Two More Books

 Hello Posterity. You might have heard of me. I'm "thwap." A practitioner of the dying hobby of "blogging." In the young childhood of the internet, many people heretofore excluded from the distribution channels of the mass media used the medium of "blogging" to get their ideas out to a potentially worldwide audience. 

They typed essays and articles and diaries and musings. Whole books even. It was "citizen journalism" it was an online "marketplace of ideas." It was fresh and exhilarating an new. It was even impacting the public conversation on politics and policies.

Now of course, the youngsters and other lazy people are limiting themselves to unnuanced blurbs and shallow observations in 145-characters or less (or something, I don't know) on "Twitter." 

The first book I'll tell you about is a university textbook from Cambridge's "New Approaches to European History" series; Jonathan Sperber's The European Revolutions, 1848-1851.

In case you don't know, after some bad harvests (followed by a bumper crop that caused grain prices to plummet) there was social unrest all across Continental Europe. In the spring, in the face of massive urban uprisings, the French constitutional monarchy fell, the Kingdom of the Naples & Sicily, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Hapsburg Empire were all compelled to accept liberal ministers and call for parliamentary elections within their states' borders. By the end of the year however, reactionary forces regained the upper hand and by 1851, when Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Napoleon, recently elected President of the Second Republic declared himself Emperor, it was all over with conservative triumphs across Europe. Both Britain and Russia remained relatively stable, with Britain extending moral support (and little else) to the constitutional monarchists, while Russia intervened diplomatically and militarily on the side of reaction.

Sperber does an excellent job of describing the social structure of Europe in the decades leading up to 1848. He also shows how the ideological importance of the French Revolution of 1789 weighed on the minds of everyone involved; some being inspired by it, others terrified of repeating it. 

Railroads and advanced capitalism were disrupting the economy of Europe the way they'd disrupted Britain a few decades previously. The British ruling class had crushed the working class Chartist movement in their own country and Sperber argues that the uprisings of 1848 were caused by the same social-economic upheavals that had produced Chartism.

Cities had become more important to the running of states by 1848. It was no longer enough for a monarch to have a court that could travel from place to place. Capital cities, at the hubs or transportation and communication networks, as well as finance, had to be controlled to control the 19th Century state. When the barricades went up, most monarchs (impoverished by the Napoleonic wars and the economic turmoil that followed them) lacked the military wherewithal to strike back, hence their capitulation to the early demands of the revolution for constitutional assemblies and elections.

Karl Marx lived through this period. Indeed The Communist Manifesto was written and produced during the revolutions. In Marx's analysis, the liberal revolutionaries were not strong enough to push the feudal social order from power in 1848. Neither were the urban working classes. But the hints of continued class struggles were there for all to see.  Liberal constitutionalists were a small, wealthy minority of commoners. 

Secondly,  I'm reading Robert C. Tucker's The Lenin Anthology:

Lenin writes with a kind of sneering condescension about the ideas of others he disagrees with. But so far I find myself agreeing with him more than I disagree with him. I'm glad I took it off the shelf.