This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities - Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews and others - this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire's diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks' social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant 'imperial' imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.

In the spring of 1989, millions of citizens across China took to the streets in a nationwide uprising against government corruption and authoritarian rule. What began with widespread hope for political reform ended with the People's Liberation Army firing on unarmed citizens in the capital city of Beijing, and those leaders who survived the crackdown became wanted criminals overnight. Among the witnesses to this unprecedented popular movement was Rowena Xiaoqing He, who would later join former student leaders and other exiles in North America, where she has worked tirelessly for over a decade to keep the memory of the Tiananmen Movement alive. This moving oral history interweaves He's own experiences with the accounts of three student leaders exiled from China. Here, in their own words, they describe their childhoods during Mao's Cultural Revolution, their political activism, the bitter disappointments of 1989, and the profound contradictions and challenges they face as exiles. Variously labeled as heroes, victims, and traitors in the years after Tiananmen, these individuals tell difficult stories of thwarted ideals and disconnection, but that nonetheless embody the hope for a freer China and a more just world.

This book argues that although the mob and the people appear to be very separate concepts, they share a common ideological history. Hayes traces the developments undergone by the concepts of people and mob in modern European ideologies, and he examines Marx's depiction of the lumpenproletariat, Le Bon's analysis of the crowd, fascist depictions of the masses, and corporatist views of the political threat posed by the mob. He also discusses the implications of the distinction between the people and the mob for democracy providing a case study of the 1984-85 British miner's strike and reviewing the rhetoric of politicians in the new democracies of Eastern Europe.

"The People and the Mob" examines the ideological depiction of the masses from the time of the French Revolution to the democratization of Eastern Europe. During this period, Hayes explains how political activists seeking popular appeal have increasingly identified mass social groups in positive rather than negative terms, as the people rather than the mob. However, Hayes argues that although the bulk of the population has come to be identified with the people, the concept of the mob has not disappeared from political discourse, but has rather been redifined to refer to a vicious minority. The ideological significance of this concept of the mob is made clear by Hayes's examination of Marx's depiction of the lumpenproleteriat, Le Bon's analysis of the crowd, fascist propaganda, and corporatist views of society and government. Throughout his analysis, Hayes finds the concept of the mob to be closely tied to that of the people in a way that indicates ambiguous, inconsistent, or opportunist attitudes toward mass social groups. Hayes investigates the implications of such attitudes for democracy by considering political conflicts in the 1984-85 British miners' strike, and in the new democracies of Eastern Europe.

The People and the Mob explains how and why the concept of the mob has been incorporated into several forms of ideoloy that claim to speak for the people. This important finding is supported by Hayes's identification of a social analysis in which financiers and the mob are linked to each other, and separated from the people, using moral criteria of the work ethic. It is also supported by his explanation of the popular rhetorical appeal of political condemnations of the mob. Hayes shows that these rhetorical appeals and social distinctions are found in the ideology of both right and left. He demonstrates that even Marx has adopted such an ideology through his highly original interpretation of the class structure developed by Marx to explain events in France. Hayes's conclusions extend the fields of politicl theory and the history of ideas. The People and the Mob is useful to anyone interested in Marxism, crowd theory, fascism, corporatism, civil conflict in Europe, and the problems of modern democracy.

This book examines a key period in the formation of modern Egypt, the early years of military rule following the coup of 1952. The Free Officers, a secret organization of junior officers, overthrew Egypt's parliamentary regime in July 1952 and over the next few years consolidated their rule, brutally suppressing alternative political movements. Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the young officers, emerged as the leader of the military junta and launched an ambitious program for economic development, making Egypt a leader in Arab, African, and non-aligned politics, as well as a model for political mobilization and national development throughout the Third World. Focusing on the goals, programs, successes, and failures of the young regime, Gordon provides the most comprehensive account of the Egyptian revolution to date. Besides bringing to light newly opened American and British sources on the period, Gordon's book is also informed by interviews he conducted with a number of actors and observers of the events.

The book examines the dynamic of West European terrorism and counter-terrorism as it has evolved since the late 1960s. It assesses past, present and future terrorist trends and analyzes the internal security policies that have been initiated by the member states of the European Union (EU), both singularly and collectively, to combat terrorism in Western Europe. Throughout the book the theme of liberal democratic legitimacy and accountability is stressed, something that is brought particularly to bear on the latest EU internal security provision - the Maastricht Third Pillar.

Americans seem increasingly disenchanted with their legal system. In the wake of several high-profile trials, America's faith in legal authority appears profoundly shaken.

And yet, as David Ray Papke shows in this dramatic and erudite tour of American history, many Americans have challenged and often rejected the rule of law since the earliest days of the country's founding. Papke traces the lineage of such legal heretics from nineteenth-century activists William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, through Eugene Debs, and up to more recent radicals, such as the Black Panther Party, anti-abortionists, and militia members. A tradition of American legal heresy clearly emerges--linked together by a body of shared references, idols, and commitments--that problematizes the American belief in legal neutrality and highlights the historical conflicts between law and justice. Questioning the legal faith both peculiar and essential to American mythology, this alternative tradition is in itself an overlooked feature of American history and culture.

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin, by negating the Leninist-Stalinist theory of dialectical materialism and tracing Marx's political philosophy to the Classical Humanism of Aristotle, overthrows the stultifying entrapment of Stalinist Bolshevism and contributes to the revitalization of Marx's method.

Written by the leading political expert on Suriname, this thrilling tale describes ethnically inspired guerilla warfare, terrible human rights violations, military coups, painful redemocratization processes, and economic implosion. Although part of the American family of nations in the Western Hemisphere, there is almost nothing written about Suriname as a modern country. There are some ethnographies, some histories of ex-slave rebellions, and passing references to the atrocities of colonial plantation systems. After that, the dark clouds of obscurity close over a fascinating if beleaguered close American cousin, one whose history as an independent nation has much to say to the strife-ridden trouble spots of the 1990s--Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Liberia, and Nicaragua.

In this well-documented account [that] will become indispensable reading for students of the modern Middle East' (Choice), Abrahamian uncovers little-known documents that challenge conventional interpretations of the 1953 Iranian governmental coup. Offering 'new insights into his history-shattering event' (Reason.com), his riveting account transforms America's understanding of a crucial turning point in modern U.S. - Iranian relations.'

Supporters of Stalin saw Trotsky as a traitor and renegade. Trotsky's own supporters saw him as the only true Leninist. In Trotsky and the Russian Revolution, Geoffrey Swain restores Trotsky to his real and central role in the Russian Revolution. In this succinct and comprehensive study, Swain contests that: In the years between 1903 and 1917, it was the ideas of Trotsky, rather than Lenin, which shaped the nascent Bolshevik Party and prepared it for the overthrow of the Tsar. During the autumn of 1917 workers supported Trotsky's idea of an insurrection carried out by the soviet, rather than Lenin's demand for a party orchestrated coup d'etat. During the Russian Civil War, Trotsky persuaded a sceptical Lenin that the only way to victory was through the employment of officers trained in the Tsar's army. As well as examining Trotsky's critique of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s, this seminar reader probes deeper to explore the ideas which drove Trotsky forward during his years of influence over Russia's revolutionary politics, exploring such key concepts as how to construct a revolutionary party, how to stage a successful insurrection, how to fight a revolutionary war, and how to build a socialist state.

The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.

The Defence of Terrorism, originally written in 1920 on a military train during the Russian Civil War, represents one of Trotsky's most wide-ranging and original contributions to the debates that dominated the 1920s and '30s. Trotsky's intention is "far away from any thought of defending terrorism in general". Rather, he seeks to promote an historical justification for the Revolution, by demonstrating that history has set up the 'revolutionary violence of the progressive class' against the 'conservative violence of the outworn classes'. The argument is developed in response to the influential Marxist intellectual Karl Kautsky, who refuted Trotsky's 'militarisation of labour' and Lenin's wholesale rejection of a 'bloodless revolution'. The introduction, written for the second edition of 1935, presents Trotsky's reflections on the similarities between Kautsky and the burgeoning British Labour Party: specifically, it recapitulates Trotsky's belief that revolution conducted according to the norms of Parliamentarianism is no revolution at all.

An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, cross-historical analysis of three 20th-century non-Western revolutionary societies--China, Mexico, and Iran--that were profoundly impinged upon by European and American imperialism. The study explores the role of apocalyptic beliefs in radical movements bent on sociopolitical transformation. It concludes that millennial expectations performed important and similar preparatory, leadership, and therapeutic functions in each case.

Millenarian movements are powerful and emotional social movements that expect an immediate, collective, total, this-worldly, supernatural salvation and transformation of society. They anticipate the complete destruction of the existing sociopolitical and economic order, which they assert will be followed by a new and perfect society. This study provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, cross-historical analysis of three 20th-century non-Western revolutionary societies that were profoundly impinged upon by European and American imperialism. It seeks to explore the functional role of millenarianism in these three revolutions.

In all three cases, millenarianism prepared the way for revolutionary transformation. It acted as a catalyst for action among that group of the most ardent revolutionists who were willing to pay any price to achieve what they were convinced was the inevitable goal of a utopian society. Millenarianism created the potential for charismatic leadership to emerge. It functioned as a doctrinal platform that awaited the opportunity to elevate a prophetic revolutionary leader to take control. Finally, millenarianism performed a therapeutic, identity, and cathartic function by providing the doctrinal foundation and an effective organization for a social healing process to take place. A challenge to conventional arguments on the origins and outcomes of revolutions, this study will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in comparative politics, sociology, and religion.

Between 1789 and 1848, clerks modified their occupational practices, responding to political scrutiny and state-administration reforms. Ralph Kingston examines the lives and influence of bureaucrats inside and outside the office as they helped define nineteenth-century bourgeois social capital, ideals of emulation, honour, and masculinity.

In The Oxford Handbook of the Old Regime, an international team of 30 contributors surveys and presents current thinking about the world of pre-revolutionary France and Europe.
The idea of the Old Regime (ancien regime) was invented by the French revolutionaries to define what they hoped to destroy and replace. But it was not a precise definition, and although historians have found it conceptually useful, there is wide disagreement about what the Old Regime's main features were, how they worked, how old they were, how far they stretched, how dynamic or inert they were, and how far the revolutionaries succeeded in their ambitions to eradicate them.
In this wide-ranging and authoritative collection, old and newer areas of research into the Old Regime are presented and assessed, and there has been no attempt to impose any sort of consensus. The result shows what a lively field of historical enquiry the Old Regime remains, and points the way towards a range of promising new directions for thinking and writing about the intriguing complex of historical problems which it continues to pose.

In this groundbreaking study, Janusz Bugajski evaluates the impact of Sandinista political, economic, and social programs. The book focuses on the confrontations between the regime and Nicaragua's rural population, particularly the Ladino peasantry and the Indian and black indigenous minorities of the Atlantic coast region. The book concentrates on the Sandinista's agrarian strategies in order to distinguish between short-term policies and long-term programs. It addresses the question of whether any durable and novel ideological, political, and economic elements have been introduced in Nicaragua in terms of Marxist-Leninist models of state socialism--expecially vis-a-vis peasantry and the country's ethnic minorities. Upon seizing power in July 1979, the Sandinistas embarked on a socialist transformation of Nicaraguan society. This book concludes that in confronting major internal and external obstacles, the regime opted for a degree of economic flexibility without abandoning its long-term political objectives. The regime's Leninist political arrangements, claims Bugajski, were therefore combined with a quasi-Communist economic program. The Sandinistas captured and remodeled all levers of social control, including the state apparatus, the armed forces, and the security network, and fortified those mechanisms that could most effectively extend their domination. But in order to minimize economic dislocation, political opposition, and social unrest, to uphold productivity, to obtain vital agro-export revenues, and to prevent international isolation, Managua implemented a transitory mixed economy and continued to tolerate a politically weakened private sector.

James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) was a brilliant reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Charles-Alexandre de Calonne's De l'etat de la France. Whig Opposition leader Charles James Fox rated it as the finest defence of the French Revolution. This edition offers an extensive editor's introduction, a fully annotated text of the first edition of Vindiciae Gallicae and an appendix which includes the significant substantive revisions that Mackintosh made to Vindiciae Gallicae in the late summer of 1791.

The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.

In modernizing Russia, obshchestvennost', an indigenous Russian word, began functioning as a term to illuminate newly emerging active parts of society and their public identities. This volume approaches various phenomena associated with the term throughout the revolution, examining it in the context of the press, public opinion, and activists.

Showcasing French participation in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, this book shows the French army at the heart of revolutionary, social, and cultural change. Osman argues that efforts to transform the French army into a citizen army before 1789 prompted and helped shape the French Revolution.

While the Arab people took center stage in the Arab Spring protests, academic studies have focused more on structural factors to understand the limitations of these popular uprisings. This book analyzes the role and complexities of popular agency in the Arab Spring through the framework of contentious politics and social movement theory.

As the dominant political force in Lebanon and one of the most powerful post-Islamist organizations in the world, Hizbullah is a source of great controversy and uncertainty in the West. Despite the significant attention paid to this group by the media, the details of Hizbullah's evolution have frequently confounded politicians--and even scholars. In this important study, Joseph Alagha, a scholar with unprecedented access to the organization, exhaustively and objectively analyzes Hizbullah's historical evolution and offers a revolutionary new perspective on the political phenomenon of the organization."Hizbullah's Identity Construction "is a timely examination of one of the world's most turbulent regions; a major contribution to the study of contemporary Islamic political movements in the Middle East; and a refreshing departure from the bland hagiographies and ad hominem attacks that are all too common in studies of Hizbullah's murky history. Superbly documented and argued, and rooted in broad knowledge of contemporary Islamist political thought, this study brings much-needed clarity to a hot-button subject. "Joseph Alagha remains one of the most thorough and careful analysts of Hizbullah's political ideology and practice. Scholars, analysts, and policy makers will find in this work a veritable treasure trove of research and insights into this complex organization."--Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University

'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph 'Brilliant ... An amazing story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan Snow IT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz. The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war. As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9. Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.