Anderson bore the brunt of the disapproval of E. P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left.
While Anderson faced many attacks in his native Britain for favouring continental European philosophers over British thinkers, he did not spare Western European Marxists from criticism; see his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976).