Fredy Perlman
Czech-born American author and activist (1934–1985)
Fredy Perlman (1934–1985) was an American author, translator, publisher, and activist. His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination (and domination generally) through a poetic investigation of the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan. He also translated the first English version of The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1970.
Early life
Perlman was born August 20, 1934, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to Henry and Martha Perlman. His family immigrated first to Cochabamba, Bolivia to escape the Holocaust and later to the United States. Perlman received a master's degree from Columbia University and a PhD from University of Belgrade. He married Lorraine Nybakken in January 1958.
Career
His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan (1983) rewrites the history of humanity as a struggle of free people resisting being turned into "zeks" (a Soviet term for forced labour that Perlman borrowed from The Gulag Archipelago) by Leviathans (a term used by Thomas Hobbes for the sovereign nation-state). The book influenced the anarcho-primitivist author John Zerzan. Philosopher John P. Clark states that Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fredy Perlman” is czech-born American author and activist (1934–1985). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fredy, Perlman and Czech-born, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2458048. VIAF identifies the subject as 77692761. The Library of Congress control number is n83152861. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1985, 1970 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fredy Perlman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.