Leon Trotsky and the Natural History of Revolutions

Gottschalk, Louis

doi:10.1086/218024

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The symbolic baggage of the wave sequence is clearer still when considered in contrast to water's enrolment for an unabashed revolutionary politics and analysis. An exemplary case of this can be found in Leon Trotsky's (1932) History of the Russian Revolution , a text that reviewer Louis Gottschalk (1938) described, suggestively, as a “natural history” of revolution. While this text has its own underlying animus and genre, it is useful for comparison.…”

Section: Movement Waters: Key Concepts and Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

Matthews

2023

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The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high‐pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world‐ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being‐otherwise with water and its meanings.

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Section: Movement Waters: Key Concepts and Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

Matthews

2023

Antipode

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The Attraction of Permanence

Calvert

1970

Revolution

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The ‘philosophical premises’ of uneven and combined development

Rosenberg¹

2012

Rev. Int. Stud.

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Recent debates over Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD) have focused on its potential in the field of International Relations, but they have not established the source of this potential. Does it derive from the philosophical premises of dialectics? The present article argues that the idea of U&CD in fact involves an innovation as fundamental for Marxist dialectics as for other branches of social theory. And it also argues that in formulating this innovation, Trotsky provided a general solution to some of the most basic problems in social and international thought. The argument is set out in three parts. The first part reconstructs Trotsky's own account of dialectical premises and their implications for social explanation. The second shows how the concept of U&CD departs from this, in ways that presuppose the tacit addition of a further ontological premise. Finally, part three analyses the locus classicus of the concept – the opening chapter of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution – showing how it is this additional premise which underpins the central achievement of the idea: its incorporation of ‘the international’ into a theory of history.

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Leon Trotsky and the Natural History of Revolutions

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The Attraction of Permanence

The ‘philosophical premises’ of uneven and combined development

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