War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

About this book

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians one thats grown increasingly apparent in recent years. Its a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or Franois Furet who links the Stalinist purges to an illness originating with the French Revolution. The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson. In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt providing a new perspective on the English American French and twentieth-century revolutions.