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Tocqueville in His Time

Cheryl B. Welch

in De Tocqueville

This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own ... More

This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own environment and its political relevance. As a theorist and a writer with a cause, Tocqueville aimed to write books that would inspire leaders to direct French political culture along new paths. However, his solitary manner of argument disregarded what is considered the norm of his own time. The chapter places him in the changing patterns of his time: the search for a social science that would save the French from the results of their disastrous experiments in revolutionary politics, the rise of historical consciousness, and the widespread desire to understand a spiritualized version of human reason.Less

Revolution, Jews, and the Streets of Warsaw: Between Secret Cells and Popular Politics

in Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry

This chapter explores the social structure and political culture of different revolutionary organizations that thrived in Warsaw. These organizations include the Polish Socialist Party (PPS); the ... More

This chapter explores the social structure and political culture of different revolutionary organizations that thrived in Warsaw. These organizations include the Polish Socialist Party (PPS); the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL); the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (the Bund). The chapter examines the different attempts by the Bund, the PPS, and other parties to bridge the transition from illegal, clandestine organizations to mass-based political parties. Finally, the chapter discusses the different factors that contributed to the decline of revolutionary politics in late 1906 and 1907.Less

From the Second American Revolution to the First International and Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War

Andrew Zimmerman

in The World the Civil War Made

This chapter examines how the American Civil War influenced Karl Marx and changed the meaning of revolution, and particularly the American Revolution of 1861–1877. Through their observations and ... More

This chapter examines how the American Civil War influenced Karl Marx and changed the meaning of revolution, and particularly the American Revolution of 1861–1877. Through their observations and analyses of the Civil War, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed a recognizably Marxist understanding of revolutionary politics and the Marxism of the three volumes of Capital. Marx's observations of the American struggle over slavery contributed to his theory of surplus value, which he developed for the International Workingmen's Association (First International). This chapter first considers Marx's views about Horace Greeley's American socialism and Henry Carey's harmony of interests doctrine before exploring how the Civil War and Marxism developed in tandem as components of a dynamic transnational set of revolutionary movements. It then links Marxist interpretation of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution to the Popular Front of 1934–1939 and the communist struggle against fascism.Less

The Disputed Grievability of Sally Zahran

Walter Armbrust

in Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution

This chapter details how the disputed grievability of Sally Zahran proved to be a microcosm of the major fault line within the revolutionary camp, particularly between the Muslim Brotherhood in ... More

This chapter details how the disputed grievability of Sally Zahran proved to be a microcosm of the major fault line within the revolutionary camp, particularly between the Muslim Brotherhood in uneasy alliance with Islamists more generally, and the non-Islamist protestors, but also a fault line between men and women. The Left were undoubtedly the most articulate among the non-Islamist revolutionaries, or if not Left in a hard ideological sense, then at least those who saw themselves as inspired by the generation of the 1970s. To be sure, Sally Zahran's death also touched on the rage of the old regime against the revolution, evident through the undercurrent of suspicion that someone, or some political force, was trying to cover it up or negate its meaning. Whether or not old regime elements were trying to manipulate Ms. Zahran's death, the mere suspicion of manipulation was a foretaste of vicious pro-regime polemics against the revolution that had, at that juncture, receded into the background, but would again come roaring back in challenges to every single event that had been taken as a “fact” by the revolutionaries. Sally Zahran's death also highlighted the confluence of gender politics with revolutionary politics. The participation of women in protest became a constant target of provocateurs and propaganda.Less

On the Battlefield in Yemen—and in Egypt

Jesse Ferris

in Nasser's Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power

This chapter studies the interplay between the battlefield in Yemen and the domestic front in Egypt. It begins with a revisionist account of the Egyptian counterinsurgency campaign, based on Egyptian ... More

This chapter studies the interplay between the battlefield in Yemen and the domestic front in Egypt. It begins with a revisionist account of the Egyptian counterinsurgency campaign, based on Egyptian memoirs and captured documents, and then proceeds to discuss three Egyptian taboos—casualties, cost, and corruption—demonstrating that the pursuit of revolutionary politics abroad contributed significantly to the enfeeblement of the revolution at home. Although the direct cost of the war in lives and treasure may not have been as great as some have argued, the indirect costs of the war proved catastrophic for Egypt. Furthermore, a number of mutually reinforcing factors impressed upon Nasser the need to come to terms with Saudi Arabia in order to end the conflict in Yemen.Less

‘How the Face of Things has Changed!’

Marisa Linton

in Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

This chapter discusses the development of a new kind of political identity during the early months of the revolution. The revolution transformed the prevailing political culture from the enclosed and ... More

This chapter discusses the development of a new kind of political identity during the early months of the revolution. The revolution transformed the prevailing political culture from the enclosed and private world of old regime politics into the new and transparent culture of revolutionary politics. Men who wanted to succeed in this new culture carved out a space for themselves by identifying with the ideology of political virtue. Political leaders would not be answerable to the king, but to public opinion: they therefore submitted their identities to the judgement of the public, to the issue being whether or not their virtue was authentic. The ideology of virtue provided the necessary justification for turning rebels into revolutionaries. It gave revolutionaries moral legitimacy from which sprang their claim to authority.Less

Stirred and Shaken. From ‘the Art of the Possible’ to Emancipatory Politics

Benjamin Arditi

in Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation

This chapter explores the persistence of agitation in emancipatory politics. It deconstructs the familiar notion that politics is the ‘art of the possible’, an observation made by Bismarck in the ... More

This chapter explores the persistence of agitation in emancipatory politics. It deconstructs the familiar notion that politics is the ‘art of the possible’, an observation made by Bismarck in the nineteenth century and taken as a rallying cry by political realists everywhere. The purpose of this is to destabilize the frontiers between the possible and the impossible, and between revolutionary and non-revolutionary politics. Agitation functions as a symptom that prevents the closure of politics in a purely gentrified format or, alternatively, agitation in tandem with emancipatory politics brings out the ‘eventness’ of events and reveals the working of the impossible, something which is easily lost in the more banal realist coding of politics as ‘the art of the possible’.Less

Scripting a Massacre

Walter Armbrust

in Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution

This chapter explains that it is not entirely wrong to partially attribute the coup, the massacre, and the certainty of those who backed these actions to the notion that revolutionary politics left ... More

This chapter explains that it is not entirely wrong to partially attribute the coup, the massacre, and the certainty of those who backed these actions to the notion that revolutionary politics left no alternative to violence, which manifested in the Rabʻa Massacre. But it is entirely wrong to neglect the long-standing discursive apparatus of excommunicating the Muslim Brotherhood from the national community that was operational during the period of revolutionary liminality and before it. Resorting to such concepts as imitation and crisis in no way obviates the need to delve into the production, meaning, and circulation of this discourse. If anything, the need to document and interpret the means of excommunication are heightened by one's attention to the form of crisis: the creation or occurrence of a threshold in the present; a plunge into liminality, and then a reckoning. The revolution created a series of thresholds, not just the initial threshold of the plunge into the void when the label “revolution” was applied to events on January 25, 2011. The Maspero Massacre was a threshold; the Battle of Muhammad Mahmud Street was too, and so were a number of other crisis events, including the Tamarrud demonstration against Muhammad Morsy in 2013 and the coup that followed shortly thereafter.Less

A Migrating Revolution: Mexican Political Organizers and Their Rejection of American Assimilation, 1920–1940

John H. Flores

in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History

This chapter examines immigrant political culture, the phenomenon of transnational social movements, and the formation of binational identities through a study of a Midwestern Mexican American ... More

This chapter examines immigrant political culture, the phenomenon of transnational social movements, and the formation of binational identities through a study of a Midwestern Mexican American immigrant community during the first half of the 20th century. It reveals the relationship between international and local politics by reconstructing the history of a segment of the Mexican population of Chicago, which is termed here the “Revolutionary Generation.” These political activists, whose ranks included men and women, white-collar workers, blue-collar laborers, and rural folk, formed liberal, conservative, and radical associations in Chicago. As diverse and divisive as these immigrants were, the chapter groups them together as a political generation because their collective ideology was shaped by their experience and understanding of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). After migrating to Chicago, they began adapting their particular understanding of revolutionary politics to the city with the aim of shaping the identities and influencing the political outlooks of Mexicans residing within the United States. Although various revolutionary factions eventually made their way to Chicago, the chapter focuses on the liberal and radical wings of this political generation and compares them as they evolved outside the borders of the Mexican nation-state.Less

Introduction

Saul Newman

in The Politics of Postanarchism

The central claim of anarchism – that life can be lived without a state, without centralised authority – has been an anathema not only to more mainstream understandings of politics, which bear the ... More

The central claim of anarchism – that life can be lived without a state, without centralised authority – has been an anathema not only to more mainstream understandings of politics, which bear the legacy of the sovereign tradition, but also to other radical and revolutionary forms of politics that see the state as a useful tool for transforming society. However, the rejection of political authority in the name of equality and liberty will always be part of the vocabulary of emancipation. The vision of anarchy that for the sovereign tradition is the ultimate nightmare, is the eternal aspiration of the radical tradition. This chapter notes that the central aim of this book is to affirm anarchism's place as the very horizon of radical politics.Less

Politics, Power and Violence in Agamben

John Lechte and Saul Newman

in Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness, Images, Violence

The task of this chapter is to clarify what we see as Agamben's understanding of politics, a question which is otherwise very opaque in his work. It is argued here that seeing Agamben as a political ... More

The task of this chapter is to clarify what we see as Agamben's understanding of politics, a question which is otherwise very opaque in his work. It is argued here that seeing Agamben as a political thinker – which we do — relies on being able to make a coherent distinction between politics and power. Here this distinction is explored through, first, a critical engagement with Chantal Mouffe's category of the political, and then with Antonio Negri's distinction between constituting and constituted power, neither of which, we argue, adequately accounts for Agamben's understanding of politics. We then turn to Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’, in which the project of transcending legal violence through the enigmatic notion of ‘divine violence’ takes us closer to Agamben's messianic and ‘anarchic’ way of thinking about politics beyond the clasps of law and sovereignty.Less

New Men for New Politics: The First Jacobin Leaders

Marisa Linton

in Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

This chapter discusses the emergence of the first Jacobin leaders. The co-founders and first leaders of the Jacobins — Barnave, the Lameths, and Duport — supported the constitutional monarchy, and ... More

This chapter discusses the emergence of the first Jacobin leaders. The co-founders and first leaders of the Jacobins — Barnave, the Lameths, and Duport — supported the constitutional monarchy, and manoeuvred tactically to become powerful figures in the new regime. In order to dominate the Jacobin Club and appeal to radical public opinion, they adopted the identity of men of virtue. They used this rhetoric to denounce their political opponents and personal rivals, above all Mirabeau, as men without virtue, and therefore secret enemies of the Revolution.Less

Epilogue: What Is to Be Done?

Camila Vergara

in Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic

This chapter discusses possible scenarios in which plebeian power could be institutionalized from the point of view of revolutionary politics. It argues that if the aim of revolution is liberty, ... More

This chapter discusses possible scenarios in which plebeian power could be institutionalized from the point of view of revolutionary politics. It argues that if the aim of revolution is liberty, which demands self-emancipatory political action, then revolutionary change could be achieved without the need of an outright revolution. It also refers to the redistribution of political power that could be done by revolutionary reformers within the boundaries of the Constitution or by the people themselves, claiming collective power and authority by disrupting the ordinary administration of power with their extraordinary political action in local assemblies. The chapter emphasizes that the only power with enough authority to lead structural reforms would be the one exerted by the assembled many themselves. It reviews the proposed blueprint for institutionalizing the power of the many that contributes to guiding prudent and able leaders, revolutionary vanguards, and commonsense people.Less

Revolutionaries: Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (A Thousand Dreams Like These, 2003, Dir. Sudhir Mishra)

Omar Ahmed

in Studying Indian Cinema

This chapter reflects on the revolutionary politics of Sudhir Mishra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (A Thousand Dreams Like These, 2003). Dismissed by audiences on its release, it has grown to become one ... More

This chapter reflects on the revolutionary politics of Sudhir Mishra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (A Thousand Dreams Like These, 2003). Dismissed by audiences on its release, it has grown to become one of the best-reviewed Indian films of its time. Set against the backdrop of the radical Naxalite movement in 1970s India, Mishra's evocative film is a rare example of contemporary political cinema influenced by the work of Shyam Benegal and Mrinal Sen. The chapter discusses a range of areas, including the origins and evolution of political cinema, with a particular focus on Bengali director Mrinal Sen. It also considers the positioning of the film within broader Naxalite cinema; an analysis of director Sudhir Mishra's career; and key ideologies contested amongst the central characters.Less