"This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century.
The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917.
Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power.
Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as ""remarkable, learned and lively,"" while The New Yorker noted that Billington ""pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing."" It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life."
By:
James Billington
Introduction by:
James H. Billington
Imprint: Transaction Publishers
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Revised ed.
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 38mm
Weight: 1.280kg
ISBN: 9780765804716
ISBN 10: 0765804719
Pages: 677
Publication Date: 30 September 1998
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
A / AS level
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction BOOK I FOUNDATIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY FAITH: THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES I Incarnation 2 A Locus of Legitimacy 3 The Objects of Belief 4 The Occult Origins of Organization BOOK II THE DOMINANCE OF THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARIES: THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY 5 The Conspiratorial Constitutionalists (I8I5-25) 6 National vs. Social Revolution (I830-48) 7 The Evolutionary Alternative 8 Prophecy: The Emergence of an Intelligentsia 9 The Early Church (the 1840s) 10 Schism: Marx vs Proudhon, 11 The Magic Medium: Journalism 12 The Waning Revolutionary nationalism Book III The Rise of the Social Revolutionaries: The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 13 The Machine: German Social Democracy 14 Th Bomb: Russian Violence 15 Revolutionary Syndicalism 16 The Path to Power: Lenin 17 The Role of Women, Epilogue.
Reviews for Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
The notion that there is a tradition of revolution, with discernible origins, is the fatal preconception of this huge undertaking. Billington, Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and a historian of Russia, makes the further mistake of taking the Russian Revolution as an archetype. The central theme thus becomes revolutionaries as secular prophets seeking heaven on earth - and organizing themselves into secret societies with occult foundations in hidden knowledge and ritual. Although the occultism is said to originate in the Illuminati and other German groups, the ideological origins are traced to the French Revolution's left wing. The emphasis on secularism, which follows from Billington's Russian orientation, means that he ignores earlier manifestations of social revolution within a lived religious experience - such as the Diggers and Levellers of the English Revolution, the Protestant peasant uprisings in Germany, or the radical Puritan elements in the American Revolution. The French Revolution's substitution of classical Greek and Roman symbolizations for religious symbols and references fits into Billington's framework - it coalesces with the mystic revival of Pythagoras and neoplatonism on the occult side: but it also, crucially, accords, with his presumption that organized efforts at social change are ipso facto mystical aberrations. Billington goes on to trace the path of this revolutionary tradition through Europe and North America - where the Molly Maguires fit in - to Russia. Throughout, he focuses on the intellectuals and publicists who figure so prominently on the surface of revolutionary movements - Mater, Paine, Marx, etc. - and gives little weight to the aspirations of the artisans, urban poor, and peasants who responded to their words and deeds (or didn't respond). Nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries - the caricatured anarchists with smoking bombs - are the perfect images of Billington's tradition ; but a closer look at either emancipatory social movements or the social history of 19th-century revolutions would have shown how atypical they actually were. Billington may think that because Paine lived in a menage a trois with the anarchist Buonnarotti and his wife, and saw Pythagoras as the symbol of liberatory knowledge, his thesis is proved; this is only a tradition by innuendo. (Kirkus Reviews)
