Revolution An Intellectual History

by Traverso, Enzo

• ISBN13: 9781839763595
• ISBN10: 1839763590
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781839763618
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-04-30
• Publisher: Verso
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

"Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it."
–China Miéville, author of October

A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth century's age of revolutions

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's 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 intellectuals--from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South--as 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.

Author Biography

Enzo Traverso was born in Italy and taught history and political theory in France for almost twenty years. Since 2013, is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of several of books, including Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (2016), Left-Wing Melancholia (2017), and The New Faces of Fascism (2019), which have been translated into a dozen of languages. He regularly writes for Jacobin in the US, Il Manifesto in Italy, and other French and Spanish-language magazines. He has also taught as visiting professor in several countries of continental Europe and Latin America.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction


Chapter 1. The Locomotives of History
The Railway Age
Secularization and Temporalization
Conceptualizing Revolution
Energy and Labour Power
‘Máquinas Locas’
Armoured Trains
The End of a Myth


Chapter 2. Revolutionary Bodies
Insurgent Bodies
Animalized Bodies
The People’s Two Bodies
Sovereign Body
Immortality
Regeneration
Liberated Bodies
Productive Bodies


Chapter 3. Concepts, Symbols, Realms of Memory
Fixing a Paradigm
Counterrevolution
Katechon
Iconoclasm
Symbols
Thought-Images: ‘Man at the Crossroads’


Chapter 4. The Revolutionary Intellectual, 1848–1945
Historical Boundaries
National Contexts
Physiognomies
Bohemians and Déclassés
Maps I: West
Maps II: Colonial World
Conscious Pariahs
Conservative Anti-Intellectualism
‘Fellow Travellers’
Thomas Mann’s Allegories
Comintern Intellectuals
Conclusion: An Ideal-Type
Tables


Chapter 5. Between Freedom and Liberation
Genealogies
Representations
Ontology
Foucault, Arendt and Fanon
Freedom, Bread and Roses
Liberation of Time
Benjamin’s Messianic Time


Chapter 6. Historicizing Communism
Periodization
Faces of Communism
Revolution
Regime
Anticolonialism
Social-Democratic Communism
The Heteronyms of Ilio Barontini
Epilogue


Illustration Credits
Index