Militant Minority Research Articles

Militant minority at work: a successful case of unionisation of garment workers in Istanbul

ABSTRACT This article explores a successful unionisation struggle among garment workers in Istanbul. In the last four decades, Turkey has become a global showcase of authoritarian anti-labour neoliberalism and one of the world’s top garment and textile exporters. The latter has come at the cost of worker exploitation and precarity. Such conditions led a group of knitting workers to unionise at the beginning of the 2010s. After five years of struggle, they signed a collective bargaining agreement covering nearly 400 workers. This very rare success rested on two key factors: the efforts of a militant minority and transnational labour solidarity.

A Feminist Political Economy Critique of ‘the Militant Minority’

Recent growth in strike activity in the United States and Canada has motivated a broad scholarship on union organizing and labour movement revitalization. However, researchers and activists particularly concerned with the role of member mobilization in union renewal have downplayed institutional changes to labour law and regulation which might address the decline of union density and worker power. This commentary offers a feminist political economy critique of recent works on ‘the rank and file strategy’ and ‘the militant minority’ by arguing that greater focus should be devoted to how North American labour law and decentralized bargaining continue to impede union renewal. The article briefly traces the gendered legacy of ‘Wagnerism’ and the latter’s growing incompatibility with contemporary workplaces and forms of employment. It then makes the case for thinking through how organizing could also push for labour law reform, particularly towards broader-based, sectoral forms of collective bargaining and labour market regulation.

Interpreting the Communist Party USA’s Historical Role in the US Trade Unions: Insights from the Early Institutionalist Theory of Industrial Relations

ABSTRACTFrom 1935 to 1945, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) trade unionists were indefatigable and dedicated organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The objective of this article is to analyze the CPUSA’s role in the US trade union movement through applying the early institutionalist theory of industrial relations. This theory was selected because it provided the intellectual underpinning for New Deal trade union policy when the CIO was formed and continued to be the foremost US industrial relations theory for more than half a century. Based on institutionalist criteria, the CPUSA-led unions were much more effective in creating a dynamic trade unionism than the business unionists backed by the institutionalists. When the party actively organized the CIO’s industrial unions, it embraced a reformist viewpoint, adopting the Popular Front through its defense of democracy and its vigorous anti-fascism. If the CPUSA had not utilized this approach, it is uncertain if the early institutionalists’ New Deal trade union policy would have been achieved. In order to revitalize US trade unionism, twenty-first century left trade unionists can profit from studying the CPUSA trade unionists’ role in functioning as the CIO’s militant minority’s largest and most critical segment.

U.S. Union Revitalization and the Missing “Militant Minority”

Debates on U.S. union decline and revival usually focus on policy, technical, or political fixes. Missing are discussions of bringing workers together to act collectively at work. This has historically been the job of a “militant minority,” workplace activists (often leftists) who brought militancy and dynamism to unions, dedication and personal sacrifice in organizing, who linked workplace and community struggles, who were involved in unions’ day-to-day activities, and who connected rank and filers to leadership. This layer is largely missing today, making labor revitalization difficult. In explaining who the “militant minority” was, how it worked, and why it disappeared, we can find clues for rebuilding it.

Economic Democracy and 21st Century Socialist Strategy

This article places the question of economy democracy in the wider context of socialist strategy. It starts by assessing the matter concretely, with a brief overview of Spain’s Mondragon Cooperatives, then showing how it fits into a wider and more multifaceted solidarity economy. From there, it discusses even wider alliances, including with green energy projects, to develop a political instrument that could bring these insurgent movements, each a militant minority, and their organizations to political power as a new progressive majority that could serve as a bridge to a new socialism.

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948 – 1972

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948 – 1972

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 by Benjamin Isitt (review)

Reviewed by: Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 by Benjamin Isitt Stuart Henderson Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 Benjamin Isitt Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011; 424 pages. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 9781442611054 To paraphrase an old saw, nobody disagrees with Marxists with more vehemence and conviction than other Marxists. This is one of the lessons of Canadian historian Benjamin Isitt’s Militant Minority, a dense and carefully presented study of working class politics in Canada’s westernmost province in a time of significant [End Page 169] upheaval. Tracing the political movements, battles and achievements on the British Columbian Left from the early Cold War period up to the triumphant (if unsustainable) victory of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the provincial election of 1972, Militant Minority provides a thick and reasonably comprehensive approach to its complex subject. A deeply committed reading of the shift from an “Old” to a “New” Left politics (a shift that he, following American historian Maurice Isserman, takes pains to stress should not be understood as a rupture or a break but rather a continuity), Isitt offers a brave excursion into some pretty fraught territory. Indeed, this book aims in no uncertain terms to be provocative, and to unsettle its readers. Opening with an anecdote regarding a 1954 “incident” at which a representative of the Victoria Library Board declared that “any book which incites the downtrodden working man to revolt should be removed,” Isitt explains that he “hope[s] this book is worthy of that description” (3). And yet, as politically motivated as the author claims to be, Isitt is no mere cheerleader. The great strength of this book is, rather, in its unflinching determination to present a warts-and-all portrait of a multivalent (and not always pretty) association of left actors. Throughout this study Isitt is compelled to point out the inconsistencies, absurdities and stupidities that went hand in glove with the brilliance, commitment and integrity that characterized this burgeoning political movement. As a result, feathers will almost certainly be ruffled, as long-held beliefs are here frequently disassembled, and many names are named. Isitt explains that he has a three-fold purpose with Militant Minority: “(1) to restore political economy, and an emphasis on labour institutions, as valid subjects of working class and social history; (2) to provide a regional Canadian equivalent to Isserman’s study of the transition from the Old Left to the New Left, a ‘horizontal history’ grounded in the major political traditions of the Canadian working class and broader economic and political currents; and (3) to expand our understanding of B.C.’s political culture, class-polarized party system, and volatile labour-relations climate in a way that is relevant to a wider, interdisciplinary Canadian and international literature” (17). For the most part, Isitt succeeds on all three scores. [End Page 170] Beginning with a chapter devoted to “The Political Economy of British Columbia” is a clever decision, as the reader is provided with the wide and sturdy base onto which Isitt can build his arguments. (Indeed, for those readers unfamiliar with British Columbian politics in these years, or Canadian politics more generally, this chapter will prove utterly crucial to understanding the subsequent chapters—though broad in implication, Militant Minority is a highly local history.) This is followed by chapters on the fortunes of the British Columbia Communist Party (a.k.a. the Labour-Progressive party), the rise of the provincial CoOperative Commonwealth Federation (a social democratic party which would be reborn as the NDP in the 1960s), the outlying voices of Trotskyists and Maoists as well as anarchists and anti-war activists, the wildcat activism of (and within) many unions in the late 1960s, and a concluding chapter on the 1972 election which was won by the NDP. It must be said that Militant Minority is heavy on footnotes and appendices, even for an academic text—the book (based on a Ph.D. dissertation) appears to be twice as long as it actually is—and it is marked by an abundance of local detail and attention to internecine battles between...

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt

Reviewed by: Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt Ian Milligan Isitt, Benjamin — Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 458. The New Left was not as new as it might have seemed; it instead needs to be understood as having deeper roots than the more traditional narrative of rupture might suggest. This is one of the key take-homes of Benjamin Isitt’s expansive Militant Minority: that the New Lefts of the sixties, which would provide a crucial support to the path-breaking 1972 victory of Dave Barrett’s New Democratic Party in British Columbia, owed much to those who came before. The Old Left, epitomized by institutions such as the Communist Party of Canada, may have waned through persecution, prosecution, and the revelation of Stalin’s crimes against the Russian people; yet it, and fellow institutions such as the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union, helped sustain an oppositional culture in the province. While the CCF/NDP experienced electoral and organizational nadirs in the 1950s and 1960s, other left organizations – from Trotskyists, student movements, and the women’s movement – helped carry the torch. All of this helps make what happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the more significant. Indeed, a reframing of the period is one of the best contributions this monograph makes to the field. Questions of how to periodize the “sixties” have intrigued several scholars; Isitt instead frames his period as that of the “long boom.” This is a compelling approach that helps expand sixties studies. Alongside this social and political narrative, Isitt also reclaims political economy as a fruitful field of study. The interplay between British Columbia’s resource economy, politics, and class dynamics is well fleshed out. For the “Militant Minority” functioned in a context of a political “Tug of War,” waged between labour and capital. The traditional account of post-Second World War [End Page 561] labour relations holds that unions gained legal recognition at the expense of being encumbered in a framework of legal restrictions and regulations. Ben Isitt rejects this “postwar compromise” narrative in his local study of British Columbia. Rather, the compromise for him seems far from settled: wildcat strikes, breakaway unions, and growing nationalism characterized the British Columbian experience as the militant minority interacted with these legal structures. Militant Minority makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian labour, society, and the 1960s. Indeed, Isitt’s work is an exemplar of the new current of political history growing in Canada today. This book balances the political sphere, social movements, and everyday life well. Militant Minority is generally well written and engaging. The arguments that Isitt builds are steeped in an almost exhaustive amount of primary and secondary source material. He draws on oral interviews, police records, archival documents, and a near-encyclopedia array of secondary sources. The chapters are all well crafted. His chapter on BC’s peace movement was especially engaging; his contention that the anti-war movement was a combination of Old Leftists, unionists, and a new layer of activists helps reinforce the importance of that social movement. There are some problems with this work, however. Isitt’s use of several terms is a bit troubling. At times, perhaps due to rhetorical flourishes, the “militant minority” framework can come off as a bit homogenizing. This is sometimes unavoidable given the scope of the term (which ranges from middle-class professionals in the NDP to militant communist fishermen), but one wonders if “militant minorities” might have been a more apt descriptor. The New Left is also a bit awkwardly defined. Isitt seeks to expand the definition of the New Left, but fails to fully justify this expansion. He rightfully includes groups such as the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), but also (questionably) Trotskyists, and others who would not have self-identified under this mantle. At times, the book is also a bit stylistically clumsy. Isitt’s voice is drowned out by far too many block quotations. Vexingly, the 458-page book contains only 203 pages of...

Indonesia. The end of innocence? Indonesian Islam and the temptations of radicalism. By Andrée Feillard and Remy Madinier. Trans. by Wong Wee. Singapore: NUS Press and Institute de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud Est Contemporaine (IRASEC), 2011. Pp. 336. Bibliography, Glossary, Index.

Indonesia. The end of innocence? Indonesian Islam and the temptations of radicalism. By Andrée Feillard and Remy Madinier. Trans. by Wong Wee. Singapore: NUS Press and Institute de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud Est Contemporaine (IRASEC), 2011. Pp. 336. Bibliography, Glossary, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 2

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 (review)

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 (review)

Connecting Terrorist Networks

This article highlights initial findings from the authors’ Global Transnational Terrorism (GTT) Project, which began in August 2006. The case study draws on the database work for Southeast Asia and charts the rise of a militant minority within Jemaah Islamiyah, which was directly responsible for a series of attacks from 2000–2005. The important but restricted role of radical madrassahs and the importance of kinship emerge clearly from the study. On a more theoretical plane, the article shows how leadership “niches” opened up by unplanned events create contingent opportunities that lead to new developments.

The Political Economy of Jihad and the War on Terror

This paper treats the “war on terror” as a battle to engage the hopes of a target population. bounded by shared “conspiracist” beliefs. These are seen as countering the cognitive dissonance arising from a history of perceived humiliation. A small militant minority within this target population will have a tendency to perpetrate acts of terror both as an expression of their “apocalyptic hopes” and to evoke such hopes among their potential or latent members within the target population. In reacting to these acts through a preventive “war on terror” that is unrestricted in time and space, the superpower is setting itself the ambitious goal of extinguishing these hopes. Questions must therefore arise as to whether the pursuit of this option rather than “a more focused, restrained international response” can be explained in terms of a dispassionate assessment of the public interest being over-ridden by the passions provoked by a sense of superpower humiliation or by private considerations of political interest.

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (review)

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870. By Stephen Warren. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. 232. Cloth, $35.00.)The Shawnees figured prominently in the history of the early republic and are most famous for the resistance they offered to white settlers in the Ohio country between 1774 and 1815. war chiefs Cornstalk, Blue Jacket, and Tecumseh led an intergenerational pan-Indian movement that dealt the United States some of its most crushing defeats in its wars against Native Americans. Although they were small in number (a population of only about 3,000 in 1780), the Shawnees were arguably the most important challengers to U.S. power on the trans-Appalachian frontier.But what happened after the War of 1812 broke the pan-Indian resistance they had inspired? Historians have generally turned their attention away from the Shawnees after the death of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. No equivalent of the Cherokees' familiar Trail of Tears narrative exists in American historical consciousness for the Shawnees during and after the era of Indian removal. In many ways, they are the prototype of the textbook Indian: tragic figures who heroically defended their homelands before being steamrolled by the irresistible force of westward expansion.This book reconstructs the experience from the time of their departure from Ohio to their removal to modern Oklahoma in the 1870s. Shifting the focus away from armed resistance, Stephen Warren writes instead about divisions caused within communities by differing strategies for dealing with new white and Indian neighbors. While elements of tragedy remain, this is a story told in more measured tones about the persistence of identity in the face of overwhelming pressures to abandon it from within and without.The Shawnees' traditional identity was rooted in the multiethnic Indian communities of the eighteenth-century Ohio country. The divided themselves into five distinct kinship groups based on lineage: the Kispokotha, Maykujay, Thawegila, Piqua, and Chillicothe. While the groups shared a common culture and often intermixed and cooperated with one another, each had its own hereditary chiefs and dominated its own villages, which were also populated by other Algonquian-speaking Indians such as Delawares, Miamis, and Kickapoos. Like other Ohio Indians, the Shawnees lived in a world of decentralized, autonomous villages with constandy shifting ethnic compositions. Between 1780 and 1820, about two-thirds of the population carried this cultural and political system with them into the eastern Missouri region, where they migrated to avoid the wars and social ills then plaguing their homelands. These migrants became the Western Shawnee, a group relatively unknown (72) to modern historians more concerned with the militant minority that stayed behind under the leadership of Tecumseh. Another significant group, the Loyal Shawnee (so called because of their peaceful stance toward the United States), also stayed in Ohio during this era, led by the accommodationist chief Black Hoof.Voluntary migrations during the Revolutionary era did not end factionalism. During the 1820s and 1830s, U.S. Indian agents worked with client chiefs and religious missionaries to push those Indians remaining in the Old Northwest onto reservation lands established for them across the Mississippi. Government agents disliked multiethnic Indian communities; they were too volatile and decentralized to be managed effectively from above. Efforts to create a single, geographically fixed tribe originated with government agents who were using the reservation and annuity system to dispossess and segregate Indians from the rest of American society. …

William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism is an informative account of a bold labor organizer whose movement activity, most notably as leader of the explosive 1919 steel strike, terminated in pitiful Stalinist dotage and death in a Moscow sanitarium in 1961. This is James R. Barrett's second contribution to the University of Illinois Press series The Working Class in American History, following upon his 1987 social history of Chicago's packinghouse workers. That labor history background may explain why he is at his best when describing Foster's workingclass origins and early union organizing. He ably depicts Foster's turnofthecentury Irish Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia, his generally male world of industrial work, his many coasttocoast rail trips, his maritime work on squarerigged ships from Africa to South America, and his involvement in the Socialist party and Industrial Workers of the World, including the Spokane free speech fight of 1909. Foster's youthful radicalism, Barrett maintains, was informed not by labor republicanism, but by the syndicalism that captivated a good part of the unskilled American proletariat. After visiting France in 1910–1911, Foster developed the perspective that competing left wing unions such as the Wobblies merely isolated revolutionaries from other workers; radicals instead should build a “militant minority” within the conventional trade unions, pressing for industrial organization and militant tactics. This strategy, “boring from within,” informed Foster's leading roles in interracial wartime meatpacker organizing and the 1919 steel strike, but it so narrowed his vision to trade unionism that he supported World War I in order to preserve his effectiveness within the American Federation of Labor.

Participation et sociologie électorales dans les Landes en 1790

Melvin Edelstein, Electoral Participation and Sociology in the Landes department in 1790. Taking the example of a department far-removed from the capital, the author reviews the elections of August 1790. Far from being dominated by an active militant minority, voter participation reveals a keen interest in politics, with 61 % of active citizens present at primary assemblies. So too, the sociology of the voters and of those elected highlights the presence of a wide variety of strata from local society, especially large minorities of fanners. This prompts the author to compare his research findings with the conventional historiography and with other departments which have served as case studies.

The making of stalled national movements: Evidence from Southern Sudan and Northern Iraq

This article studies the strength of ethnonationalism among Iraq's Kurds and Sudan's southerners. The primary research question concerns whether the level of political development of these two militant minority groups enables them to achieve their stated national objectives. The following five criteria are included in the analysis: land and people, origins of the problem, nature of demands, extent of political development, and environmental constraints. The study shows that the southern Sudanese and Iraqi Kurdish movements are inherently weak, and incapable of pursuing achievable objectives. Lack of solidarity, underdeveloped national feeling, nonconciliatory governmental position, and nonsupportive regional and international powers make the success of present autonomy proposals highly unlikely for both Iraqi Kurds and southern Sudanese.

Prophecy in a New West: Mary Austin and the Ghost Dance Religion

M A R K T. H O Y E R University of California, Davis Prophecy in aNewWest:MaryAustin and the GhostDance Religion i On New Year’sDay 1889, “the sun died.”During this total eclipse, a Northern Paiute named Wovoka, known to the whites asJack Wilson, fell into a trance in the Pine Nut Mountains ofwestern Nevadawhere he had been cutting wood. He reported upon reviving that he died and went to heaven, where he talked to God and saw “all the dead people,” Indian and white alike, all of whom were dancing and appeared to be young, well-nourished, and happy. God declared thatJack Wilson was to be, in effect, co-president with Benjamin Harrison, Wilson’sjurisdiction being the West and Harrison’s the East. To secure Wilson’s authority, God granted him power over the elements, specifically in the form of five songs for controlling the weather. He then instructed Wilson to command the Indians to cease all lying, stealing, and fighting, and to work peaceably with whites. He taught Wovoka a dance, a variation of the Paiute’s traditional Round Dance, which the Indians were to per­ form at regular intervals. It later became known to whites as the Ghost Dance, in reference to the dead that were to be reunited with the living. Believers in Wovoka’s “Great Revelation” were to be saved from an impending natural cataclysm that would cleanse the earth, their reward being rejuvenated youth in the next life, in a world of peace and plenty (Hittman 63-64).1 Within months, word ofWovoka’s revelation had spread to Indian tribes throughout the West, many of whom thought him to be “the Indian Messiah.”Although Wovoka’s message enjoined the Indians to get along with whites, the revelation changed in several ways as it traveled, due in part to the vagaries of translating between different 236 WesternAmerican Literature languages; in part to the fact that Wovoka could not write, and so never “recorded” the prophecy in a fixed form; and in part to the divergent needs of the various peoples to whom the prophecy spread. Thus both what the prophecy meant and how particular tribes reacted to it varied according to specific cultural contexts. Some Indian leaders received the message as foretelling the destruction of whites only, the land returning to its rightful inhabitants—a version of a prophecy that has a long history in Native American cultures (see, e.g., Trafzer). Although some believed that the Indians could help bring about the millennium by actively resisting or fighting the whites, what happened at Wounded Knee in December 1890 shows the extent to which white anxiety eclipsed the desire—or willingness—to accurately assess the threat posed by this militant minority. As Ghost Dance scholar L. G. Moses puts the situation, “Dancing, peaceful Indians awaiting their divine redemp­ tion did not sell newspapers, so journalists surfeited the country with stories about Indians dancing themselves into frenzies as they awaited reinforcements from the risen dead” (qtd. in Hittman 276). Acting under the orders of a government made uneasy by the supposition that a Ghost Dance ceremony wasa War Dance, the U. S. Cavalry opened fire on a band ofLakotawhich included women aswell as men, children and elders as well as warriors. The Indian dead numbered around two hundred fifty; some were found up to three miles away from the dance grounds. The Ghost Dance religion and Wovoka’s vision are thought by most to have died on thatwinter day in 1890, and, with the “final”defeat of Indian resistance to white military authority, any remaining hopes by Native Americans to retain their “traditional”way(s) of life along with it. This reading of the events at Wounded Knee has also been shared by most scholars, Indian and white alike. Most anthropologists, following Mooney, who worked east-to-west in gathering information and forming his conclusions about the Ghost Dance, focus on its manifestation among the Lakota and other Plains Indians, and thus foreground these tragic “final” events. Drawing cause-and-effect inferences between Wovoka’s doctrines and Wounded Knee, they assume directly, or indi­ rectly imply, or else state outright that Wovoka’s doctrine...

Lynn Hunt: Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

What do interpretations of the French Revolution as diverse as those of Marxist, Tocquevillian, or revisionist historians have in common? According to Lynn Hunt, all share a conscious disregard for, indeed, often a dismissal of, the intentions and the identity of those who made the Revolution. In all three accounts, the specific and unique nature of the Revolutionary project, its immediacy, its innovations, ultimately its lasting creations, are denied. Marxist and Tocquevillian interpretations are caught in a teleological preoccupation with origins and outcomes: the Revolution and its components are the unconscious handmaidens of either the consolidation of bourgeois capitalist hegemony or the modernization of the state. Revisionist historians see the Revolution as an aberration, a historical accident expressing the resentments and the frustrations of a militant minority who possessed no compelling logic behind their actions. Common to all three interpretations is a tendency to transcend the Revolutionary “event,” to consider it as a metaphor for “underlying economic and social interests.” All three share an inability to see the Revolution as an intensely lived, unique experience, whose importance and repercussions its contemporaries were fully conscious of and exploited. In particular, none of the aforementioned schools takes into account perhaps one of the most important and long-lasting inventions of the Revolution: the creation of a new political culture. Lynn Hunt demonstrates how the language, images, rituals, costumes, and daily political activities contributed to conjure up a new French national community that broke consciously with the past. Rather than focusing on how the Revolution divided men, Hunt chooses to examine how it united them into a new political class through the exercise of certain symbolic practices and rhetoric.

Lynn Hunt: Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

What do interpretations of the French Revolution as diverse as those of Marxist, Tocquevillian, or revisionist historians have in common? According to Lynn Hunt, all share a conscious disregard for, indeed, often a dismissal of, the intentions and the identity of those who made the Revolution. In all three accounts, the specific and unique nature of the Revolutionary project, its immediacy, its innovations, ultimately its lasting creations, are denied. Marxist and Tocquevillian interpretations are caught in a teleological preoccupation with origins and outcomes: the Revolution and its components are the unconscious handmaidens of either the consolidation of bourgeois capitalist hegemony or the modernization of the state. Revisionist historians see the Revolution as an aberration, a historical accident expressing the resentments and the frustrations of a militant minority who possessed no compelling logic behind their actions. Common to all three interpretations is a tendency to transcend the Revolutionary “event,” to consider it as a metaphor for “underlying economic and social interests.” All three share an inability to see the Revolution as an intensely lived, unique experience, whose importance and repercussions its contemporaries were fully conscious of and exploited. In particular, none of the aforementioned schools takes into account perhaps one of the most important and long-lasting inventions of the Revolution: the creation of a new political culture. Lynn Hunt demonstrates how the language, images, rituals, costumes, and daily political activities contributed to conjure up a new French national community that broke consciously with the past. Rather than focusing on how the Revolution divided men, Hunt chooses to examine how it united them into a new political class through the exercise of certain symbolic practices and rhetoric.