Abstract
In July 1989, as tourists poured into Paris for the celebration of the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille, Parisians were to be observed setting off in droves for their country retreats. As had become increasingly clear in the preceding months, the French were disenchanted with 1789, bored with the very idea of revolution.l In this they reflected the scholarly consensus that had built up steadily over the post-1968 years in the West. It was shown in the triumph of the ‘revisionist’ historiography of the French Revolution, illustrated in the characteristically engaging — and engagé — remark of Richard Cobb that ‘the French Revolution should never have happened, possibly never did happen, and in any case had no effect one way or the other on most people’s lives’.2 It was shown in the general disparagement of revolution as a mode of transformation, the view that if revolutions had indeed once been, as Marx put it, the locomotives of history, ‘in our industrial (or “post-industrial”) age, the locomotive has become an outdated means of historical transport’.3
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Notes and References
On the distinctly cool French response to the bicentenary, see E. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise (London, 1990), pp. ix–x, 96–113.
R. Lowenthal, ‘The “Missing Revolution” of Our Times: Reflections on New Post-Marxist Fundamentals of Social Change’, Encounter, June (1981), p. 18.
A. Camus, ‘Neither Victim nor Executioner’ (1946), in K. Kumar (ed.), Revolution: the Theory and Practice of a European Idea (London, 1971), pp. 302–3.
Quincy Wright, quoted in S. Neumann, ‘The International Civil War’, World Politics, 1 (1949), p. 334, note 2.
On the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the model for Third World revolutions, see T. H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution. 1900–1930, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1971).
On the play of international forces, specifically Portugal’s NATO allies, in the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, see M. Kayman, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Portugal (London, 1987).
F. Engels, ‘Introduction’ (1895) to K. Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France 1848–50’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 118–38.
Though the ingenious use of laptop computers and the Internet by some contemporary insurgents, such as the reborn Zapatistas of southern Mexico and the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, should be noted. For Castro’s remark, see R. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Trans. B. Ortiz (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 67.
See e.g. E. Hermassi, ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18 (1976), pp. 211–35.
See J. H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (London, 1980);
also M. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago, 1976), Part One.
K. Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in T. B. Bottomore (trans. and ed.), Karl Marx: Early Writings (London, 1963), p. 55.
Lenin is quoted by C. B. A. Behrens, ‘The Spirit of the Terror’, New York Review of Books, 27 February 1969.
See especially L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936) (London, 1967), pp. 86–114.
The debates on these issues among Russian intellectuals in the early years of the revolution are discussed in J. Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–22 (New York, 1986).
For these developments, see the characteristically incisive discussion in P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976).
For Mao’s attempt to ‘transform a whole culture’ through the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, and the relevance of this attempt to Western radicals, see the sympathetic account by R. M. Pfeffer, ‘The Pursuit of Purity: Mao’s Cultural Revolution’, in B. Mazlish, A. D. Kaledin and D. B. Ralston (eds), Revolution: a Reader (New York, 1971), pp. 338–57.
A. Huxley, ‘Foreword’ (1946) to Brave New World (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 10.
R. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. J. Fullerton and P. Sieveking (London, 1973), p. 11.
The best account of the thinking behind the May events is A. Willener, The Action-image of Society: On Cultural Politicization, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1970);
the most balanced account of the events themselves is B. E. Brown, Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt (Morristown, NJ, 1974).
It is probably true to say that all serious conceptions of revolution have been ‘totalistic’, in the general sense that — at least since the French Revolution of 1789 — they have aimed at the creation of a new species of humanity in a totally transformed social environment. For the intellectual sources of such a conception of revolution, see B. Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
See T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–51 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 9–30.
See J. Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 31–48;
S. White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven and London, 1988).
F. Halliday, ‘Revolution in the Third World: 1945 and After’, in E. E. Rice (ed.), Revolution and Counter Revolution (Oxford, 1991), p. 136.
F. Castro, History Will Absolve Me (London, 1968), pp. 95ff.
J-P. Sartre, ‘Preface’ to F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 18–19.
For Fanon’s influence among Third World liberation theorists, see E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), pp. 322–36.
See D. Caute, Fanon (London, 1970), p. 94.
On the role of the middle stratum of the peasantry in Third World revolutions, see especially E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969), pp. 276–302.
For some examples see H. Munson, Jr, Islam and Revolution in the Middle East (New Haven and London, 1988).
See, for interesting discussions of some of these examples, E. Weber, ‘Revolution? Counter-Revolution? What Revolution?’, in W. Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: a Reader’s Guide (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 488–531;
R. H. Dir, ‘The Varieties of Revolution’, Comparative Politics, 15 (1983), pp. 281–93;
E. K. Trimberger, Revolution From Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt and Peru (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978).
P. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, trans. N. F. Dryhurst (London, 1909), p. 582.
F. Halliday, ‘The Ends of the Cold War’, New Left Review, 180 (1990), p. 5.
J. Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Revolutions of Recuperation and the Need for New Thinking’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall: the Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London, 1991), p. 27.
F. Furet, ‘From 1789 to 1917 to 1989: Looking Backward at Revolutionary Traditions’, Encounter, September (1990), p. 5.
Quoted in R. Darnton, ‘Runes of the New Revolutions’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, September 6 (1991), p. 17.
B. Geremek, ‘Between Hope and Despair’, Daedalus, Winter (1990), p. 99.
See especially M. Frankland, The Patriots’ Revolution (Chicago, 1992), pp. 318–33.
See, for example, T. Garton Ash, We, the People: the Revolution of ‘89 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 14.
See, for example, Octavio Pat, ‘Twilight of Revolution’, in I. Howe (ed.), Twenty-Five Years of Dissent (New York and London, 1979), pp. 314–25.
A. Camus, The Rebel, trans. A. Bower (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 29.
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© 2001 Krishan Kumar
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Kumar, K. (2001). The Revolutionary Idea in the Twentieth-Century World. In: Donald, M., Rees, T. (eds) Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4026-1_10
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