The Best Book About Revolution in 30+ Years

Martin Malia died before he finished what he must have intended to be, if not his summum bonum, then at least his summing-up. It was left to Terrence Emmons, his professional colleague, to put it in shape for presentation to the world.

Bully for Terrence Emmons. Malia’s History’s Locomotives is the best book on revolution I have read since—oh, perhaps since John Dunn’s Modern Revolutions, back in the 70s.

Malia was a lifelong student of the Soviet “Tragedy” (as he called it), but he was a good deal more than that. Perhaps his most original and important work was his Russia Under Western Eyes, in which he tried to see how our vision of Russia was refracted or distorted through our own prejudices and aspirations.

History’s Locomotives can be read as an extension of that approach. Here, Malia tries to understand the entire history of Marxist revolution in the context of the insights and blinders of Western thought. What he has produced is a brisk—sometimes to the point of leaving you breathless—canter through near 600 years of European political upheaval.

Malia is by no means a sympathizer with Marxism. But one of the many virtues of this book is that he approaches his subject without the dripping hostility of, say Richard Pipes, or other students of the revolutionary tradition who sometimes lest their hostility get in the way of real understanding. Malia approaches the matter with something closer to Olympian detachment, suavely exhibiting the errors and misunderstandings without much in the way editorial overload. Indeed ironically, if he spills any venom in this book, it is aimed at his academic colleagues the sociologists who, it seems, are too given theorizing to appreciate the sheer facticity of history.

Shorter Marin Malia: political upheaval is a constant of social life, but “revolution” is a highly specific social construct, peculiar to the European condition. But even “revolution” cannot be reduced to a formula. Malia has the historian’s nominalism (I think this is his beef with the sociologists). He recognizes—insists—that revolutions learn from their predecessors and shape their successors in what comes perilously close to a kind of Hegelian aufhaben.

In particular, Malia demonstrates how the very idea of “revolution” begins (with the English) as a synonym for “restoration”—how the early “revolutionaries” felt they were just coming full circle. It was the Americans who, even as they sought “restoration” found themselves creating something that appeared wholly new. It was the French who undertook to systematize and generalize their example. It was the French and the Americans together who set the stage for 1848—the first “anticipated” revolution, and for whatever it may be worth, the which the reactionaries won.

Locomotives can be tough going it times, not because of the style, which is smooth and professional, but because Malia covers so much with (apparently to him) such ease—I sympathize with the Amazon reviewer who asks plaintively for an occasional definition now and then. I suspect the book might not be quite as finished a product ass Emmons makes it out to be. Still, it is an invaluable retelling of a familiar story, well worth reading and, I suspect, just as much worth rereading.