The Blanqui Reader

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Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786635011
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (866 download)

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Book Synopsis The Blanqui Reader by : Louis Auguste Blanqui

Download or read book The Blanqui Reader written by Louis Auguste Blanqui and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.

The Blanqui Reader

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Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786635038
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (866 download)

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Book Synopsis The Blanqui Reader by : Louis Auguste Blanqui

Download or read book The Blanqui Reader written by Louis Auguste Blanqui and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.

Communist Insurgent

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Author :
Publisher : Haymarket Books
ISBN 13 : 1608468887
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Communist Insurgent by : Doug Enaa Greene

Download or read book Communist Insurgent written by Doug Enaa Greene and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the revolutionary tradition, the name of Louis Blanqui is either remembered with derision or as a noble failure. Yet during his lifetime, Blanqui was a towering figure of revolutionary courage and commitment as he organized nearly a half-dozen failed revolutionary conspiracies and spent half of his life in jail. This is Blanqui's story.

Eternity by the Stars

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780983697299
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (972 download)

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Book Synopsis Eternity by the Stars by : Louis-Auguste Blanqui

Download or read book Eternity by the Stars written by Louis-Auguste Blanqui and published by . This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350076813
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment by : Philippe Le Goff

Download or read book Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment written by Philippe Le Goff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350076821
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment by : Philippe Le Goff

Download or read book Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment written by Philippe Le Goff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.

Politically Red

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262047802
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Politically Red by : Eduardo Cadava

Download or read book Politically Red written by Eduardo Cadava and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

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Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788739558
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (887 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century by : Erik Olin Wright

Download or read book How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century written by Erik Olin Wright and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.

Revolution

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Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1839763590
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (397 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution by : Enzo Traverso

Download or read book Revolution written by Enzo Traverso and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350180440
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy by : Duy Lap Nguyen

Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy written by Duy Lap Nguyen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

Fire Alarm

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Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1784786438
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (847 download)

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Book Synopsis Fire Alarm by : Michael Lowy

Download or read book Fire Alarm written by Michael Lowy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.

A Hypocritical Reader

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781999924515
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (245 download)

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Book Synopsis A Hypocritical Reader by : Rosie Snajdr

Download or read book A Hypocritical Reader written by Rosie Snajdr and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Splicing the Choose Your Own Adventure format, sci-fi, metafiction, absurdism and social critique, Rosie Snajdr A Hypocritical Reader is experimental fiction at its most animated and innovative. This is the future literature we need but haven't seen. You read it here first." - Isabel Waidner "A warping, wending, distending, distressing, flaming lightening strike of a book--Snajdr summons forces to be reckoned with." -Eley Williams A Hypocritical Reader is your emancipation, reader. Want to lose yourself in your favourite genre? This book is for you. Want to question the influence of modernist experimentalism on the short story form? This book is also for you. Want to explore that unspeakable Barthesian dictum? Okay? You want to psychoanalyse the (female) writer? Hmmm. Follow the book's emotional arc, or pick your own path by choosing which pages to turn to. Hell, you can even clip out the individual words and collage your way into exciting new worlds. Just don't tell the author. This book is Calvino, with an attitude.

The Virtues of Violence

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190058412
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis The Virtues of Violence by : Kevin Duong

Download or read book The Virtues of Violence written by Kevin Duong and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virtues of Violence studies a pervasive but misunderstood image of violence in modern French thought: popular violence as social regeneration. It argues that this vision of violence was not a niche phenomenon, but central to the momentous developments of modern French politics. It appealed to thinkers across the spectrum because it answered fundamental dilemmas at the heart of democratization. Understanding its pervasive appeal, Duong argues, reveals howdemocracy was never simply a struggle for justice or a new legal regime, but also liberating visions of the social bond.

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351110497
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (511 download)

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Book Synopsis The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by : David Ohana

Download or read book The Intellectual Origins of Modernity written by David Ohana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

The Democratic Sublime

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190658150
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis The Democratic Sublime by : Jason Frank

Download or read book The Democratic Sublime written by Jason Frank and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration"--

The Paris Commune of 1871

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Author :
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1447486625
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (474 download)

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Book Synopsis The Paris Commune of 1871 by : Frank Jellinek

Download or read book The Paris Commune of 1871 written by Frank Jellinek and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in the 1930s this is a fascinating examination, using documents and eye-witness accounts, of the famous Paris Commune. Contents include: The End of An Empire; The Government of National Defence; The National Assembly; The Eighteenth of March; The Government of Monsieur Assi; The Commune War; Cluseret Rossel Delescluze; Last Days of the Commune; The Battle of Paris; The End The Restoration of Order; The Commune At Work. Many of these earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Fire in the Minds of Men

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Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 0765804719
Total Pages : 694 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (658 download)

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Book Synopsis Fire in the Minds of Men by : James H. Billington

Download or read book Fire in the Minds of Men written by James H. Billington and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power. Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.