John Anderson (philosopher) - Social Theory

Social Theory

After arriving in Sydney in 1927 he associated with the Communist Party of Australia and contributed to their journals, sometimes under a nom de plume but, by about 1932 he began to believe that communism under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union was a dictatorship with no room for workers' control or participation. He then became aligned with the Trotskyist movement for a period of time. But "e could not put up any longer with dialectical materialism or with the servile state which he saw was being imposed by the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat".

At a time when Australia had few genuinely first-rate intellectuals, Anderson's influence in Sydney intellectual life was enormous. The failure of the Communist Party to build a significant influence at Sydney University during the 1930s and 1940s, compared with the Party's greater success at Melbourne University, is often attributed to the influence of "Andersonian individualism" among Sydney students. Anderson later abandoned authoritarian forms of socialism and became what would today be called a libertarian and pluralist—an opponent of all forms of authoritarianism. Sometimes he described himself as an anarchist but, after the 1930s, he gave up his earlier political utopianism.