Internationalism in Theory: A World-Historical Vision

Abstract

The previous chapter examined how the general idea of ‘Revolution’ developed in modern history. It charted how this conceptual development had itself an international character — in discursive, generative, and paradigmatic terms. The aim of this chapter is to look at the international dimension of the concept itself, to show how, within the idea of ‘Revolution’ and attendant ideas such as progress, an international component was repeatedly present. Such an international dimension was always present in modern thought, but largely implicit. One can, indeed, say of this international dimension what Robert Nisbet has said of the idea of ‘progress’ — that beyond being an idea it was something broader, a ‘context’, a set of assumptions that were so taken for granted that they were often partially and very generically articulated.¹ Many assumed that just as progress was comprehensive — in science as in economics, in arts as in politics — so it was to be accompanied by a transformation of the world: barriers between nations and peoples would come down; science and communications would bring peoples together; war, a relic of now outmoded social orders, would pass; the fraternity of mankind, increasingly racially fused and preferably all speaking a common language, was at hand. This was a core idea, a commanding myth, of liberalism as much as of revolutionaries. Yet it was no less effective a part of revolutionary thought for being so generic, and for being shared with those whose ideas, in other contexts, revolutionaries would have rejected.