Book launch: How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?
Facebook event here.
Tuesday 13 June, 6.30pm, £2 with refreshments
1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3QE
Join author and historian Neil Davidson at Bookmarks to discuss the new abridged version of his popular How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?
“I was frankly poleaxed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic, and socialist. He’s sending me, at least, back to the library.” —MIKE DAVIS, author, Planet of Slums
Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, the concept of the “bourgeois revolution” has recently come in for sustained criticism from both left and right.
In this comprehensive rejoinder, Neil Davidson seeks to answer the question, How revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions? by systematically examining the approach taken by a wide range of thinkers to explain their causes, outcomes, and content across the historical period from the sixteenth-century Reformation to twentieth-century decolonization. Davidson demonstrates that there is much at stake—far from being a stale issue for the history books, understanding these struggles of the past can offer insightful lessons for today’s radicals.
Neil Davidson currently lectures in Sociology with the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize, Holding Fast to an Image of the Past (2014) and We Cannot Escape History (2015).
