Revolution

Praise for The New Faces of Fascism, Verso, 2019: A valuable intervention. -- Natasha Lennard * Times Literary Supplement * Praise for The New Faces of Fascism, Verso, 2019: Traverso's scholarship is an active agent in creating a usable collective narrative of mass anti-fascist resistance to address the precariousness of insecurity we feel. Yet this book's most salient aspect is Traverso's historicizing of consciousness about the legacy of what revolutionaries once fought and how we contested it - the internal contradictions and ambiguities of fascism and antifascism that he exquisitely excavates. -- Alan Wald * Against the Current * Praise for The New Faces of Fascism, Verso, 2019: But what do we mean when we say fascism today? In The New Faces of Fascism, historian Enzo Traverso calls the concept of fascism both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping current political reality. -- J. Hoberman * Bookforum * Praise for The New Faces of Fascism, Verso, 2019: Cultural historian Enzo Traverso's intervention in this field of debate is both well timed and nuanced. In The New Faces of Fascism, Traverso refuses both hysteria and complacency, taking a careful path, signalled by his concept of 'postfascism', to describe what he views as a multifaceted, contradictory, in-transition ideological-political constellation. -- Chamsy el-Ojeili * Thesis Eleven * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Enzo Traverso's new book offers us a guide to the left that the 20th century left behind. -- J. Hoberman * The Nation * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Left-Wing Melancholia is an exciting, original, and illuminating discussion, which sets the contemporary Left's feeling of disorientation and loss into a rich and varied landscape of memory practices and emotional states. It fulfills in many ways its ambitious promise to rethink the history of socialism and Marxism through the prism of melancholy. -- Warren Breckman * American Historical Review * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Arguing against Walter Benjamin and Wendy Brown, Traverso sees left-wing melancholy as a site of resistance. -- Peter E. Gordon * Boston Review * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Enzo Traverso's inspired book Left-Wing Melancholia revisits iconic representations of revolutionary hopes and defeats not to draw up an inventory of what has been lost but rather to remind his readers that past defeats also contain the traces of unfulfilled possibilities. Left-Wing Melancholia is both a historical meditation on melancholy and an exemplification of melancholy as a practice of acquiring knowledge and cultivating memory. -- Ulrich Plass * History and Theory * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: This brilliant book seeks to recover a hidden, discreet tradition: that of leftwing melancholia. -- Michael Loewy * Against the Current * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Traverso's contribution is the most empyrean and reflexive, imaginatively exploring the melancholic dimension of left-wing thought over the past century. He gestures, too, towards an as yet ill-defined reshaping of Marxism and socialism, which might once again, with confidence, look both towards the past and into the future. -- Chamsy el-Ojeili * Thesis Eleven * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Left-Wing Melancholia is well-written, timely and original. -- Eli Zaretsky, The New School for Social Research Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Left-Wing Melancholia is a path breaking work that combines history and political theory with a concise, richly analytical, exciting narrative. Enzo Traverso redefines our understanding of the current regimes of temporality?a sorrowful transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century?and challenges historians and critical theorists alike to think beyond the standard binaries between history and memory, revolution and defeat, and melancholy and politics. In other words, this book is a gem. -- Federico Finchelstein, The New School for Social Research Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Marvellously learned and gorgeously poetic, Left-Wing Melancholia is a transcendent masterpiece of the Marxist imagination. Each engrossing chapter provides a tour-de-force of trenchant observations and lucid argumentation about the melancholic landscape of socialist memory. Intricately constructed with acrobatic prose, electric compressions, and magisterial assuredness, Traverso's scholarly milestone synthesizes an ambitious spectrum of interventions into the revolutionary aspirations and defeats of the twentieth century that is historically engaging, eminently readable, and pressingly pertinent. -- Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture, University of Michigan Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: According to Freud, mourning is differentiated from melancholia in its working through grief by acknowledging the irreparable loss of a love object. If so, should the contemporary Left finally concede the failure of its dreams of revolutionary redemption? Or, and this is the gamble of Enzo Traverso's provocative new book, is it better to remain defiantly melancholic in the hope that those dreams may still be realized? Drawing on a lifetime of immersion in the history of modern European culture and politics, he provides future progressive movements a glimmer of hope that the dialectic of defeat may not yet be history's final word. -- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: With Left-Wing Melancholia, Enzo Traverso provides us with a timely and learned meditation on the politics of grief, mourning, and historical loss. Yet, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, Traverso also instructs us on how the experience of loss can simultaneously generate heretofore untapped repositories of social hope. Left-Wing Melancholia is both an exhilarating work of intellectual synthesis as well as a pathbreaking study in cultural history. -- Richard Wolin, author of Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: In this wide-ranging, conceptually rich, nuanced and thoughtful meditation, Enzo Traverso takes stock of the current historical moment as marking a fundamental historical and cultural crisis for the Left. The overarching trajectory of struggles oriented toward an emancipatory future that characterized and motivated movements in the past two centuries has been fundamentally broken, resulting in a profound melancholia. Taking inspiration from heterodox critical responses to the darkness enveloping Europe in 1940, Traverso seeks to uncover trace elements of a new utopian imaginary, as a leap without guarantees, a melancholy wager. -- Moishe Postone, University of Chicago Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: The perfect meditation for our melancholy age. -- Peter Gordon * Boston Review * Praise for Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017: Left-Wing Melancholia's breadth is impressive, almost intimidating. -- Sean Cashbaugh * H-Net Socialisms, H-Net Reviews * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Enzo Traverso's investigation is based on a brilliant-although controversial-idea. It is an important book that deserves to prompt vast and interesting debates. -- Saul Friedlander, UCLA, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews and The Years of Extermination Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Written with empathy and perspicacity, Fire and Blood takes the measure of the explosion of violence-revolutionary vs. counter-revolutionary, fascist vs. anti-fascist, military vs. civilian-that constituted the European 'civil war' of the first half of the twentieth century. Enzo Traverso's admirable erudition and judiciousness make this work an indispensable synthesis. -- Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Despite thousands of books on the two world wars, we are still far from understanding the violence that tore Europe apart between 1914 and 1945. By conceiving of the conflict as a civil war, Enzo Traverso provides us with a new way to think about the disaster that continues to shape the twenty-first century. -- Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Enzo Traverso's provocative book poses a profoundly important question to modern history. How can we understand the 'age of extremes' (1914 to 1945) from a present-our present day in the west-that is in general terms allergic to 'ideology' and convinced that 'there is no alternative'? What happens when an anodyne and self-satisfied liberalism projects its values back into an earlier era of intense political struggle? -- Adam Tooze * Guardian * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Nuanced and erudite Fire and Blood is more than a history of a catastrophe that began a hundred years ago. It is also a warning of a potential future. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Incisive, challenging, and compelling interpretation of the European wars of annihilation, whose consequences still reverberate. -- George de Stefano * Pop Matters * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Remarkable. -- Jonathan Sturgeon * Flavorwire * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: This wonderful book is not a simple history of [the 1914-45 period]. Rather it examines the ideas which underlay the mass movements of the inter war years, and why the morality of pre-1914 Europe was undermined by a generation scarred by the horror of the First World War. -- Chris Bambery * CounterFire * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: One must admire Traverso's ambitious synthesis of theory and recent scholarship. -- Shelley Baranowski, University of Akron Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: This is engaged history at its best. Fire and Blood is a passionate and bracing contribution to the issues that bedeviled Western political intellectuals in the age of extremism. -- Russell Jacoby, UCLA, author of Bloodlust and The Last Intellectuals Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: A remarkable study on the politics of violence. -- Dan Diner, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of America in the Eyes of the Germans Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Fluently written and employing a synthetic approach that will appeal to the common reader. -- Nitzan Lebovic * Haaretz * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Enzo Traverso has pulled off the rare reconstruction of a past epoch that pulsates with electric immediacy. Fire and Blood fashions events happening seventy-five-to-one-hundred years ago to feel as lively and pertinent as political debates taking place at present. -- Alan Wald * Against the Current * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: Cannot be neglected by anyone with the temerity to approach the subject in future. -- Al Richardson * Revolutionary History * Praise for Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-45, Verso, 2016: [A] remarkable reinterpretation of the history of the 'Thirty Years War' of the twentieth century. It recreates the ethos of this time. -- Michael Loewy * Le Monde Diplomatique * Offering one of the most unsentimental yet non-reactionary meditations on revolution ever written, Traverso comes not to bury or praise the earthly drive to take heaven by storm but to understand it anew. Enriched by a lifelong study of historiography and politics, immense historical knowledge, theoretical polyamory, and a compelling artistic eye, this book also features splendid humility in exploring its slippery, complex and important subject. For those who long to craft a different order of things, Traverso's account is essential. For those who want to ponder what spirits revolutions or makes shipwrecks of them, this rare work roams the globe and the library, reflecting on Phnom Penh and Havana, not only Paris and Moscow, and thinking with Weber, Arendt, Fanon and Constant, not only Trotsky, Lenin and Mao. -- Wendy Brown, author of <i>In the Ruins of Neoliberalism</i> This brilliant essay on the images of revolutions is a unique experiment, which has no equivalent in the vast historiographic literature on the subject. Inspired by Marx, Trotsky ,and Walter Benjamin, it is built as a montage of dialectical images, which function as lamps that illuminate the past. Enzo Traverso, probably the most gifted historian of his generation, does not hide his hostility to what he calls the octopus of universal commodity reification ; without idealizing the past revolutions , he wants to preserve, in this fascinating and heterodox piece of research, the memory of historical experience. Quoting Benjamin: we cannot ignore the claim that the past has on us. * Michael Loewy * A perfect partnering of author and subject! Enzo Traverso is the Marxist scholar most gifted to present us with a masterfully articulated appraisal of the perplexing presence of concepts and images of revolutions in the political imagination. His astonishing scholarly expertise is on display with stunning elegance to reveal a rich tapestry of material from the 19th and 20th centuries, along with a multitude of riveting actors and thinkers. Revolution is a monumental advance in its sophisticated and supple interpretations; it is also a virtuoso performance in the art of refreshingly precise, rigorously compact exposition, complemented by a novelist's flair for narrative power and dramatic verve. -- Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it's hard to know how we did without it.' -- China Mieville