Revolutionary Tradition Research Articles

Narratives of democracy in post-war France

Loyalists of France’s Third Republic presented the regime as heir to France’s revolutionary tradition and as such the bearer of a set of undying principles: liberty, equality, and fraternity. This narrative came under crippling pressure in the 20th century, and in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new set of narratives began to crystallize that rethought the meaning of republican democracy. Under the Third Republic, it was the venerable Parti Radical, dating back to Dreyfusard days, that had been the mainstay of the democratic idea, but in the Liberation era, the party was sidelined, and successors emerged, Socialist and Christian-democratic, which tendered new visions of democracy’s future. The place of the State in French life was also reconsidered. It ceased to be an object of democratic suspicion but came to be seen rather as an indispensable vehicle for effecting the nation’s reconstruction. France’s place in the world came in for a major rethinking at the same time. The nation remained as ever the bearer of the democratic idea, but it now expressed that commitment as a European power and not an imperial one, as a founding member of a brotherhood of democracies and not as a unilateral actor propelled by a self-appointed civilizing mission. In today’s post-colonial, post-industrial, and globalizing world, however, these narratives no longer have the same purchase as in decades past.

Antifa without fascism: the reasons behind the anti-fascist movement in Ireland

ABSTRACTThe anti-fascist movement is generally viewed as a reaction to the extreme right by concerned left-wing activists. Therefore we would not expect the Antifa to feature in countries where extreme right activism is not a feature of the politics. However, Ireland has no significant extreme right but it still has an anti-fascist movement that plays an influential role within radical left circles. By treating Ireland as an outlier in relation to the existing reactive explanation for anti-fascist mobilisation this paper takes a deviant case analysis approach to generate novel hypotheses behind the reasons for the anti-fascist movement. First, anti-fascism acts as a site of left convergence, an area of unity that transcends the usual ideological divisions that can impede other types of political collaboration in a fragmented radical left activist base. Second, in the absence of effective extreme right forces, anti-fascism acts as a form of prophylactic action. In effect, the aim of this activism is to deny political space to extreme right micro groups before they become a popular force or a more serious political threat. Finally, a close cultural lineage between elements within the left and a past revolutionary tradition will increase the appeal of anti-fascist activism among left-wing activists.

Abordagens ao itinerário intelectual de um professor escolanovista na América do Sul: Otto Niemann (1888-1958)

The contribution analyses the intellectual itinerary of Otto Niemann, one of the most prominent teachers who experimented with the ’ scolanovism ‘ postulates on Uruguay on the first half 20th century. The contribution takes root in showing that certain fundamental aspects of his thought and actions -if these topics could separate come from the working revolutionary tradition on the 19th century and they manage to impregnate the layers of the p ublic state system of education .

Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 ed. by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher, and: Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 ed. by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher

Reviewed by: Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 ed. by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher, and: Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 ed. by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher Karin Bauer Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968. Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 164. Cloth $140.00. ISBN 978-0815384694. Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968. Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 196. Cloth $140.00. ISBN 978-0815384724. These two slim volumes explore the legacy of 1968 through the lens of gender. Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency examines the historical and contemporary significance of 1968 in different national and geographical contexts, asking questions about women's involvement and experiences as both victims and perpetrators of violence. Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence focuses on a range of questions about militancy, the causes and legitimating strategies for the exercise of political violence, the use of counterviolence, and, importantly, about women's creative strategies of intervention that engage with violence in multifarious ways. Both volumes read "woman" as a political and cultural category inseparable from the political and cultural contexts of their engagements and the discursive constructs of femininity. They examine the constitution of and struggles for female agency and the consequences of thinking "woman" as a—often disruptive—political subject. In its challenge to prevalent gender norms, women's activism becomes all the more fraught when it includes provocative, nonnormative, and confrontational practices and militant and violent actions. Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency provides a geographically and culturally diverse perspective on violence, militancy, and the legacy of 1968 that aims to be attentive to both local specificity and transnational tendencies. Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence's focus is primarily on Germany and on the question of why and how violence might be said to be emancipatory. Providing readers with wide-ranging perspectives on issues of gender and violence, the volumes' interdisciplinary approach opens up productive conversations about the legacy of 1968 across overlapping fields of inquiry. Contributors are scholars from women's and gender studies, political science, history, and international, film, cultural, literary and area studies. While several chapters draw on contributors' previously published research, all succeed in reframing earlier arguments, adding new perspectives and nuances. The two volumes are companion pieces with cross-references in the introductions and between the individual chapters. The reasoning behind splitting the chapters into two volumes is difficult to ascertain, as neither the quantitative scope nor the conceptual framework would seem to call for the division. A single volume would have provided scholars with a more user-friendly resource and the editor with a [End Page 638] chance to pen one comprehensive introduction rather than two overlapping ones referencing each other. This said, the volumes challenge dominant interpretations and self-interested instrumentalizations of 1968; they constitute an impressive and urgent contribution to scholarship on violence and gender in relation to the legacy of 1968 and will serve as an invaluable resource for further investigations. Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency presents sections on gender and cultural memory, violence and/as counterviolence, and women as violent actors. Kristina Schulz examines how differing memories of 1968 led, in the 1970s, to different assumptions and conclusions with regard to feminist action. She argues that the internal tensions and divisions of the feminist movements in the 1970s are linked to the divergent attitudes toward 1968. According to Schulz, the arguments, tactics, and strategies—in particular, regarding violence against women—developed after 1968 as a divide between cultural and social feminism. Schulz associates cultural feminism, using Helke Sander as one example, with retreat and the privileging of personal experience, and associates social feminism with an engagement in politics that aims to transform public institutions. In Schulz's estimation, the weakening of this division ultimately contributed to the development of a broader range of arguments and strategies. Presumably, this erosion of the dividing line between cultural feminists, who situate themselves in the revolutionary tradition of 1968, and social feminists, whose foundational narratives are shaped...

Introduction

This special issue stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and the Middle East. Taking seriously the possibility of an alchemical transformation of psychoanalytic thought through its encounter with the Middle East and with Islam, chapters reopen the psychoanalytic canon to consider key concepts through unexpected interlocutors, religious traditions, and intellectual formations. This includes bringing medieval Islamic philosophical concepts of the Cloud to bear on conceptions of causality and après coup; and thinking from the point of view of the Last Judgment in dialogue with the therapeutic work of a Moroccan imam and the Lacanian analyst Fouad Benchekroun. Authors also recover lesser known histories of psychoanalytic theory: in the work of Egyptian psychoanalytic theorist Sami-Ali, who developed a distinctly expansive theory of the imaginary influenced by Islamic apophatic theology and his own clinical work; and in Iraqi sociologist ʿAli al-Wardi's critical re-evaluation of the unconscious, via the Islamic revolutionary tradition, as a source of the miraculous. Moving to the contemporary era, chapters tackle the various uses of psychoanalysis in ‘dialogue initiatives’ that delegitimize Palestinians' use of violence in Palestine/Israel; and in efforts to ‘lay on the couch’ the figure of the jihadi in contemporary France in the service of a secular modernizing project. Engaging critical theory, history, anthropology, literary studies, and Islamic studies, this special issue will be of interest to all those concerned with psychoanalysis in relation to a geopolitical elsewhere.

ʿAli al-Wardi and the Miracles of the Unconscious

In the 1950s, the Iraqi sociologist ʿAli al-Wardi attempted to work through, for a popular Iraqi readership, various theories of unconscious forces that shape human conduct, from Sufi conceptions of the hidden dimensions of the mind, to Freudian theories of the id and the super-ego, to insights into extrasensory psychic forces emerging from what al-Wardi considered to be the cutting-edge science of parapsychology. While earlier Iraqi intellectuals had engaged with Freudian terms in order to appropriate a reasoning ego worthy of sovereignty, al-Wardi was more interested in appropriating an unconscious, albeit one not entirely aligned with the Freudian understanding. According to al-Wardi, that understanding was too focused on the negative effects of the unconscious and neglected the miraculous or supernatural dimensions of the psyche. This project took on explicitly political and anticolonial implications in some of his works, which envisioned an Islamic revolutionary tradition that repeatedly disrupted the abstract reason of the state by drawing on the irrational but politically effective powers at the core of the human.

A Paper Puritan of Puritans: The Liberator’s Protestant Spirit the Antebellum Public Sphere

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions

ABSTRACTMarxism has been the name increasingly given by friend and foe to contemporary radical revolutionary movements in the last couple of centuries. That opens the seldom-asked question, what about the radical revolutionary movements and ideas which could not be so described? For them the collective term often used negatively was ‘vulgar’, or, less negative but still unacceptable to Marxists, ‘utopian’ and ‘vernacular’. That last turn indicated spontaneous radicalism of the lower classes, which lack the incise language (polish?) of academic debate. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘vernacular’ as the ‘language spoken in particular area by a particular group especially one that is not the official or written language’. It introduced often a history-passed-and-third-worldly accentuation. Experience has shown that most effective revolutionary movements were led by a group representing a mixture (interdependence?) of Marxism with vernacular radicalism, often described as Marxism with a ‘xxxx’ face (Chinese or Czechoslovak or something else). One can even conclude that for Marxism to make way it must link with radical local tradition, definitely not-Marxist. Moreover, it doesn’t quite ‘work’ singly, for its success depends on the mixture of Marxism and non-Marxism. It seems that particular role in that confrontation is defined by a conceptual (ideological?) set of collectively dominant ideas or ‘idols’. If so, a major blocking force to the advance of Marxist movements is, on top of the power of the existing state and political economy, some prevailing ideological elements accepted by the ‘masses’ since the Second International. Those would be ‘purism’, ‘scientism’, ‘progressivism’ and ‘statism’. We shall eventually touch in that context on supporting the revolutionary vernacular of the People’s Will party of Russia, its implications and its relations to Marx’s own Marxism.

The Future of Meritocracy: A Discussion of Daniel Bell’s The China Model

Abstract Compared to Wang Shaoguang’s approach to re-interpret the old concept “democracy” to overcome the Schumpeterian model of political legitimation, Daniel Bell’s Political Meritocracy takes a more challenging path, attempting to build a new discourse of legitimacy centering on the concept “meritocracy” and incorporating elements of ancient China’s traditions, the socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, and the system of competitive elections common in the Western world today. This inspiring work is full of incisive arguments, but could be improved by further considering the tension between the Confucian tradition and the revolutionary tradition in the twentieth century.

1960년대 중반 북한 경제위기 양상과 혁명전통의 유일성 확립 - 개혁의 배격과 갑산파 숙청의 배경을 중심으로

1960년대 중반 북한 경제위기 양상과 혁명전통의 유일성 확립 - 개혁의 배격과 갑산파 숙청의 배경을 중심으로

THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY AND THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION

The National Revolutionary Party was founded in 1929 to win elections and to resolve conflicts between different political groups after the Mexican Revolution. But it was also created in order to face the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy to the Constitution of 1917 and the measures that the revolutionary governments had established to “defanatize” the Mexican people and to limit the social influence and therefore the political power of the Catholic Church. In the past decades nevertheless, the PRI has evolved from initial anti-clerical and even antireligious positions towards more respectful positions of religious freedom, in line with the logic of a State that considers itself to be plural and respectful of differences. On the other hand, party authorities do not always respect their liberal and revolutionary tradition, the secularism of the state and the principle of separation that guarantees the moral autonomy of individuals against corporations. At times, the search for legitimacy generates political dependence and eventually leads to the imposition of the creeds and dogmas of majorities with respect to minorities of all kinds consequently eliminating the free will of broad sectors of the population that do not share those principles and expect the protection and guarantee of their rights by the secular State.

Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg 2

In this exchange, Benita Parry reinstates the significance of Luxemburg as a Marxist thinker and activist, whose kind of political commitment cannot be detached from the revolutionary tradition of socialism. Parry's compelling reflections address Luxemburg's relevance to defining vital questions in Marxism, especially the centrality of class struggle, the Party, spontaneity, imperialism, combined and uneven development, and the accumulation of capital in a neoliberal age. Parry shows how Luxemburg's vision is necessarily a systemic, dialectical and materialist one, in a way that could inspire current generations to keep the socialist tradition alive. In the concluding sections, Parry also explores the significance of Luxemburg to rethinking postcolonial studies and the Jewish question today.

위기감과 자부심 사이 : 북한 ‘민족문화’ 개념의 분화와 변화

This paper’s goal is to understand North Korea’s present-day nationalism in part by showing how North Korea regarded the “nation”(minjok) and “culture” through the changes in its concept of “national culture”(minjok munhwa). North Korean nationalism grew stronger amid international variables such as competition with South Korea, a sense of crisis and opposition towards the US, differentiation from arising China post-Cold War, and Third World solidarity. Although early on North Korea strongly viewed the “nation” and nationalism negatively and aimed for an anti-chauvinist “national culture,” it later broke with the Stalinist concept of “nation” emphasizing economic community, transitioning to a concept of “nation” which valued blood ties and culture and emphasizing this concretely with the expression “national culture.” This latter concept was divided into “national cultural heritages”(minjok munhwa yusan) and “national cultural arts”(minjok munhwa yesul) since the founding of the North Korean regime. That is, national cultural heritages of the past were to be well preserved and passed on to create national cultural arts, and exceptional national cultural arts were to become great national cultural heritages in the future. The political struggles in the late 1950s and 1960s also constituted a battle of concepts surrounding “national culture,” where in various revolutionary traditions were renounced and Kim Il-Sung’s anti-Japanese resistance experience privileged over the others. With Kim’s sole leadership over North Korea fully established in 1967, national nihilism and reactionarism were strongly criticized during the theorization of “national culture” until the 1970s. The holding of many international events in Pyeongyang during the 1970s and 1980s was the result of North Korea’s self-awareness and pride in taking a leading role in Third World solidarity. Domestic and foreign crises and the country’s solitary hard line stance in the aftermath of the Cold War solidified North Korean nationalism, and concepts such as the “Chosun people first ideology” and the “people of Kim Ilsung,” and “Taedonggang culture” were produced as strategies to unify the regime in this atmosphere. In sum, the term “national culture” was an affective mechanism to preserve and unite the country in the face of national crises as well as a bastion of its self-esteem demonstrating the country’s existence.

Italian state politics and the disruptive factor of volunteer groups

The Cretan crisis and the Greco-Ottoman War meant a revival of philhellenism all over Europe. Especially in Italy the war caused vigorous philhellenic reactions: demonstrations and collections of money for the Greek cause, as well as organization and shipping of groups of volunteers to the Greek war fronts. Scholarly discussion on the Italian involvement in the crisis of 1897 has revolved around two main foci: Italy’s search for a diplomatic role and a national identity between “grandezza” and “raccoglimento” policies or Italian philhellenism as an example of the power of philhellenism in nineteenth-century Europe within the broader international context of Risorgimento philhellenism. In this paper, Italian state politics will be discussed from another perspective, namely the Italian policy towards the Italian volunteer groups fighting for Greece. Published Italian state documents as well as research studies based on further Italian primary sources not having dealt with the specific desideratum, the allies’ angle, also partly the Greek perspective, as revealed through their state archives allow us to extensively reconstruct the different steps taken by the government in Rome in its endeavours to deal efficiently with the uncontrolled dynamics of its national revolutionaries both inside and outside the country. Irregular volunteer groups claimed their right and in part imposed their share to actively participate and influence directly or indirectly national and international policies, aspiring to represent continuity in a powerful revolutionary tradition against the priorities of nation-states. In times of internal crises, and despite their divergent, even contradictory, policies, nation-states of the nineteenth century came together in their objective to defend their exclusive right to shape and pursue national policy according to their priorities against the disruptive factor of national revolutionaries, and to deal efficiently with – or repress – the actions and potential for instigation by volunteer groups both at home and abroad, especially when internal collection was for them the only viable alternative left.

Mayo del 68, la Comuna de Par�s y la tradici�n revolucionaria: una aproximaci�n desde Henri Lefebvr

This article analyses May 1968 from the perspective of Lefebvre’s work and from the concept of revolutionary tradition. First, I outline the links between May 1968 and the Commune of Paris, how the hegemonic revolutionary tradition is challenged and how 1917 is replaced by 1871 as the model of revolution. Afterwards, I describe the disputed heritage of the Commune and how this event is overshadowed after the Russian Revolution. Finally, I examine Lefebvre’s criticism of the contemporary society from his reflections on everyday life and the urban, but also how his account on the Commune becomes a response to these problems, provides a different approach to May 1968 and sheds light on the connection between revolution and tradition.

Reflections on the revolution in the jubilee year

Revolutions at all times attracted the attention of various social groups, because their consequences always in one way or another influenced the status and prospects of these groups. It is natural that the jubilees of revolutionary events stimulate interest in these events not only among professional researchers of the revolution, but also among all those who are somehow connected with power structures: represent, support, or criticize them. The article analyzes the opinions of various social actors on the revolutionary perspective in Russian society, its connection with the revolutionary tradition, the foundations of which were laid in 1917, the year of the two Russian revolutions. Particular attention is paid to the reasons that stimulate thinking about this fateful topic. Intellectuals are considered as the main and most important subject of reflection on the revolutionary perspective of society.

Reading Joyce in the Age of Trump

Reading Joyce in the Age of Trump Joseph Valente (bio) The famous christmas dinner scene in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents an especially polarized moment in the politics of metrocolonial Ireland—when the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell divided the populace as to whether politically strong or morally pristine leadership was of paramount importance.1 The Daedalus family recapitulates this debate along gendered fault lines, the Ireland-first men for Parnell, the church ladies against him. At a heated point in the dispute Mr. Daedalus invokes the anticlerical spirit of Whiteboyism. He directs his friend John Casey's attention to a picture of his grandfather hanging on the wall, the first of many portraits mentioned in A Portrait. "Do you see that old chap up there, John? […]He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a Whiteboy."2 This ancestor of Stephen Daedalus really existed as an ancestor of James Joyce, invoked by Joyce's father, John, as he was by Simon Daedalus. As a secret society militating against tithes, rent increases, and evictions, the Whiteboys wore white cockades and introduced a revolutionary tradition at odds with the nationalist practice approved by the Catholic church. Throughout the colonial era, the alliance of church and parliamentary party continued to represent the dispossessed nation of Ireland both to her own citizens and to the outside world. But bodies like the Whiteboys and their revolutionary progeny began to identify a sector of the dispossessed as a grassroots Irish nation within the Irish nation—a truer Irish nation, because a more truly dispossessed one, lodged within a relatively comfortable sociopolitical establishment. [End Page 221] This imagined nation within a nation (to paraphrase Benedict Anderson) might reasonably be likened to Donald Trump's "real America" inundated by the establishment "swamp" in Washington, DC. Simon Dedalus's grandfather was assigned to that dispossessed tribe in A Portrait: "a good Irishman when there was no money in the job." But he crowns his grandson's memory less for the patriotic stand he might have taken against colonial occupation than for the resistance he offered to the Irish-Catholic establishment, whose clerical leaders he would not allow at his table.3 Simon's tribute to him follows a series of aspersions on the prelates of Ireland for indulging worldly appetites that have turned them into fat cats; the tribute proceeds, in turn, with John Casey's catalogue of betrayals of the Cause by a Catholic hierarchy collaborating with British rule. The new nationalist establishment is thus portrayed as allied with the settler class in being an elite, self-aggrandizing force inimical to the interests of the true Irish people-nation. In a similar vein Trump celebrates his "base" mainly to weaponize them. Like Simon Dedalus, he practices a form of populist ventriloquism, giving "the people" a voice strictly as a megaphone for his own. Joyce's canniest political insight in the Christmas-dinner scene centers on the means and the psychology whereby populist attitudes enter mainstream political discourse and exert a transformative impact. With the example before us today, populist sentiments, including those identified with Trumpism, do not grow and spread organically as the grassroots metaphor conveys, but neither do they cover the ground through artificial, top-down implantation as the neologism of astroturf(ing) imports. Rather, the seeds of populism are disseminated by a process of middle-class identification and appropriation; an identification with the grievances of "the people," defined as the working or peasant classes; and an appropriation and reshaping of those grievances to the more empowered agenda of the middle, professional, and moneyed classes. The progress of populism, which is to say its incorporation in a national(ist) program, thus tends to defy the binaries of grassroots/astroturf or organic/artificial to which it has given rise. It makes itself available to disaffected factions of the bourgeois and middle-class establishment without losing the effective appearance [End Page 222] of broadcasting a distinctly plebeian voice. To extend the horticultural metaphor, populism advances as a grievance creeper. Selected journalistic organs supply the channels whereby grievances are...

Memories of exclusion

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s concern for remembrance in political life in light of contemporary discourses regarding the memory of slavery and colonization in the African diaspora. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. In this paper, I give further contour to these debates by considering Arendt’s discourse on revolution in light of an analysis of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In so doing, my aim is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s understanding of the revolutionary tradition that she believes we are responsible for remembering and appropriating anew in political life today.

The American tradition of constituent power

How do “the people” exercise their revolutionary right to replace the existing constitutional order? The conventional answer is that the people act through specially elected constitution-making bodies like constitutional conventions. But what powers must these specially elected institutions—as the representatives of the people—wield? Must they possess the inherent power to, for instance, unilaterally change the ratification requirements? Or, even if they must submit their drafts to a popular referendum, must they have inherent power to pass laws or displace existing government prior to a referendum? These questions have recently re-emerged in constitutional transformations around the world. Constitution-making bodies with broad inherent legal powers—justified as necessary for revolutionary expressions of the popular voice—have allowed strong partisan factions to use constitution-making to consolidate power. Some scholars—citing recent practice—have argued that we should abandon the revolutionary tradition altogether. A recovery of American debates about the powers of constitution-making bodies, however, shows that these runaway bodies are not necessary to a revolutionary expression of constituent power. On the contrary, the American approach to constituent power presents strong reasons why a revolutionary exercise of constituent power requires an elected constitution-making body to be a proposing body with limited legal powers.

The Year 2016: A Review of the Events Held in Six European Countries

The Year 2016: A Review of the Events Held in Six European Countries