Billington, James
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)