Revolution

An Intellectual History

Look inside
"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.
"Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it."
—China Miéville

"A monumental achievement, and should be a touchstone for today’s left. We can’t build a future beyond capitalism without coming to terms with the challenging history it confronts."
—Neil Vallelly, Jacobin

"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

"Vividly written, full of sparkling details and sharp theoretical insights..."
—Hannah Proctor, Radical Philosophy

"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

"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 Löwy

"Something for every revolutionary."
Socialist Worker
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.
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

About

"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.

Reviews

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

"A monumental achievement, and should be a touchstone for today’s left. We can’t build a future beyond capitalism without coming to terms with the challenging history it confronts."
—Neil Vallelly, Jacobin

"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

"Vividly written, full of sparkling details and sharp theoretical insights..."
—Hannah Proctor, Radical Philosophy

"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

"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 Löwy

"Something for every revolutionary."
Socialist Worker

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
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