Revolution | enzo traverso

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of dialectical images: Marxs locomotives of history, Alexandra Kollontais sexually liberated bodies, Lenins mummified body, Auguste Blanquis barricades and red flags, the Paris Communes demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others.

It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals--from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos Carlos Mari tegui, C.

James, and other rebellious spirits from the South--as outcasts and pariahs.

And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century.

This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.