Reading list

The study of revolutions is inherently political, and this is very much reflected in the available literature. At present, the subject is rather unfashionable in academia. Hence an unusually high proportion of the academic books listed in this handout either date from earlier decades when the concept of revolution was less unfamiliar to English-speaking academics, or come from conference proceedings etc. I have tried as far as possible to include the key figures that contemporary sociologists of revolution would make reference to.

The people who have done most thinking about revolutions, of course, have been revolutionaries, and this handout draws strongly on "primary sources" - the words of practicing revolutionaries. Again, you will notice a certain sociology of knowledge reflected in the list: the "classical" revolutionaries are by now of interest to academia, and so remain in print, while literature by contemporary revolutionaries is of course currently in print. For the former, you may have to search through various collections of their writings to locate copies of pieces which were originally published as pamphlets or newspaper articles, etc.

Anything between these two extremes is routinely difficult to find, since revolutionary groups rarely have the money to reprint their favourite authors in readily accessible editions. This is partly remedied by the relatively low costs of the Internet (someone still has to transcribe or scan a text, and turn it into HTML format), and I have included a certain number of Web sites. If you are interested, you will find a good range out there!

The best single textbook for this course is

· John Foran (ed.), Theorizing revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997). This is a collection of essays on the sociology of revolution, covering some of the most important theoretical approaches and a range of specific examples.

A good alternative is

· Willie Thompson, The left in history. Revolution and reform in twentieth-century politics (London: Pluto, 1997). This is a very good overview of the history of revolutionary politics in the last 100 years.

I recommend you start the course by choosing either of these, or one of the books listed below, and reading it through slowly:

· Kolya Abramsky (ed.), Restructuring and resistance: diverse voices of struggle in western Europe (2001) is an up-to-date collection of writings by contemporary activists in and around the "anti-globalisation movement".

· Hannah Arendt, On revolution (London: Penguin, 1973) is a classic discussion by this well-known political philosopher.

· Todd Gitlin, The sixties: years of hope, days of rage. (New York: Bantam, 1993) is a classic history of the "revolutionary moment" of the 1960s.

· Antonio Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) is the classic English-language selection of this difficult but rewarding theorist: the leader of the Italian Communist Party, writing as a political prisoner in the face of rising fascism in Europe, and asking "Where did we go wrong?"

· Karl Marx, The civil war in France. (many different editions; also available online via the Marxists Internet Archive) is his classic account of the Paris Commune of 1871.

· Daniel Singer, Whose millennium? Theirs or ours? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999) is an intensely readable book by this veteran American journalist considering the issue of revolution at the start of the 21st century, with discussions of a wide range of different countries.

· Theda Skocpol, Social revolutions in the modern world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) is a recent collection of articles by the doyenne of the study of revolutions.

· Starhawk, Webs of power: notes from the global uprising. (Gabriola, BC: New Society, 2002; much of this material is available online at her own web pages) is a very readable collection of essays from this leading anti-globalisation campaigner.

· Mark Steel, Reasons to be cheerful: from punk to New Labour through the eyes of a dedicated troublemaker (London: Simon and Schuster, 2001) is a very funny personal history of activism by this well-known stand-up comedian.

· Sidney Tarrow, Power in movement: social movements and contentious politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) is a very wide-ranging discussion which places the subject of revolution firmly in relation to other kinds of social movements.

· Charles Tilly, European revolutions 1492 - 1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) is an overview of the revolutionary history of Europe in the last half-millennium by this well-known scholar of social movements.

Other starting points for this course might include:

· the Marxists Internet Archive at http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/admin/intro, which has a massive collection of writing from classic and more recent authors in the Marxist tradition;

· the Struggle collection at struggle.ws includes a wide range of material from anarchist and other popular movements in Ireland and abroad;

· my own Tools for change pages at this site, particularly the section on revolutions;

· The counter-cultural On-line Infoshop with a wide range of relevant resources: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~mai/;

· Connolly Books, East Essex St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2 is one of the better sources in Dublin for literature on revolutions;

· Red Banner is currently the only non-aligned revolutionary magazine I know of in Ireland(2 an issue);

· The annual Alternative futures and popular protest conference in Manchester is perhaps the only regular academic conference which focuses on revolutions and related issues such as social movements and utopias. A number of photocopied papers from this conference are available in the library, and I hope to make some at least of the collected proceedings available;

· A number of revolutionary groups of course exist in Ireland, several of which have extensive bookshops available at their conferences etc. Events organised by groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Workers Solidarity Movement, etc. often include discussion of issues relevant to the study of revolutions!

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