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Featured Review
| Martin Malia. History's Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World. Edited and foreword by Terence Emmons. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 360. $30.00.
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| In this complex and visionary work, Martin Malia places the Russian Revolution in the succession of world revolutions. On the way to his destination, he interweaves five lines of argument, all of them controversial: about the nature of revolution in general, about European revolutions, about European history, about comparative history, and about Russia in world-historical perspective. Terence Emmons, editor of the posthumous volume, tells us that Malia had already stated the main themes of his argument in a paper presented to the American Historical Association in 1975. But it took another quarter century—and the Soviet Union's collapse—for him to decide that the era and the interlocked sequence of great revolutions began with the Hussites in 1415 and ended not with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but with Joseph Stalin's camouflaged refutation and abandonment of Marxism during the 1930s. For a sixth line of argument eventually emerges to complicate the others. Most strenuously of all, Malia insists that Marxism fails doubly as a historical analysis and as a guide to creating a viable society, yet from 1848 onward provided a political myth of enormous persuasiveness and momentous, destructive consequence. With so much going on at once, this book resembles a mountain-climbing train that is constantly doubling back on itself. |
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The book as a whole moves through five main sections, broadly chronological rather than in accordance with the six arguments: an introduction setting the problem and sketching its European context; a first chronological chunk on inspired great revolutions from the Hussites to the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt; the classic Atlantic revolutions of England, America, and France; the arc from nineteenth-century non-great revolutions through the development of Marxism to the Russian Revolution broadly defined; and, finally, conclusions, substantial appendixes, and inconveniently located endnotes. In a book like this, after all, an informed reader repeatedly wants to look up where Malia is getting his evidence and with whom he is disagreeing. We would therefore read much more effectively with notes on the page. Since I often questioned particular details (for example Malia's downplaying the peasants' and bourgeois' crucial places in the French Revolution), I found myself burrowing in the back to see what substantiation he was offering for his descriptions. |
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Rather than dwelling on the accuracy of Malia's multiple historical narratives, however, let me concentrate on the six organizing arguments. Every one of them deserves attention. Every one raises serious doubts. On the nature of revolution in general, Malia complements numerous short sermons in the historical text with two appendixes, one on the historiography of great revolutions seen as a set, another on what he calls the high social science "staseology" of revolutions. As we might expect, staseologists such as Barrington Moore, Jr., and Moore's student Theda Skocpol come off less well than the historians. |
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Malia refuses to state a formal definition of revolution, preferring to develop his exposition historically. Nevertheless, he eventually commits himself to a distinctive conception of great revolutions. In Malia's view, for which Alexis de Tocqueville becomes a major inspiration, a great revolution involves alignment of most segments of a large state's population against the existing regime, radicalization of the opposition, violent overthrow of the previous rulers, substitution of new governing institutions for the old, and consolidation of new power within modified versions of those institutions. Not only Tocqueville but the French Revolution of 1789 inspires the book's organizing model. |
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