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Beschreibung

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.

This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.

This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.

Über den Autor
Keith M. Baker is Professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University. His books include What's Left of Enlightenment? and Inventing the French Revolution.

Dan Edelstein is Professor of French and History at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, which won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Contents and Abstracts
1Did the English Have a Script for Revolution in the Seventeenth Century?
chapter abstract

This chapter examines the various resonances the word revolution held in seventeenth-century England. When used in a political context, it rarely meant turning full cycle or returning to the status quo ante, but rather a sudden and dramatic change, a turning quite around, or a regime change. The English commonly used the term revolution (or its plural revolutions) to refer to the political and religious upheavals of the period, and although revolutions did not necessarily have to involve fundamental or radical change, they could do, and by the end of the century there had emerged the notion that these revolutions had been beneficial and desirable because they had delivered England (and Scotland and Ireland) from tyranny. England's script for revolution was linked to the question of how to bring about the desired regime change and thus whether it was possible to resist a monarchy that was deemed absolute.

2God's Revolutions: England, Europe, and the Concept of Revolution in the mid-Seventeenth Century
chapter abstract

This chapter explores the early use of the word and concept of "revolution" as deployed during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. The politicized usage of the word was chiefly adapted from continental sources, reflecting both intensifying parallel political conflicts in several parts of Europe, and increasingly efficient networks for the transnational dissemination of news and information. After the regicide in 1649, the term "revolution" appeared with growing frequency in England, as contemporaries groped for a new vocabulary to describe the churning constitutional instability and change that plagued their polity. Although used in several ways, the word was appropriated with particular enthusiasm by radical puritan republicans, who often invoked it to describe God's providential disruption of established forms and constitutional order.

3Every Great Revolution is a Civil War
chapter abstract

The conceptual categories of 'revolution' and 'civil war' are as contested as they are porous. This essay argues that the modern 'script' of revolution was not as original as some scholars have claimed. As a narrative of the violent and transformative reorganization of sovereignty, the revolutionary script developed after 1789 had morphological and genealogical similarities to an earlier and much more enduring script of political change: the Roman script of civil war. The essay traces the various narratives derived in classical and post-classical texts from the Roman experience of civil war and shows how Roman conceptions of civil war shaped later narratives of revolution. It concludes that civil war was the original genus of which revolution was only a late-evolving species.

4Revolutionizing Revolution
chapter abstract

This chapter draws on digitized databases and other materials to investigate meanings of the term "revolution" and its cognates in English, American, and French imprints in the century between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. It traces a shift from the notion of revolution as a fact, an expression of change and vicissitude generally recognized ex post facto, to a conception of revolution as a collective political act oriented toward the future. It points to the role of Enlightenment thinking in the revalorization of revolution as long term transformation and, more particularly, to the significance of Raynal'sRévolution de l'Amériquein narrativizing revolution as immediate and ongoing political action. It concludes by examining the emergence of a revolutionary script in the French Revolution.

5Constitutionalism: The Happiest Revolutionary Script
chapter abstract

Two "stories" provide the essential script for the major aspects of the American Revolution. One script is a story of colonial resistance to imperial policies. Here the Americans followed familiar arguments about the careful yet calculated ways in which "a long train of abuses" could lead an unjustly governed people to assert their rights, including a right to revolution, against the threat of tyranny. The second story is about the remarkable way in which Americans worked out the central problems of constitution making in the decade after independence. This story provides an ideal happy ending to the complicated dynamics of revolution, by solving problems few other revolutions have mastered.

6From Constitutional to Permanent Revolution: 1649 and 1793
chapter abstract

In early-modern times, the telos of revolution was generally perceived as the ratification of a new constitution. Constitutions provided the foundation for the political authority of the new regime; they derived their own legitimacy as expressions of popular sovereignty. This revolutionary theory was first enacted during the English Civil War; it culminated with the American Revolution. The French Revolution started off during this same path, but in the years 1792-94, a new model of revolution emerged. In a dizzying circuit, it made "revolution" the new source of authority for the revolution, and eschewed constitutionalism for what later theorists (starting with Marx) would refer to as the "permanence" of revolution. This new, future-oriented model could legitimate actions undertaken by the State, rather than just a revolutionary people.

7Scripting the French Revolution, Inventing the Terror: Marat's Assassination and Its Interpretations
chapter abstract

Despite the deconstruction since the 1960s of many of its dominant historiographical discourses, the French Revolution remains hostage to a script that distinguishes it from contemporary European and American sister revolutions: the myth of the Terror, according to which the Jacobins instituted a centralized dictatorship in Paris, in the hands of Robespierre, and exercised a systematic violence against its opponents. Marat's assassination is a prime example of how pivotal events of the Revolution were immediately integrated into systems of representation and contributed to the construction of the most enduring scripts. By radicalizing and opposing in a Manichean manner the positions of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary actors, the numerous discourses and emotions surrounding the violent death of l'Ami du peuple thereby participated in forging the simplifying myth of the Terror, producing a distorted image of France, split between a dictatorship of public safety, external war, and civil war.

8The Antislavery Script: Haiti's Place in the Narrative of Atlantic Revolution
chapter abstract

The notion that free people of color and slaves in Saint-Domingue might have been acting out a drama first performed elsewhere has a long and troubling history. This essay considers the two most oft-mentioned precedents (the American and French revolutions) and finds that neither explains the manner of Haiti's path out of the Old Regime. Revolutionary-era influences must be balanced against prior experiences and understandings of slavery and racial subordination, including those embodied in colonial law. Such an approach helps to clarify the ambiguities of emancipation as it ultimately took form in Haiti, where liberation from slavery was obscured by the imperatives of independence from France. The very nations that sought to contain Haiti's example would later struggle with their own variations on this Haitian theme.

9Scripting the German Revolution: Marx and 1848
chapter abstract

TheCommunist Manifestowas treated by generations of Marxists as an example of scientific class analysis and materialist conception of history. When it was written, it was intended as a set of formulations addressed to a radical German readership. This essay sets theManifestoin the context of previous attempts to characterise the situation of Germany after the French Revolution. Despite the transformative importance of the achievements of German philosophy in the preceding eighty years, the political reality of Germany was disappointing: a docile and obedient people unaffected by the 1830 revolutions in neighbouring countries. After attempting to sketch a German route to revolution in 1844, Marx and his friends left Germany and adopted an abstract and universal discourse embracing the whole of the modern world. The resultingManifesto conjured up a largely imaginary conflict between fabricated entities and proved to be of little value in confronting events in 1848.

10Reading and Repeating the Revolutionary Script: Revolutionary Mimicry in Nineteenth-Century France
chapter abstract

"Reading and Repeating the Revolutionary Script: Revolutionary Mimicry in Nineteenth-Century France"examines the emergence, transformation, and cultural and political effects of the"discourse of revolutionary mimicry" in nineteenth-century France. First, a reading of Gustave Flaubert's 1869 novelL'Education sentimentaleillustrates how fears regarding the reading and repeating of revolutionary scripts existed not only the political, but also the literary sphere during the Second Empire (1852-1870). The chapter then considers the political effects of this discourse upon the Paris Commune of 1871 and how it directly influenced the day-to-day decisions and actions of the Communards. Together, these analyses strongly suggest that the post-1848 discourse of revolutionary mimicry served to de-legitimize unambiguously positive or romantic conceptions of "revolution," ultimately shaping how nineteenth-century revolutions were not only represented and judged, but also how they were actually performed.

11"Une Révolution...
Details
Erscheinungsjahr: 2015
Genre: Geschichte, Importe
Rubrik: Geisteswissenschaften
Medium: Taschenbuch
Inhalt: Einband - flex.(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780804796163
ISBN-10: 0804796165
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor: Keith Michael Baker
Dan Edelstein
Redaktion: Edelstein, Dan
Baker, Keith Michael
Auflage: New
Hersteller: Stanford University Press
Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Mare Nostrum Group B.V., Doelen 72, ?-4831 GR Breda, gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk
Maße: 228 x 154 x 30 mm
Von/Mit: Dan Edelstein (u. a.)
Erscheinungsdatum: 07.10.2015
Gewicht: 0,622 kg
Artikel-ID: 121097380

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