Marx and the French Revolution

Marx and the French Revolution PDF Author: François Furet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226273385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. François Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvié situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context. With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic. The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.

Marx and the French Revolution

Marx and the French Revolution PDF Author: François Furet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226273385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. François Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvié situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context. With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic. The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.

Rethinking the French Revolution

Rethinking the French Revolution PDF Author: George C. Comninel
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860918905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based. In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx’s own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historical materialism that found their mature expression in Das Kapital; and outlines an interpretation which concludes that, while the revolution unified the nation and centralized the French state, it did not create a capitalist society.

The French Revolution and Historical Materialism

The French Revolution and Historical Materialism PDF Author: Henry Heller
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004345868
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This text reasserts the Marxist view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Based mainly on articles published in the journal Historical Materialism it challenges the still dominant revisionist view of the French Revolution. It serves to restore the close tie between the history of the Old Regime and the Revolution. It demonstrates that the rise of a bourgeois capitalist class has a long history dating back to the sixteenth century. Moreover, it shows that the Revolution itself played a large role in strengthening the bourgeoisie politically and economically while bringing about the unification of financial and productive capital. Indeed, it shows that the rising of the masses during the Revolution, viewed by revisionism as economically regressive, in fact helped to bring about the consolidation of capitalism.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: Readhowyouwant
ISBN: 9781427012241
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture

The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture PDF Author: Jay Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198842708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
The Bolsheviks sought legitimacy and inspiration in historic revolutionary traditions, and Jay Bergman argues that they saw the revolutions in France in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 as supplying practically everything Marxism lacked, including guidance in constructing socialism and communism, and useful fodder for political and personal polemics.

The Civil War in France

The Civil War in France PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850

The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850 PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: Wellred Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
The revolutions of 1848 which broke out across the world are among the landmark events of the nineteenth century. The experiences of this tumultuous period helped to crystallise and sharpen the ideas of Marx and Engels. Written in the midst of events, in a profound and detailed application of historical materialism, Marx reveals that the political and social changes taking place in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary France have their root in the economic changes affecting European capitalism. Included is Engels' uncensored introduction to the 1895 edition. Here, Engels provides historical context and shows how this period relates to subsequent events in France – including the Paris Commune – as well as explaining the development of Marx and Engels' own conception of scientific socialism.

The French Revolution and Social Democracy

The French Revolution and Social Democracy PDF Author: Jean-Numa Ducange
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004384790
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Beyond France’s own national historiography, the French Revolution was a fundamental point of reference for the nineteenth-century socialist movement. As Jean-Numa Ducange tells us, while Karl Marx never wrote his planned history of the Revolution, from the 1880s the German and Austrian social-democrats did embark on such a project. This was an important moment for both Marxism and the historiography of the French Revolution. Yet it has not previously been the object of any overall study. The French Revolution and Social Democracy studies both the social-democratic readings of the foundational revolutionary event, and the place of this history in militant culture, as seen in sources from party educationals, to leaflets and workers’ calendars. First published in 2012 as La Révolution française et la social-démocratie. Transmissions et usages politiques de l’histoire en Allemagne et Autriche, 1889–1934 by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2012.

Philosophy and Revolution

Philosophy and Revolution PDF Author: Stathis Kouvelakis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786635801
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the specter of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to modernity: a “revolution without revolution.” Trapped in a politically ossified society, German intellectuals were driven to brood over the nature of the revolutionary experience. In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On the one side were those socialists—among them Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels—who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations, bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, proletarian hegemony and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself.

Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism

Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism PDF Author: William Lewis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739157345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Throughout the course of the twentieth century communism has enjoyed direct competition with all other governmental and economic systems. Often, communist countries produced their own special brand of party intellectual. These figures rightly occupied their place within their own national context and within the context of the International. Some communist intellectuals, through the high level of erudition exhibited in their writing, have received a wider reception, despite their direct linkage to party politics e.g. Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and, Victor Serge are good examples. After 1956, when Kruschev exposed Stalin's atrocities to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, as a result, to the entire world, Marxist philosophy was widely discredited. It had been assumed that Stalin's excesses were somehow encouraged or supported through Marx's thought. When, in the mid 1960s, Louis Althusser first offered his re-readings of Marx's philosophy it, and communist political practice, were in ruin. However Althusser was in a unique cultural and historical position. Thinking and writing concomitant with the structuralists and poststructuralists in France and also having access to certain theoretical tools while, simultaneously, committing himself entirely to Marxist thought-Althusser was, conceivably the last of his tradition. He was a Marxist philosopher who, unlike Sartre at the end of his life, did not abandon communism to, for instance existentialism. In Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism William Lewis gives readers a striking example of intellectual biography and critical theory. His approach, considering the work and life of Althusser within French Marxism and French intellectual culture, fills a void in contemporary scholarship. But, much more importantly, Lewis is able to show how Althusser's thought is the result of and a response to specific French intellectual and political traditions of reading Marx. It is through this combination of concerns that Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism offers us a contemporary and poignant Althusser whose ideas, under the weight of Lewis's pen, can help us better understand what resources it may hold for philosophy, political thought, and cultural thought today.