Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804796165 ISBN 13: 9780804796163

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.

This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Keith M. Baker is Professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University. His books include What's Left of Enlightenment? and Inventing the French Revolution. Dan Edelstein is Professor of French and History at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, which won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize.

Keith M. Baker is Professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University. His books include What's Left of Enlightenment? and Inventing the French Revolution.Dan Edelstein is Professor of French and History at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, which won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize.

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Scripting Revolution

A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions

By Keith Michael Baker, Dan Edelstein

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9616-3

Contents

Introduction KEITH MICHAEL BAKER AND DAN EDELSTEIN, 
Part I: Genealogies of Revolution, 
Did the English Have a Script for Revolution in the Seventeenth Century? TIM HARRIS, 
God's Revolutions: England, Europe, and the Concept of Revolution in the Mid-seventeenth Century DAVID R. COMO, 
Every Great Revolution Is a Civil War DAVID ARMITAGE, 
Part II: Writing the Modern Revolutionary Script, 
Revolutionizing Revolution KEITH MICHAEL BAKER, 
Constitutionalism: The Happiest Revolutionary Script JACK RAKOVE, 
From Constitutional to Permanent Revolution: 1649 and 1793 DAN EDELSTEIN, 
Scripting the French Revolution, Inventing the Terror: Marat's Assassination and its Interpretations GUILLAUME MAZEAU, 
The Antislavery Script: Haiti's Place in the Narrative of Atlantic Revolution MALICK W. GHACHEM, 
Part III: Rescripting the Revolution, 
Scripting the German Revolution: Marx and 1848 GARETH STEDMAN JONES, 
Reading and Repeating the Revolutionary Script: Revolutionary Mimicry in Nineteenth-Century France DOMINICA CHANG, 
"Une Révolution Vraiment Scientifique": Russian Terrorism, the Escape from the European Orbit, and the Invention of a New Revolutionary Paradigm CLAUDIA VERHOEVEN, 
Scripting the Russian Revolution IAN D. THATCHER, 
Part IV: Revolutionary Projections, 
You Say You Want a Revolution: Revolutionary and Reformist Scripts in China, 1894–2014 JEFFREY WASSERSTROM AND YIDI WU, 
Mao's Little Red Book: The Spiritual Atom Bomb and Its Global Fallout ALEXANDER C. COOK, 
The Reel, Real and Hyper-Real Revolution: Scripts and Counter-Scripts in Cuban Documentary Film LILLIAN GUERRA, 
Writing on the Wall: 1968 as Event and Representation JULIAN BOURG, 
Scripting a Revolution: Fate or Fortuna in the 1979 Revolution in Iran ABBAS MILANI, 
The Multiple Scripts of the Arab Revolutions SILVANA TOSKA, 
Afterword DAVID A. BELL, 
Contributors, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Did the English Have a Script for Revolution in the Seventeenth Century?

TIM HARRIS

The seventeenth-century English joked about themselves being a rebellious people. "The King of Spain," ran a common adage, was "said to be Rex Hominum, the king of men, his subjects being generally well affected towards him: the King of France, Rex Asinorum, the king of asses, whose subjects are forced to bear whatsoever taxes he is pleased to lay on their backs: the King of England, Rex Diablorum, the king of Devills, by reason of their many rebellions." The historiographer royal James Howell, writing in 1661 just after the restoration of the monarchy, asserted how England "hath bin fruitfull for Rebellions," there having "hapned near upon a hundred" since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Yet despite such self-awareness, and despite the fact that the English had two revolutions over the course of the seventeenth century, it has traditionally been thought that the English did not possess the modern concept of revolution in this time period. The first historian to write of "the English Revolution" was François Guizot in his Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre of 1826, the preface of which contained an extended comparison between affairs in England and the French Revolution. In the seventeenth century, the word "revolution" — so we have been told — possessed a "mainly non-political meaning," and was used predominantly in an astronomical sense, as in the revolution of the planets; if it was ever applied to politics, it carried a conservative meaning, as bringing "the situation back to what it had been before — to complete the historical cycle": in short, a return to the status quo ante. Hence, contemporaries called the restoration of monarchy in 1660 a revolution, but referred to what we now call the English Revolution as "the Great Rebellion." The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, on the other hand, was indeed styled a revolution at the time, but this was supposedly "because so much of it was not in the modern sense revolutionary," but rather an attempt to restore the old system.

Such a view has proven remarkably resilient. It is, however, seriously misleading. Christopher Hill demonstrated more than a quarter of a century ago that the word "revolution" underwent a transformation in meaning over the course of the seventeenth century as a result of the profound political changes of the 1640s (though he did also note earlier usages of revolution not implying circularity), and concluded that the term had certainly acquired its modern political meaning well before 1688. David Cressy has likewise seen a key shift in meaning occurring in the mid-seventeenth century, suggesting that "under the pressure of events" the word "acquired new political and constitutional shadings" and came to be employed "metaphorically to signify a sudden and dramatic change, or significant and abrupt turnover in the politics and religion of the state." Yet even this might put the emergence of these allegedly "new" shades of meaning too late. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first known use of "revolution" to mean the "overthrow of an established government or social order by those previously subject to it" and the "forcible substitution of a new form of government" to 1521, in a letter written by Thomas More to Cardinal Wolsey. In fact the letter is from 1526, although the five-year time difference is hardly significant; as the context makes clear, More presumed that Wolsey would have no trouble grasping his meaning, and thus he could not have been using the word in a novel way. Writing with regard to the internal conflict in Scotland during the minority of James V and the battle among rival Scottish factions for control of the young king's body (the letter was written in the aftermath of the slaying of the Earl of Lennox at the Battle of Linlithgow on 4 September 1526), More reported how Henry VIII was pleased that the heads of the regency council, the Earls of Angus and Arran, seemed to be prospering "against theire enemyes," but nevertheless remained concerned that the Chancellor, the Archbishop of Saint Andrews James Beaton, was using "all his possible power to procure [the Earls'] destruction, and to rere broilerie, warre and revolution in the Realme to the no little perell of the yong King." The OED also notes a usage from 1569, in an English translation of a French work by Pierre Boaistuau (d. 1566), in which in reference to the turbulent history of Naples and the frequent overthrow of its kings by war it is observed: "of al the kingdoms of the earth, only this state of Naples hath exceeded in revolution, mutation, persecution and losse of blood." One certainly should not attempt to make inferences about typical usage from two isolated examples; moreover, the OED also cites numerous usages from this time of the term "revolution" in a cyclical sense. Nevertheless, what we can say is that already in the sixteenth century there was available the concept of a revolution that involved the forcible overthrow of a reigning monarch by violence and bloodshed and the erection of a new regime, and that English readers would have recognized — and have been familiar with — the meaning of this term when used in this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804796165
• ISBN 13: 9780804796163
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Herausgeber: Baker Keith Michael, Edelstein Dan
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande