Call for Papers
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 59 (2019)
Changing the World – Revolutions in History
Karl Marx famously called them the »locomotives of history«. Revolutions spurred the imagination not only of intellectuals. They raised dreams of a »better world« and hopes for another tomorrow. But what were revolutions? What distinguished them from rebellions and protests? How did it feel to be a »revolutionary«, whether male or female? The historiography of revolutions has followed its own cycles of demand and decline. During the 1970s and 1980s, the search for revolutions (and research into their non-appearance) was accompanied by a large dose of romanticism. Since then, the concept of »revolution« as a tool for the analysis of historical change has often been replaced by other, less politically charged categories. Historical research into revolutions, including approaches from social history, has lost a lot of its earlier momentum. At any rate, revolutions rarely ever trigger controversies nowadays.
In the past, this was fundamentally different. Divergent interpretations of the German revolution of 1918/19, which currently has its centenary, led to bitter conflicts, not least between the two German states, the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. Writing the history of revolutions has always been a contribution to contemporary quests for political meaning and to controversies over cultural practices of remembrance. One of the many questions is whether specific historical processes of political, social, economic and cultural change can be labelled as »revolutions« at all. Were the American struggle for independence from Great Britain and the formation of nation states in Latin America and Haiti »revolutions«? Can the many failed attempts to topple monarchies in Europe in 1848/49 be best described as »revolutions«? Is it appropriate to describe the Nazi »seizure of power« in 1933 as a National Socialist »revolution«? Were the student protesters of 1968 in fact global »cultural revolutionaries«? What was the connection between war and revolution during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And, finally, how did the experience of decolonization modify theories and interpretive models of revolutionary change?
Among the contested issues in the historiography of revolutions is not only the question, whether revolutions really cause an increase in liberties and »emancipation«. The role of violence in revolu-tions has also been hotly debated. Some political observers have argued that the potential for revolutions to be conducted »peacefully« – as in the GDR in 1989 – might be an indication of a »special path« of Germany. Those in favour of this view did not hesitate to endorse the events in 1989 as a beacon of ›civility‹ in contrast to other uprisings and protest movements. Myth-making about revolutions is not restricted to the era of the Cold War, but has been embedded in a variety of different political traditions and narratives.
Intellectual and scholarly debates over the theory of revolutions have their own history: contribu-tions range from the important texts by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson to those by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Michail Bakunin, Hannah Arendt, Michael Foucault or Franz Fanon. The 2019 issue of the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte is devoted to the theme of »revolutions«, and aims to bring momentum and new ideas to the long-established debates on this topic.
Four broadly defined thematic fields are at the core of our attention:
TIMES OF REVOLUTION
Contributions to this theme should investigate the forms and the specific temporal structure of revolutions: which notions of societal »order« shaped revolutionary movements? Do revolutions always occur spontaneously, or is the notion of a planned revolution conceivable? What is the role of violence in different stages of a revolutionary transformation? Which notions of legality shaped revolutionary movements, and, even more importantly: which social groups constituted them? Revolutions were shaped by intensive struggles over legitimacy and power, and by attempts to control time. This is obvious for the French revolution and its introduction of a new revolutionary calendar as well as new season names, but was also a recognisable element of all larger twentieth century revolutionary movements. What accounts for the dynamics of these struggles over time and the redefinition of the »future«? By tackling these questions, papers to this theme could investigate the horizon of expectations of the revolutionaries – and their opponents – and thus contribute to an understanding of revolutionary agency.
AIMS AND OBJECTS OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
In this second section we are investigating the aims and objects of revolutionary change. Who was the subject of the critique and practice of the revolutionaries: monarchs and aristocrats, the state and elites, legal institutions, feudal structures in the agrarian economy, the hegemony of parties, the churches and religion more generally? Which forms of counter-revolutionary activity are identifiable, and what were their motives? Conflicts over power and domination were not only located in the political system or the constitutional sphere – if constitutions existed at all –, but also in property relations, in the access to resources such as capital or labour and land. Revolutionaries used threat scenarios to legitimise their own political ideologies, a specific understanding of justice, forms of self-empowerment and reasoning about a »state of emergency«. These cultural frameworks for a revolutionary »state of exception«, and the violent practices they justified, are a fruitful subject of inquiry.
ACTORS AND THE DYNAMICS OF REVOLUTIONARY AGENCY
The third dimension of this theme issue is focused on the logic of revolutionary action, on the actors who drive revolutions forward and on their repercussions in the widest sense, in terms of social, political, economic, gendered and cultural consequences. Which of the key groups of actors could achieve their aims? What was the role of utopian ideas, and of the shifting intersection between expectations and disappointments? How far-reaching was the drive towards change, the bottom-up dynamics, the circulation and replacement of elites? And, in analytical terms: how can historians assess and measure these aspects of revolutionary change? Which interpretive models were used by different disciplines in their attempts to measure or even quantify the success or failure of revolutionary movements? Thus, the volume is open for contributions on the history of disciplinary approaches to the study of revolutions. We explicitly invite scholars from the historical social sciences to present results and perspectives of their research on revolutions, from the past right up to the present, such as work on the »Arab spring« or the transformation in the Ukraine.
SPACES OF REVOLUTION
The concept of revolution has its own history. Part of that history is the question whether the con-cept has valency and repercussions beyond Europe. Generally, we invite contributions on revolu-tions both in Europe and the wider world. The example of decolonization demonstrates how deeply developments within and beyond Europe are often entwined. Many of the classical theoretical texts on revolutions compared developments in Europe with those in the Americas, and the USA specifically. The reception of the work of Franz Fanon on the critique of colonial racism, and its use as a blueprint for violent revolutionary uprising, demonstrates the wide range of conceptual readings and thematic connections. Many traditional questions about the significance of ethnicity, class and gender in revolutions take on a new meaning and allow new insights when we consider them from a post-colonial perspective, which recalibrates the position of Europe in the wider world.
We are inviting all interested scholars to formulate their ideas and proposals for papers in relation to the four central themes of our call for papers. Abstracts – and subsequent article manuscripts – can be submitted in either German or English. Proposals for papers should be no longer than 3,000 characters – including a short bio – and should reach the editors by 31 May 2018. In preparation of the volume, a conference with invited contributors to the volume will take place at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin on 25/26 October 2018.
The Archiv für Sozialgeschichte is edited by Beatrix Bouvier, Kirsten Heinsohn, Thomas Kroll, Anja Kruke, Philipp Kufferath (managing editor), Friedrich Lenger, Ute Planert, Dietmar Süß and Meik Woyke.