While Europe was the centre stage of revolutions since the end of the 18th century, the non-European world, too, was drawn into revolutions around the same period and up to the years of the early 21st century.
How do we understand these revolutionary passions, born outside the continent of Europe? How far have they been conditioned by the European matrices they refer to? Have they, in turn, given birth to exportable models ?
Across three continents: Latin America, the Middle East and India, three authors interrogate the phenomenon of revolution and hold a dialogue with the major work of François Furet entitled, The Passing of an Illusion. The latter is a retrospective of the ‘communist idea’, that was published in 1995, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.
Furet’s ideas of the links between revolution and democracy, revolution and totalitarianism, revolution and egalitarianism are explored with reference to the revolutions in Cuba (1959), Nicaragua (1979), the revolutions of the Middle East, specifically the Iranian revolution (1989), and the revolutionary movement in India prior to Independence.
Hamit Bozarslan, Gilles Bataillon and Christophe Jaffrelot explore the nuances within revolutionary contexts like the ‘bureaucratization’ of Revolution in Latin America, the growing religious fundamentalism of Khomeni’s Iran and the ‘revolutionary terrorism’ of heroes like Bhagat Singh.
The book will be of interest to political scientists and historians and students of international affairs and other general readers.