attempt that led to Suharto taking power in Indonesia disillusioned Anderson, who wrote that it "felt like discovering that a loved one is a murderer". Therefore, while Anderson was still a graduate student at Cornell, he anonymously co-wrote the "Cornell Paper" with Ruth T. McVey that debunked the official Indonesian government's accounts of the abortive coup of the 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–66. The "Cornell Paper" was widely disseminated by Indonesian dissidents. One of two foreign witnesses at the show trial of Communist Party of Indonesia general secretary Sudisman in 1971, Anderson published a translated version of the latter's unsuccessful testimony. As a result of his actions, Anderson was in 1972 expelled from Indonesia and banned from reentering, a restriction that lasted until 1998 when Suharto resigned to be replaced by B. J. Habibie as president.

Anderson was fluent in many languages including Indonesian, Javanese, Thai and Tagalog, as well as the major European languages. After the American experience in the Vietnam War and the subsequent wars between Communist nations such as the Cambodian–Vietnamese War and the Sino-Vietnamese War, he began studying the origins of nationalism while continuing his previous work on the relationship between language and power.

Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, in which he described the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries. He defined a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. In 1998, Anderson's return trip to Indonesia was sponsored by the Indonesian publication Tempo, and he gave a public speech in which he criticized the Indonesia opposition for "its timidity and historical amnesia—especially with regard to the massacres of 1965–1966".