Revolution: An Intellectual History

“Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it.”
-China Mi?ville, 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 Jos? Carlos Mari?tegui, 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: Enzo Traverso
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Verso
Published: 04/30/2024
Pages: 480
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 7.82h x 5.13w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781839763595
Language: English