History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism

by Mike Haynes (Editor), Daniel Bensaïd (Contributor), Geoff Eley (Contributor)

In History and Revolution , a group of respected historians confronts the conservative, revisionist trends in historical enquiry that have been dominant in the last twenty years. Ranging from an exploration of the English, French, and Russian revolutions and their treatment by revisionist historiography, to the debates and themes arising from attempts to downplay revolution’s role in history, History and Revolution also engages with several prominent revisionist historians, including Orlando Figes, Conrad Russell and Simon Schama.

This important book shows the inability of revisionism to explain why millions are moved to act in defence of political causes, and why specific political currents emerge, and is a significant reassertion of the concept of revolution in human development.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Mike Haynes teaches history at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the wake of the collapse of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1992, and the rise of neo-liberal, neo-conservative (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and other right wing revisions of moderrn history, the notion of the revolution as progress has come under increasing assault. A common version of the revision is that revolutionary France and Russia were aberrations in the smooth progress of liberal societies towards the logical end-of-history that is liberal, free-market capitalism; while another is that Fascism and Soviet-style communism were the same thing (the equation of Hitler and Stalin, for instance). This extremely good collection of essays sets out to revisit the the role of revolutions in European history, with 5 of the 9 essays evaluating right-wing revisions of the English, French and Russian revolutions, and four considering the historical roles of revolution in more theoretical terms. There is a distinctly Trotskyist flavour to some of the papers, but certainly not all.

I particularly appreciated Geoff Kennedy's revisiting of the English revolution not as a simple rise-of-bourgeois society/ emergence of a new class reading, but through an analysis of the fracturing of upper and middle classes as a result of the broader economic transition from feudalism to capitalism. Some of the papers are demanding, and Anglo-American readers may need to revisit some of those that work from more continental philosophical and epistemological positions: that this is so is a sign of the richness of the book and significance across a range of disciplines: history, sociology, policial science (although mainly history). Highly recommended.

[Marginalia Σημειώσεις στο περιθώριο]

Παρουσίαση του άρθρου του Ντανιέλ Μπενσαΐντ «Revolutions : Great and Still and Silent», που αποτελεί το καταληκτικό κεφάλαιο αυτής της έκδοσης, στο πρώτο μας τεύχος από την Έλσα Παπαγεωργίου:
https://marginalia.gr/arthro/i-istori...