 Anderson’s political thought is distinctive for his rejection of the state as the fundamental object of political investigation and reflection. This aspect of his thought aligns rather strongly with modern Nietzschean and anti-humanist political thought. For Anderson the social is not reducible to agreements among atomic individuals. In his anti-individualist statements, however, he seems to echo an idealist view of social movements portrayed, for example, by Bernard Bosanquet who similarly decried the “repellent isolation” of atomist individualism. Culture and human achievement depend upon the capacity of human beings to engage in activities that take them outside themselves. Apart from these struggles with nature or within broad social movements, a person collapses into non-entity (Bosanquet 1899, pp. xxxiii ff.). 