Revolution: An Intellectual History
"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.
"1138650353"
Revolution: An Intellectual History
"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.
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Revolution: An Intellectual History

Revolution: An Intellectual History

by Enzo Traverso
Revolution: An Intellectual History

Revolution: An Intellectual History

by Enzo Traverso

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$9.99 

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Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781839763618
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication date: 10/19/2021
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 480
File size: 9 MB

About the Author

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 viii

List of illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Locomotives of History 32

The Railway Age 33

Secularization and Temporalization 41

Conceptualizing Revolution 46

Energy and Labour Power 50

'Máquinas Locas' 61

Armoured Trains 66

The End of a Myth 72

Chapter 2 Revolutionary Bodies 78

Insurgent Bodies 79

Animalized Bodies 85

The People's Two Bodies 92

Sovereign Body 102

Immortality 112

Regeneration 116

Liberated Bodies 128

Productive Bodies 140

Chapter 3 Concepts, Symbols, Realms of Memory 148

Fixing a Paradigm 148

Counterrevolution 161

Katechon 168

Iconoclasm 173

Symbols 184

Thought-Images: 'Man at the Crossroads' 204

Chapter 4 The Revolutionary Intellectual, 1848-1945 219

Historical Boundaries 219

National Contexts 225

Physiognomies 232

Bohemians and Déclassés 239

Maps I: West 253

Maps II: Colonial World 273

Conscious Pariahs 292

Conservative Anti-Intellectualism 296

'Fellow Travellers' 306

Thomas Mann's Allegories 312

Comintern Intellectuals 315

Conclusion: An Ideal-Type 323

Tables 327

Chapter 5 Between Freedom and Liberation 334

Genealogies 334

Representations 342

Ontology 351

Foucault, Arendt and Fanon 356

Freedom, Bread and Roses 371

Liberation of Time 376

Benjamin's Messianic Time 383

Chapter 6 Historicizing Communism 390

Periodization 390

Faces of Communism 396

Revolution 401

Regime 408

Anticolonialism 416

Social-Democratic Communism 433

The Heteronyms of Ilio Barontini 440

Epilogue 443

Illustration Credits 445

Index 448

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