Through this work and its companion volume, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson presents a Marxist history of Western political development that takes readers from the first stirrings of political consciousness in the classical world to the rise of absolutist monarchies in Europe and the birth of the modern epoch.
"Quite splendid ... A powerful and lucid intelligence."--Eric Hobsbawm, New Statesman
"The breath-taking range of conception and the architectural skill with which it has been executed make his work a formidable intellectual achievement."--New York Review of Books