- Alex Zamalin in Conversation with Aaron Robertson on the Political Power of American Countercultures:Dreams of Liberation“There is individual freedom, but there is also the collective, political level of freedom. I think the attempt to combine the two is what makes countercultural movements so unique—and why I think their account of freedom is revolutionary.”
- Robert Darnton Interviewed by Disha Karnad Jani: “The Revolutionary Temper”“Darnton traces how the antecedents to revolution circulated among the Parisian public in the decades before the storming of the Bastille, through their everyday oppositions to the rising price of bread, the overreaches of the monarchy, and the policing of poor neighborhoods. Through their growing sense that the powerful in their society were not governing as they should, ordinary people in Paris began to acquire a shared feeling of discontent, and showed this through many forms of public performance and protest. Darnton tracks this as the development of a “revolutionary temper” in Paris, one which made the population ready to change their… Continue reading Robert Darnton Interviewed by Disha Karnad Jani: “The Revolutionary Temper”
- Thomas Meaney: “You Can’t Trust Elites. Just Ask a 500-Year-Old German Peasant.”In “Summer of Fire and Blood,” Lyndal Roper tells the story of the serfs who fought for a better life and the elites who co-opted their movement.
- Alexander Aerts: “Alexandre Kojève: Bildung in a Revolutionary Cell”“Kojève thought that this revolutionary terror formed the necessary condition for the creation of freedom to come. The realisation of this ‘actual’ freedom came about with the eventual dissolution of ‘absolute’ freedom. In 1918, with Russia standing at the crossroads of history, the constitution of the Bolshevik regime and the previous period of war communism were neither the completion of the revolution nor real existing communism — that is, post-revolutionary communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the extension of the revolution and its victorious fraction into the realm of the state. For Kojève, it logically followed that those… Continue reading Alexander Aerts: “Alexandre Kojève: Bildung in a Revolutionary Cell”
- Tsogo Kupa: “Requiem for a revolution”“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a tremendous historical thesis into the early years of post-coloniality and the crunching, brutal machinery of Western imperialism. America’s puppeteering of foreign governments in the Global South during the Cold War warrants little elaboration, and what makes Johan Gimonprez’s effort a revelation is that it argues that American arts and culture, imparted by its larger-than-life cultural emissaries, were as influential a weapon of the imperial arsenal as any forms of espionage or militarism.”
C. P. Cavafy Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
This site is a book-length scholarly study of political hubris in modern tragedy, specifically, the self-destruction of revolution from Romantic to Postmodern theater and beyond. It includes original scholarship as well as news, comments, and announcements. It remains a work in progress in that new material is regularly added to it and existing material is revised and reconfigured.
Parallel blog of further reflections on solidarity and collaborative culture