Revolution: An Intellectual History

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This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of dialectical images: Marxs locomotives of history, Alexandra Kollontais sexually liberated bodies, Lenins mummified body, Auguste Blanquis barricades and red flags, the Paris Communes demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectualsfrom Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos Carlos Maritegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the Southas outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.

Reviews

Offering one of the most unsentimental yet non-reactionary meditations on revolution ever written, Traverso comes not to bury or praise the earthly drive to "take heaven by storm" but to understand it anew. Enriched by a lifelong study of historiography and politics, immense historical knowledge, theoretical polyamory, and a compelling artistic eye, this book also features splendid humility in exploring its slippery, complex and important subject. For those who long to craft a different order of things, Traverso's account is essential. For those who want to ponder what spirits revolutions or makes shipwrecks of them, this rare work roams the globe and the library, reflecting on Phnom Penh and Havana, not only Paris and Moscow, and thinking with Weber, Arendt, Fanon and Constant, not only Trotsky, Lenin and Mao. -- Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
This brilliant essay on the images of revolutions is a unique experiment, which has no equivalent in the vast historiographic literature on the subject. Inspired by Marx, Trotsky ,and Walter Benjamin, it is built as a montage of dialectical images, which function as lamps that illuminate the past. Enzo Traverso, probably the most gifted historian of his generation, does not hide his hostility to what he calls the "octopus of universal commodity reification"; without idealizing the past revolutions , he wants to preserve, in this fascinating and heterodox piece of research, the memory of historical experience. Quoting Benjamin: we cannot ignore the claim that the past has on us. * Michael Lwy *
A perfect partnering of author and subject! Enzo Traverso is the Marxist scholar most gifted to present us with a masterfully articulated appraisal of the perplexing presence of concepts and images of revolutions in the political imagination. His astonishing scholarly expertise is on display with stunning elegance to reveal a rich tapestry of material from the 19th and 20th centuries, along with a multitude of riveting actors and thinkers. Revolution is a monumental advance in its sophisticated and supple interpretations; it is also a virtuoso performance in the art of refreshingly precise, rigorously compact exposition, complemented by a novelist's flair for narrative power and dramatic verve. -- Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it's hard to know how we did without it. -- China Miville
Vividly written, full of sparkling details and sharp theoretical insights... -- Hannah Proctor * Radical Philosophy *
Something for every revolutionary. * Socialist Worker *

Author Bio

Enzo Traverso is Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of several of books, including Fire and Blood, Left-Wing Melancholia, and The New Faces of Fascism, which have been translated into a dozen of languages. He regularly writes for Jacobin and Il Manifesto.