Revolution: an intellectual history

Cover Page -- Halftitle Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: The Locomotives of History -- The Railway Age -- Secularization and Temporalization -- Conceptualizing Revolution -- Energy and Labour Power -- 'Máquinas Locas' -- Armoured Trains -- The End of a Myth -- Chapter 2: Revolutionary Bodies -- Insurgent Bodies -- Animalized Bodies -- The People's Two Bodies -- Sovereign Body -- Immortality -- Regeneration -- Liberated Bodies -- Productive Bodies -- Chapter 3: Concepts, Symbols, Realms of Memory -- Fixing a Paradigm -- Counterrevolution -- Katechon -- Iconoclasm -- Symbols -- Thought-Images: 'Man at the Crossroads' -- Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Intellectual, 1848-1945 -- Historical Boundaries -- National Contexts -- Physiognomies -- Bohemians and Déclassés -- Maps I: West -- Maps II: Colonial World -- Conscious Pariahs -- Conservative Anti-Intellectualism -- 'Fellow Travellers' -- Thomas Mann's Allegories -- Comintern Intellectuals -- Conclusion: An Ideal-Type -- Tables -- Chapter 5: Between Freedom and Liberation -- Genealogies -- Representations -- Ontology -- Foucault, Arendt and Fanon -- Freedom, Bread and Roses -- Liberation of Time -- Benjamin's Messianic Time -- Chapter 6: Historicizing Communism -- Periodization -- Faces of Communism -- Revolution -- Regime -- Anticolonialism -- Social-Democratic Communism -- The Heteronyms of Ilio Barontini -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Illustration Credits -- Index.

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's 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 Jose Carlos Mariategui, C.L.R. 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.