However, it seems to me that the most common approach nowadays is not romanticization or celebration but rather a form of stigmatization. You write that “Rehabilitating revolutions as landmarks of modernity and quintessential moments of historical change does not mean romanticizing them.” Would you like to expand on this claim and on the importance of rehabilitating revolutions as important moments of historical change?Įnzo Traverso: I would say a main purpose of my book is to avoid both the romanticization and the stigmatization of revolutions – I wished to neither celebrate nor disparage them. Una Blagojević: In your new book, Revolution: An Intellectual History, you explore various ideas that were triggered by revolutions: theories, symbols, artistic depictions, hopes, and controversies. Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz is an early-career historian who has recently obtained his PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh. Una Blagojević is a doctoral candidate of the History Department at Central European University. His work has been translated to many languages, for example, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory Le Totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en débat Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945. He has investigated political and mass violence in European culture, Marxism, memory, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism, among other topics. Before coming to Cornell University as the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, he taught political sciences for many years in France. The conversation explores Traverso’s agenda of rehabilitating revolutions as crucial moments of historical change his conception of the role of the historian and approach to writing intellectual history his understanding of the different types of revolutionary intellectuals in modern times, and much more.Įnzo Traverso is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe, and his research focuses on the intellectual history and the political ideas of the 20th century. This book had a kind of assembled, essayistic feel to it which wasn’t awful or anything but which doesn’t compare with works like “The Furies,” as Traverso himself would probably agree.In conversation with Una Blagojević and Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz, Enzo Traverso discusses key themes in his newest book Revolution: An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021). I tend to agree with Traverso about his framing of the early twentieth century, and am always down with a tilt at liberal historiography. Case in point, the way the age of crises between 19 affected every society in Europe (and beyond- one weakness of the book is that it’s unabashedly eurocentric). They tend to be layered conflicts- regional, ideological, international, local, religious fault lines are all activated by civil wars and interact in complex ways. Civil wars are proverbially ferocious, calling forth degrees of commitment (both in scale and depth) seldom seen in other types of war. There’s a few reasons to see this as a long European civil war, along the lines of the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century or the French revolutionary/Napoleonic wars at the dawn of the nineteenth. Mayer wrote about the French and Russian revolutions, Traverso writes about the arc of violence in Europe that began with World War One, extended through the waves of revolutions and counterrevolutions in the 20s and 30s, and ended with World War Two. “If all civil wars are tragedies, some deserve commitment,” as Traverso puts it. Imperialism, revolution, industrialization, all among the main movers of modern history, all substantially violent, so sticking at one type of violence as unavoidably tragic and wrong makes little sense. In many respects, this book is an extension of Arno Mayer’s great work, “The Furies.” Mayer argued that rather than illustrating the danger of ideology as a free-floating concept, the great ideological bloodlettings between the French Revolution and today show that violence is the inevitable concomitant of change- that “violence is the midwife of history.” This goes along with the blind eye liberal anti-totalitarian scholarship turns towards massive violence that did not proclaim its ideological nature (or, more cynically, didn’t happen to white people)- the violence of imperialism, for instance. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A…Įnzo Traverso, “Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945” (2007) (translated from the French by David Fernbach) – Italian historian Enzo Traverso lobs the logic of civil war like a bomb at the warmed over totalitarian-school readings that were big stuff in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and which look to be coming ‘round again after Trump et al.
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