A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth century\u2019s age of revolutions<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of \u201cdialectical images\u201d: Marx\u2019s \u201clocomotives of history,\u201d Alexandra Kollontai\u2019s sexually liberated bodies, Lenin\u2019s mummified body, Auguste Blanqui\u2019s barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune\u2019s 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\u2014from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos\u00e9 Carlos Mari\u00e1tegui, C. L. R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South\u2014as 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOffering one of the most unsentimental yet non-reactionary meditations on revolution ever written, Traverso comes not to bury or praise the earthly drive to \u2018take heaven by storm\u2019 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 slip-pery, complex and important subject. For those who long to craft a different order of things, Traverso\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis 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 illumi-nate the past. Enzo Traverso, probably the most gifted historian of his generation, does not hide his hostility to what he calls the \u2018octopus of universal commodity reification\u2019; 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Michael L\u00f6wy<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA perfect partnering of author and subject! Enzo Traverso is the Marxist scholar most gifted to present us with a masterfully articulated ap-praisal 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\u2019s flair for narrative power and dramatic verve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBrilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it\u2019s hard to know how we did without it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 China Mi\u00e9ville<\/p>\n\n\n\n Verso \/ 480 pages \/ October 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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