"A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas, the Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The Expanding Blaze reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event--and that it didn't end with the transformation and independence of America. Rather, the revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the revolution's international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas--including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty--helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context."--

It is of the very definition of any "classic" work that it will not only introduce a new depth and direction of thought, but that its original insights endure. When it first appeared in 1940, Reason and Revolution by Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was acclaimed for its profound and undistorted reading of Hegel's social and political theory. Today, the appreciation of Marcuse's work has remained high, more relevant now than ever before. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

2021 Reprint of the 1940 Edition. Translated by Bertram D. Wolfe. Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this short work the author criticizes the Bolsheviks and presents a prescient warning of their dictatorship. Nonetheless, she continued to call for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", albeit not of the one-party Bolshevik model. In that context, she wrote the words "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" ("Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently") and continues in the same chapter: "The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress". Bolshevik theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky responded to this criticism by arguing that Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to Russia of 1917. They stated that the lessons of actual experience such as the confrontation with the bourgeois parties had forced them to revise the Marxian strategy.

The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution

"The Bolshevik Myth" from Alexander Berkman. Anarchist known for his political activism and writing (1870-1936).

On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

Following the October Revolution of 1917, a revolutionary wave swept across Europe. In this period, Leon Trotsky, along with Lenin, was pivotal in setting up the Third (Communist) International, which represented a world party of the working class. The International could not be conjured out of thin air. Much like the Bolshevik Party, it had to be built through struggle against many different tendencies and ideas. This book collects all of Trotsky's writings and speeches related to the first five years of the Communist International. Highlighting the task he and Lenin faced in trying to educate the young communist parties of Germany, France and elsewhere, it deals with many problems that the working-class movement still comes up against today. This includes the question of the United Front, the national question, the consciousness of the working class and how it changes and much more. Today, the capitalist system faces the deepest crisis in its history. However, we are faced with the same problem Trotsky outlined in 1924: there is no mass international organisation of the working class with a clear understanding of the task at hand. Therefore, this work is not just of historical interest, but should be read as a guide to action for all workers and youth seeking a revolutionary way out of the present crisis. This edition contains a new introduction by Fred Weston, editor of Marxist.com, which outlines some of the key debates and decisions as well as an outline of the development of the International in this period.

2011 Reprint of 1955 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this work Sidney Hook, a distinguished scholar, examines the chief issues which have divided Marxists from non-Marxists, and Marxists from each other. This volume of exposition, comment and readings is offered as an introduction to the study of Marxism in conflicting theory and practice. A valuable collection of original source readings are provided, including "The Communist Manifesto", "Historical Materialism," "The Fetishism of Commodities," "Religion and Economics," and much more by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kautsky, Trotsky and Luxemburg.

Articles and letters to young militants expelled in 1935 from the rightward-moving Socialist Party of France, explaining the kind of party that must be built to lead a socialist revolution.

Explains how the meaning of these basic themes has changed throughout history and how these ideas are understood by the opposing classes. Revolution as the source of effective human emancipation.