Historical Revisionism Research Articles

Yes, No, Maybe: A Position Statement from Midstream

Yes, No, Maybe:A Position Statement from Midstream Dorothy Chansky (bio) Midstream is supposed to be that place where you don't switch horses. If, however, you did boldly decide to dismount, you might find yourself struggling against the current, swimming to Cambodia—or drowning. Midstream is, I think, where those of us who teach theatre history find ourselves right now. The days of theaterwissenshaft are long gone, but full-blown globalism and / or theatre history as a kind of planet-wide performance genealogy remains a long way off. My title, then, is a lead-in to my own musings about this midstream moment. These musings are deeply personal yet inevitably professional as well. Yes, I still stand behind the response I wrote to Jody Enders's "Theatre History in the New Millennium" issue of Theatre Survey. To recap: while "positivism and playtexts" is the old-fashioned mixture that still drives most undergraduate theatre history courses, and while an inability to think about fissures, gaps, evidence, documentation, hegemony, rhetoric, theory, invisibility, othering, silencing, genealogies, the cultural situatedness of literature, and the self-centeredness of most claims to the "universal" collectively remains a gaping hole in the training of most theatre majors (not to mention the thinking of many theatre practitioners), the fact remains that even graduate programs aspiring to and achieving innovation in history depend on students coming in with the sort of "background" or "knowledge" delivered in the very package (positivism and playtexts) I problematized. Add to this the fact that the theatre history survey may be the only history course of any sort that a theatre major takes, and the problem becomes even worse.1 No, I am not persuaded that the Zarrilli et al. Theatre Histories: An Introduction (2006) is the silver bullet with the magic to carry us into a solidly interdisciplinary historiographic future. I admire much in the text and will probably test drive it in my own survey course next year, but in some ways it falls prey to the very problems with which I am concerned in this essay. (See my review elsewhere in this issue.) Certainly no single book can solve problems that go beyond the structuring of a single course (semester- or year-long). And maybe, as we try to think globally and introduce bits of theory to beginning undergraduates, there is an ahistorical component to the whole conversation that underpins my worries. Thinking across boundaries is crucial to responsible present-day citizenship. There is, however, a difference between boldly (or even carefully) crossing borders, and traversing territory while either willfully ignoring or remaining unaware of them. With temporal border crossings (one way to think about studying theatre history), it can be frighteningly easy to collapse the past into the present for a kind of easier access. After all, the dead can't talk back, and they may seem much more appealing if presented in the image of the present, which is to say with their differences minimized or retrofitted to be legible as a primitive precursor to the here and now.2 Let us assume, however, that we wish to avoid ahistoricism as we cross the stream. What do we lose as we revise? This is an especially pressing question at the moment of revision, since those doing the restructuring retain the "old" knowledge and skills they seek to reinterpret or retool. Those who come later will cease to know the terrain from which the revisionist historians drew. [End Page 21] Recall deconstruction—a heady proposition when "everyone" knew the literature and theories it was infecting like a virus from within. Now it's a trope, a style, a hegemonic tic, and the idea that an undergraduate has read Rousseau or Voltaire or even Shakespeare beyond the high points and character psychology is an iffy proposition at best. Deconstruction loses its sting when it is the default-setting optic. (Although this may be preferable to its losing its very lifeblood by being misunderstood as take-it-apart-and-rebuild-it-in-a-nontraditional-way—any old "nontraditional" way—while the "traditional" way defaults back to a blend of New Criticism and major themes. Bye-bye Derrida, the supplement, the slippery...

Communal Conflict in Viqueque and the ‘Charged’ History of '59

This paper seeks to demystify the failed uprising against the colonial administration in 1959 in remote south-eastern Portuguese Timor, an event which later was ably used as propaganda by Indonesian revisionist historians and pro-integration Timorese during the Indonesian occupation. Providing a historical context for the rebellion and a narrative of events based on archival sources and interviews with local informants, the paper shows how to this day memories of the rebellion are linked to ongoing rivalries in Viqueque District and Uatolari subdistrict in particular.

Postwar Liberalism as a Usable Past?: The Rewards and Risks of Historical Revisionism

If there ever was a liberal consensus, there is certainly no consensus today about what liberalism was, or is, or might become. Its left-wing critics believe that liberalism is a ruthless free-market ideology promoting the global hegemony of capitalism. Its right-wing critics believe precisely the opposite: that it's a creeping socialism hoping to curtail capitalism and destroy the free market. Left critics accuse liberalism of favoring a selfish individualism that denies the value of community. Right critics claim that it threatens individual rights with collectivist values and weakens communities with elitist conceptions of the public good. The sound and fury of these contradictory attacks on liberalism have succeeded until recently in shouting down more nuanced and balanced assessments. But as the Republican Party under George W. Bush steers the United States further and further to the right, a number of historians and political theorists have begun to view liberalism in a new light. Without espousing a nostalgic return to the good old days of liberalism's heyday, they argue that liberalism is not quite the demon its critics have made it out to be. They suggest that a more accurate understanding of liberalism might contribute to a vision of the national past that could prove useful today.

The colony The harrowing true story of the exiles of Molokai

The colony The harrowing true story of the exiles of Molokai

El revisionismo historiográfico, sobre el pasado reciente en España

In recent years, the increased interest shown in the work of historians has highlighted their social role in connection with the uses of history, as well as their responsibility and ethical commitment to their work. In particular, these conclusions may be drawn if we examine how historians have performed their social function in the current democratic system in Spain, specifically regarding their consideration of the recent past – the events of the Second Republic, the civil war and the long years of the Franco regime. The dispute over «historical revisionism» is a case in point.

R. M. ティトマスにおける戦争と福祉

Titmuss’s “War and Social Policy” (1955) is known as a masterpiece Warfare-Welfare thesis, a thesis that emphasises the close linkage between warfare and welfare. His thesis presents a historical view that the Second World War (WWII) promoted the development of universal social services, and that post-war social policies succeeded the legacy as unfinished business. However, revisionist historians qualified this view, some of them calling it a myth. This paper examines why Titmuss presented such a so-called myth in the contemporary political context of the National Health Service. The examination reveals that, on the one hand, Titmuss’s Warfare-Welfare thesis systematises the view that welfare, or social policy, had functioned as an essential elements of modern warfare. On the other hand, in the early 1950s’ controversial context, Titmuss’s argument signified a trade-off model of the Warfare-Welfare thesis. He regarded WWII as war to win a peace in which welfare would be given a higher priority. He also stressed the continuity between the Great War and post-war social policy, including the National Health Service. This view, in practice, functioned as the basis for antagonism against the rearmament of the early 1950s.

Back to the Future: Finding Internationalism, Cross-Ethnic Solidarity and Race-Class Analysis in Ethnic Movements of the Sixties/Seventies

That mythical era called a richly complicated decade that lasted roughly 20 years (1955-1975), remains a major touch stone of political and cultural debate in U.S. Despite constant attempts to trivialize and contain era, power of phrase the to evoke imagery and provoke controversy is little diminished. Trivialization, accomplished primarily by mainstream me dia, most often takes form of cliches like sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll (for cultural side) and adolescent rebellion (for po litical side). From point of view of social movement studies, perhaps most telling and devastating version of containment is phrase sixties-style demonstration, as if ac tivism is just a lifestyle choice comparable to a brand of jeans, or as though social move ments are forever hermetically sealed in one era of U.S. history. If this kind of reductive reading of six ties is largely product of conservatism and mainstream media tropes, two books under review suggest that left too has contributed significantly to reducing power and complexity of politico-cultur al history of sixties. George [Jorge] Mariscal and Laura Pulido, in quite different but largely complementary ways, argue that subsequent era of identity politics has distorted degree to which social move ments of sixties and early seventies (in case of these books) frequently sought and sometimes achieved international, cross racial, and cross-identity alliances. Both au thors engage in historical revisionism regard ing era misnamed the sixties, while keeping a clear eye on implications of that time for social movement work in present era. Mariscal (Professor of Literature and Di rector of Chicano/a-Latino/a Arts and Hu manities program at University of Califor nia, San Diego) has written previously on topic of Chicano/as and Viet Nam War. His experiences talking to Chicano/a veter Brown-Eyed Children of Sun: Lessons from Chicano Movement, 1965-1975, by George Mariscal. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 348 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0826338054.

Wolfgang Sievers and the Revisionism of Australian Migrant Art

This paper contends that in looking to Australian migrant art, such as that of the German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, we can better understand the significance and politics of revisionist discourse in this country and begin a much needed enquiry: to rethink the historiography of modernism in Australia. Drawing on the experience of migrant identity situated between the past and the present (and potential future) – the present now represented by the new Australian locality – the concept of the ‘inbetween’ and identity renegotiation that is implicit here are seen to condition and structure the local settler culture more so than the concept of provincialism. It is the dynamic of the ‘in-between’ (both cultural and psychological) with its postcolonial implications, with which Australian art historical revisionism is ultimately concerned, and it is through modernist migrant art that this condition can best be understood and articulated. 1 Over the past twenty years, Australian art historians have struggled to reassess the contribution of the post-Second World War migrant artists to Australian art history. Establishing an effectual framework for this project has been met with little to no success. The work of German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, for example, has been institutionalised under the safe banner of modernism, yet the problems posed by such definition and institutionalisation in terms of art production and reception in Australia have not been taken into account. Nor has the already viable revisionist framework, instrumental in re-modelling Australian art history over the past two decades, been considered in accounts of migrant art. An enquiry into how and to what degree emigre artists have responded to the presumably inherent provincial condition of Australian culture and society, and how their local artistic efforts can be considered in terms of revisionism, reveals crucial elements in the structure of the revisionist framework. The work of Wolfgang Sievers serves as the catalyst for this analysis, largely because his work illuminates the condition of ‘settler art’, the condition which embodies the dynamic that revisionism identifies as the driving force of Australian art practice. This article starts with the premise that the very name ‘Australia’ denotes a country defined by the settler–colonialists, either before or after settlement. In referring to the ‘settler’ culture, I am referring explicitly to the non-Indigenous element of Australian society, regardless of whether someone would consider her or himself a settler. The term relates less to a particular period in history, the nature of occupation or nationality than it does to a mentality: it is thus psychological and political, as the revisionist writing reveals. The terms ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ are in the present context interchangeable.

Remembering and Forgetting the War: <em>Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950–2006</em>

Ruling elites often make pernicious national myths for instrumental purposes, creating divergent historical memories of the same events in different countries. But they tend to exploit international history disputes only when they feel insecure domestically. Societal reactions to elite mythmaking, reflected in radicalized public opinion, can reinforce history disputes. During the 1950s–1970s, China avoided history disputes with Japan to focus on geostrategic interests. Only from the early 1980s did domestic political incentives motivate Beijing to attack Japanese historical memory and promote assertive nationalism through patriotic history propaganda, which radicalized Chinese popular views about Japan. Media highlighting of Japan's historical revisionism exacerbated societal demands to settle war accounts with Japan, while factional politics within the Chinese Communist Party made it difficult for the top leaders to compromise on the bilateral "history issue."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Forgotten Founder

The eminent political theorist Sheldon Wolin has recently argued that Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political (Wolin, 2001: 5). Tocqueville's indispensable account of Democracy in has been praised as at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on (Democracy, p. xvii). One can read about Tocqueville's ideas concerning the peculiarities and peccadilloes of American life and politics on a weekly basis, if not daily, in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as in the scholarly literature. The extension of his comparative study of the roots and character of modern democracies from America to the Old World, The Old Regime and the Revolution, has been central to the rethinking of the French Revolution that took place in France around the time of its bicentennial in 1989. The Tocqueville-inspired historical revisionism of that episode was an intellectual development of major political import, dovetailing as it did with the collapse of communism

COURT STUDIES AND THE COURTS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE

A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

Unraveling the Japan-South Korea “Virtual Alliance”: Populism and Historical Revisionism in the Face of Conflicting Regional Strategies

Domestic politics combined with strategic repositioning toward the U.S. set back ties between Japan and South Korea in 2004–05. Despite the North Korean nuclear crisis and the challenge of shifting great power relations in Asia, as well as closer economic and cultural bilateral ties, politicized forces are pulling the two countries apart.

Who's Oppressing Whom? Homosexuality, Christianity, and Social Work

Hodge's (2005) article, Epistemological Frameworks, Homosexuality, and Religion: How People of Faith Understand the Intersection between Homosexuality and Religion, asserts a mutually exclusive irreconcilable worldview that will always separate Evangelical Christians and the gay and lesbian community. Despite Hodge's stated motives to increase tolerance of diversity, his deceptive arguments could potentially aggravate the hostility that already exists between some Christians and members of sexual minority groups. Hodge makes his assertions using certain frameworks and concepts to set the terms of the discourse in a preferred and skewed manner. Through a seemingly reasoned discourse, Hodge attempts a specious argument that people of faith are oppressed within the social work profession, the greater community, and most particularly by the gay and lesbian community. It is distressing that many of the problems with Hodge's writings continue despite having been addressed by others. These problems include incorrect definitions (Bennett, 2003), misquoting or misinterpreting sources (Canda, 2003; van Wormer, 2003), methodological issues, and use of outmoded frameworks (Liecthy, 2003). We will not attempt to deal with every fallacy, tautology, and misrepresentation in the article. Rather, we focus our critique of Hodge's work on four areas: (1) its erroneous definition of oppression; (2) unsubstantiated and monolithic generalizations about the beliefs of Christians; (3) its unfounded claims of oppression of Christian people; and on the bases of (4) freedom of speech, academic discourse, and social work ethics. Hodge's article brings to mind another instance of recasting history and social conflict; that of the revisionist historians more accurately called Holocaust deniers. Shermer and Grobman (2000) accurately renamed these individuals deniers of historical facts, not revisers. More importantly these authors, although noting the understandable outrage experienced by many Holocaust survivors and legitimate historians, insist that the critical issue is one of free speech. They respond with a careful analysis and deconstruction of what appears to be objective and scholarly. Their willingness to give deniers an authentic hearing is in the service of being able to deconstruct the false claims of individuals advancing a political agenda under the guise of scholarship. In like manner, we present our response to selected aspects of Hodge's article. HOW ARE OPPRESSION AND DISCRIMINATION DEFINED? Hodge's glib use of the terms oppression and discrimination without clearly defining them is misleading. He assumes a shared definitional understanding when in fact his use of the words is not in keeping with the definitions articulated in diversity, multiculturalism, and anti-oppression work (Adams et al., 2000). Furthermore, he references key figures in anti-oppression work in obfuscating ways. Careful review of the literature cited by Hodge demonstrates his misinterpretation and selective use of definitional frameworks and to support his premise of discrimination against religiously committed individuals. Most important, he confounds individual acts of mean-spiritedness with structural forms of oppression. The use of civil rights and diversity language by dominant groups to reassert their privilege and power is not new. Take, for example, the issue of whether affirmative action harms white men. Pincus's (2003) study suggests that although there are individual episodes of white men being discriminated against, there is no evidence that white men are systematically discriminated against and thus harmed as a group by affirmative action policies and practices. However, some continue to assert affirmative action harms white men as a group. This is a highly emotionally charged idea that many continue to believe, despite lack of evidence. Hodge alleges discrimination against certain religious groups in a similarly unsubstantiated and inflammatory manner. …

Relocating Mimesis: New Horizons for the British Regional Novel

Relocating Mimesis:New Horizons for the British Regional Novel David James (bio) British regional fiction saw its "golden age" with the Brontës' fascination with the remote moorlands of York, an age that witnessed George Eliot's inquest into the spread of industrialization across the Midlands, and Hardy's estranged yet reflexive attachment both to rural Dorset and a romanticized Oxford. Under the aegis of such writers, the provincial novel, as a genre, entered a volatile arena where selfhood and community destabilized one another under the gathering storm of technological modernity. Such was the "golden age" of regional writing, according to Phyllis Bentley. Yet Bentley's canvass is broader than her favoured line-up of practitioners might suggest. Stretching from 1840–1940, it also takes in what she saw as the capacious "renaissance" of regional writing between the world wars. In the 1930s, a time of "fresh impetus" unprecedented for the novel's orientation toward international upheaval, such figures as Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson wrote of the socio-economic deprivation and working-class unemployment in Yorkshire—a discrete period of innovation that affected setting as much as style (Bentley 13). By heralding new sociogeographical ventures in terms of location and plot, interwar women writers were interested not simply in directing the genre toward immediate polemical concerns, but also in mining a seam quite distinct from their predecessors. To novelists in the heyday of late-Victorian regionalism, the very idea of westerliness, of journeying out of Wessex, consolidated the [End Page 420] equation of seclusion with civility epitomized by Devon and Cornwell—an equation at the heart of these counties' perceived immunity from the urbanization afflicting England's southeast corner.1 As though countering the way southwestern counties had become idealized as enclaves for vestigial traditions, writers at the latter end of Bentley's spectrum in the 1930s would invert that trajectory: northward they lead us, voyaging past the fortunes of East Anglian agriculture as recorded by Doreen Wallace in the 1936 So Long to Learn; past Walter Greenwood's impoverished Lancashire Cotton mills, and beyond—they convey us to where, "under the hammer-blow of adversity," industrial depression had caused a whole population to become "very conscious," as Bentley describes it, "of the common human occupation on which we all depended, which linked us to our native soil" (Bentley 37–8). So conscious were they of the forces that "linked" regional writers to the upheavals of their "native soil," that by the 1970s British social historians were frequently turning back to novelists of the industrial north as spokespersons for provincial hardship. Citied in empirical research into economic fluctuations, reduced to talking-heads for demographic patterns, apprehended against the backcloth of mining and manufacturing towns at a time when indigenous coal and steel industries were coming under increasing threat—regional realists doubtlessly sounded prophetic of the latter-day sea-changes to working-class livelihoods wrought by the upsurge of Britain's free-market economy. Writers following the generational impulses of "Angry Young Men" (as diverse as Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, and Alan Sillitoe), were hailed retrospectively as social documentarians, prescient of a new and virulently divisive era of urban capitalism. As D. J. Taylor remarks, this strategy was "convenient" for sociologists—insofar as regional fiction offered a sort of affective archive, a literary plight symptomatic of the need to raise public awareness of the effects of industrial poverty—yet "highly injurious to the writers themselves" (26). Despite the specificity of their respective polemical and stylistic concerns, northern regionalists from the 1950s and 60s found themselves "turned into a movement whether they liked it or not" (Taylor 26). From Stanley Middleton and Alan Sillitoe in Nottingham, further north still to David Storey's This Sporting Life (1960) and Stan Barstow's A Raging Calm (1968), their achievements became variously misrepresented as "dramatized sociology" (26). [End Page 421] One key metacritical lesson emerges from this use of realist literature as merely an adjunctive resource for historical revisionism. Realism's narratological evolution has meant many things for writers committed to projecting alternative conditions for provincial life, writers who capitalize upon the hybridity of mimetic narration as a distinctive manner of addressing social forces...

Historians, moral judgement and national communities: the Irish dilemma

This paper treats of the peculiarity of the Irish case. Professionalization of history came late to Ireland, and when it did happen, it was with a view to overcoming the inter-denominational and inter-communal point scoring that had energized most previous writing of Ireland's history. In tracing the further development of the history profession in Ireland, the paper alludes to the extent to which the posing of new questions and the employment of new methods were motivated by historical developments elsewhere in the western academic world. The outbreak of civil conflict in Northern Ireland inspired a new phase of introspective writing about Irish identity, sometimes given the semblance of universality through the invocation of post-colonial theory. This writing was usually presented in historical format, was composed mostly by academics employed by literature and social science departments, and was severely critical of what they described as the historical revisionism in which most professional historians in Ireland were believed to have engaged. It concludes with a consideration of how historians responded both to the challenge to their integrity and to various pressures to become more judgemental in writing about Ireland's past.

Van een klassieke naar een revisionistische blik. Het belang van de conversieperiode van de stille film naar de geluidsfilm in de filmgeschiedschrijving

Many film historians are of the opinion that apart from the invention of the cinema itself the introduction of sound was the most important event in the history of film. The conversion to sound radically changed the structure of the film industry and revolutionized the practice of cinematography all over the world. Despite the widely accepted importance of the conversion period in film history film historians did not show any real interest in the period until the late seventies. The so-called new film historians - many of them revisionist in nature - showed a remarkable interest in the period that had been so neglected by their predecessors. A film historiographic analysis shows that the revisionist historians were interested in the conversion period for three reasons: 1) some pragmatic/ strategic considerations; 2) improved analytical models showed that the conversion was a key era for analyzing the aesthetic evolution of the cinema; and 3) improved access to various primary sources in film archives facilitated research of important social technological and economic evolutions that took place during the conversion period.

History repackaged in the age of print: the Sanguozhi and Sanguo yanyi

For over a millennium, the issue of the Shu-Han succession during the Three Kingdoms era (220–265 CE) has served as a proxy for debates about the relative merits of territorial control, blood relationship, and moral qualifications as grounds for imperial legitimacy in China. Debate reached a new height after the fall of north China during the twelfth century, a period when a revitalization of Confucian studies led to a greater interest in the publishing of private histories. This article deals with two little-known revisions of the official history of the Three Kingdoms period, the Sanguozhi, that sought to reflect the legitimacy debate at a time of alien conquest. It is argued that revisionist historians deviated from the norms of traditional historiography by devising new narrative strategies to further their political agenda. These innovations in turn influenced the formation of a new genre of historical fiction.

Revisionist historians and the modern Irish state: the conflict between the Advisory Committee and the Bureau of Military History, 1947–66

The most resounding charge brought during the last two decades against ‘revisionism’ in Irish historiography has been that of a tacit collaboration between historians and the government. This accusation is too serious to be left unexamined. Traditionalists have denounced ‘revisionism’ as a dubious device designed to prop up the border and undo the work of the revolution. Desmond Fennell declared categorically that ‘Both in its ultimate thrust, and as a matter of objective fact, [it] is the historiography of the counter-revolution.’ Séamus Deane defined it as ‘a provincial phenomenon’ and dismissed its practitioners as ‘neo-unionists’.

Quatre-Vingt-Neuf Revisited: Social Interests and Political Conflict in the French Revolution

Fifty years after its publication, Quatre-Vingt-Neuf — Georges Lefebvre's classic statement of the social interpretation of the French Revolution — is widely thought to have been discredited. Revisionist historians have effectively challenged the idea that the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary capitalist class overthrowing feudalism, and this has been taken to repudiate both Lefebvre's interpretation and Marxist history generally. Yet the new revisionist orthodoxy has been unable to provide a credible alternative account of the origins and course of the Revolution. A “new” social interpretation is therefore suggested which, ironically, is very close to that originally offered by Lefebvre for, while the idea of a bourgeois-capitalist class revolution clearly is refuted by the historical evidence, a return to Quatre-Vingt-Neuf reveals that this concept did not play a central role in Lefebvre's account. Nor is it integral to Marx's historical materialist method of analysis. Indeed, a fresh historical materialist class analysis of the ancien régime supports a very different social interpretation than that of “bourgeois revolution,” one largely consistent with Lefebvre's interpretation of the complex but integral social revolution unleashed in 1789.

The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933

Norman LaPorte's The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 contributes new and important material to the major debates on the history of German Communism during the Weimar Republic. Laporte distinguishes between an older historiography, which focused on the top-down imposition of a Stalinist model, with a post-1960s revisionist “history from below.” The revisionist historians explained Communist behavior “as a response to a range of social and economic conditions that influenced the mentality of party members and the choices of the party leadership” (p. 22). LaPorte sees his own work as a step beyond both schools. Following Weber, he argues that policy was indeed formulated from above, and he suggests that the revisionists have downplayed the significance of the “top-down system of control” in the KPD. At the same time, the party leaderships' directives were interpreted and responded to in specific political contexts. The rank-and-file could not be easily forced to carry out policies that “failed to account for the realities of their own specific political environment,” and the attempt of the party leadership to impose ideological uniformity, Laporte argues, “destabilized” the relationship between the party and its membership. Hence, he views his work as an attempt to fuse history “from above and below” (p. 31).