Revolution : an intellectual history / Enzo Traverso.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Traverso, Enzo, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Revolutions--History--19th century.

Revolutions.

Revolutions--History--20th century.

History.

Revolutions--Philosophy.

Intellectuals--Political activity.

Intellectuals.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xvi, 464 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Verso, 2021.

Summary:

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. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 The Locomotives of History

The Railway Age

Secularization and Temporalization

Conceptualizing Revolution

Energy and Labour Power

`Maquinas Locos'

Armoured Trains

The End of a Myth

ch. 2 Revolutionary Bodies

Insurgent Bodies

Animalized Bodies

The People's Two Bodies

Sovereign Body

Immortality

Regeneration

Liberated Bodies

Productive Bodies

ch. 3 Concepts, Symbols, Realms of Memory

Fixing a Paradigm

Counterrevolution

Katechon

Iconoclasm

Symbols

Thought-Images: `Man at the Crossroads'

ch. 4 The Revolutionary Intellectual, 1848

1945

Historical Boundaries

National Contexts

Physiognomies

Bohemians and Declasses

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

ch. 5 Between Freedom and Liberation

Genealogies

Representations

Ontology

Foucault, Arendt and Fanon

Freedom, Bread and Roses

Liberation of Time

Benjamin's Messianic Time

ch. 6 Historicizing Communism

Periodization

Faces of Communism

Revolution

Regime

Anticolonialism

Social-Democratic Communism

The Heteronyms of Ilio Barontini.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1839763337

9781839763335

OCLC:

1233031364