to the finland station poll - marx engels lenin saint-simon michelet owen

Not a west end girl amongst them!

stand back! he's a fourierist!

"i warn you," rather.

fuck. i want to read this.

maybe senior year

Wilson is my favorite critic ever and I'm so glad this poll exists even if he lacks the philosophical imagination to figure out how to synthesize Taine and Renan in a coherent thesis.

Just bought a copy of this due to this poll. Plus the collected emily dickinson inspired by that thread. Im psyched

yeah the book is kind of all over the place but its so well written and moves so quickly

rip death of thirties radicalism

the routledge edition i have has a very contrite intro

after Random House submitted the editor to a show trial

reading this now and was sort of surprised after googling to find that owen's son was a u.s. representative from indiana and has a monument at the indiana statehouse, despite being an anti-christian abolitionist socialist whatever. 19th century america could be so weird and wide-open.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Bakunin, wow, did hoos not vote??

i couldn't get into this back when, wasn't giving me what i (mistakenly or not) thought i was supposed to be able to get from it

but now it's quite breezy and ~relevant to my interests~

do people even read michelet in english now? kind of seems o.o.p. but after the michelet chapters i had an instant hunger for thousands of pages of french history

I had the same impulse as an undergraduate after reading Barthes on Michelet, but I was put off by the lack of translations--his book on witchcraft is still in print in English, though, and some 19th century translations are available on Google Books, though in an irritatingly fragmentary way.

To answer your actual question, I don't think people read Michelet in English, in part because of the lack of modern editions available and in part because most people with a yen for 19th century French historiography just go to the French editions.

The parts about Trotsky and Lenin were by far my favorite. The version of Lenin put forth in this book is not something I've been able to shake; he exists alongside the guy who ordered "100 kulak bloodsuckers to be hanged publicly so that people can see them," and I haven't really been able to reconcile these two portraits. I think there is a passage in Lenin where he writes about someone's class interests being a more important marker of their position wrt the revolution than whatever ideas they express or refrain from expressing. Here, I think, is the ultimate perversion of Marx's notion that identity is produced by concrete social reality (maybe Marx believed Lenin's reductionist view of this too too.) People are always more or less than their backgrounds make them appear to be, in my view. If this is bourgeois individualism, ok: Lenin's "us vs them" view didn't ultimately lead to socialism, a system which I think would depend on respecting individuals in their difference... something that doesn't exist under capitalism either.

Two of my roommates are reading this on my recommendation

Time for a reread?

Engels prediction from 1887 is extraordinary pic.twitter.com/sTou7j3nA4

— Mr Demos of Pnyx (@gem_ste) March 15, 2021