Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 revolutionar
Table of Contents
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.
