“The age of revolution is not over: its fruits are just unevenly distributed around the world”.
The noted scholar of imperial and global history, David Armitage, offers some reflections on the continuing significance of R.R. Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution in a foreword to a new edition; here excerpted in the Times Literary Supplement.
Lapham’s Quarterly has just published, in print and partially online, an edition devoted to texts from historical revolutions. In the editor’s introduction, Lewis Lapham vents his spleen – with an unquantifiable admixture of irony – on the devaluation of ‘revolution’ as a term and concept that ought to be so very apt for deployment in the contemporary world. While perhaps overly focused on the US scene, he neglects to discuss the very contemporary situation of Ukraine, where many observers thought they were seeing the next in a very long line of recent ‘revolutionary’ happenings. There, instead, and on a very much shorter timeframe than, for example, in Egypt, we have seen once more that calling something a revolution has only the most limited of effects on its actual outcomes.
This piece of blog-journalism illustrates very neatly how difficult many contemporary commentators find it to separate their internalised assumptions about what ‘revolution’ ought to mean from an effort to analyse real situations. Headlined ‘Libya: The Revolution That Never Was?’, its opening sentence ends with the statement that, after Gaddafi’s death ‘another Arab Spring revolution appeared to be secure.’ Going on to discuss in depth the actual destabilised condition of the country ‘after the revolution’, the author wonders ‘Libya’s revolution has splintered, to be sure, but how might it be reconstituted?’
Ultimately, the piece appears to posit that ‘Libya’s 2011 revolution produced more problems than solutions’ in a fragmented and tribalised polity: ‘The revolution only introduced more hardship and violence than ever before.’ Yet the ultimate conclusion swings drastically away from this pragmatic evaluation: ‘Thus, Libya’s revolution remains postponed – its destiny in the hands of those who might envision and create an authentic, historical alternative.’
A revolution that both was, and is not yet… A contradiction strikingly typical of the contemporary discourse.
Our friend Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley has begun a new project to effectively ‘live blog’ his exploration of the French Revolution collection at Manchester’s John Rylands Library. Some very informative close readings are sure to follow…
