The Blanqui Reader

The Blanqui Reader
Author: Louis Auguste Blanqui
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786635011

First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.

Communist Insurgent

Communist Insurgent
Author: Doug Enaa Greene
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1608468887

In the revolutionary tradition, the name of Louis Blanqui is either remembered with derision or as a noble failure. Yet during his lifetime, Blanqui was a towering figure of revolutionary courage and commitment as he organized nearly a half-dozen failed revolutionary conspiracies and spent half of his life in jail. This is Blanqui's story.

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment
Author: Philippe Le Goff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350076821

Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.

Politically Red

Politically Red
Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262047802

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

Eternity by the Stars

Eternity by the Stars
Author: Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780983697299

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy

Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy
Author: Duy Lap Nguyen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350180440

Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

The Virtues of Violence

The Virtues of Violence
Author: Kevin Duong
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190058412

The Virtues of Violence studies a pervasive but misunderstood image of violence in modern French thought: popular violence as social regeneration. It argues that this vision of violence was not a niche phenomenon, but central to the momentous developments of modern French politics. It appealed to thinkers across the spectrum because it answered fundamental dilemmas at the heart of democratization. Understanding its pervasive appeal, Duong argues, reveals howdemocracy was never simply a struggle for justice or a new legal regime, but also liberating visions of the social bond.

Fire Alarm

Fire Alarm
Author: Michael Lowy
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1784786438

This illuminating study of Benjamin’s final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism—Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifiable” philosopher. His essay “On the Concept of History” was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin’s celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin’s philosophy of history.

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity
Author: David Ohana
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351110500

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment

Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment
Author: Philippe Le Goff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350076813

Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.