Traverso, sensibly, disclaims any insight into historical necessity, and says he isn’t even trying to infer any clear lessons from the past. Instructive distinctions are rarely drawn. But its method, with its feverish constellations and deft thematic grand jetés – however intoxicating for the reader – seems ill-chosen. Revolution is Traverso’s attempt to provide interpretive orientation. But as we lack direct confrontation with the revolutionary past, we must interpret a structure for it. Contending claims will appeal to historical experience. Our strategy and tactics and self-understanding will all be debated. We’ll want to bring about an event in our own day which satisfies that definition. Assume we then share some ostensive and explicative way of defining a revolution. We come to a revolutionary desire at least in part through inspiration by past events, by their drama and results. Organized, directed efforts to bring about root-and-branch social change require diverse kinds of understanding. Let us set aside the question of whether emancipatory radicalism – if it can be thought in the singular – is now, as Traverso claims, ‘bereft of memory’ (29), whatever that turns out to mean. It is to work through the tumult of past revolutions, find their experiential meaning, and thereby render urgent service to the left movements of the present, whom Traverso diagnoses with historical amnesia. ![]() Under those headings we find a digressive, nonlinear series of microstudies and meditations, with Traverso springing in a few pages from the iconography of Death of Marat to Lenin on the state, and thence to Kollontai’s ideas on the liberated body, Stakhanovism, the theatre of Meyerhold, Ernst Jünger on the catharsis of combat. Each of its six chapters is nominally concerned with a certain theme, idea, or problem – the revolutionary intellectual, say, or revolutionary bodies. Analysis and narrative accompany Traverso’s project, but they do not exactly drive it. Nor does he trace a straight vector through great revolutionary sequences. ![]() In his new book, Enzo Traverso does not try to answer it, at least not directly. ![]() How do societies change? More precisely: how can their basic structures be changed intentionally, suddenly, by people acting together out of a shared commitment to create not just different institutions or rules, but a new kind of order? That is the question of revolution.
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