Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Occupy Wall Street as a revolutionary movement?
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:22:00 BST
Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, CEISR's David Andress outlines the ways in which the Occupy Wall Street movement differs from events such as the French Revolution - while noting the parallels that offer warnings to both the protesters and those they are protesting against.
An internationally-recognised expert on the culture and politics of the 1790s, Professor Andress writes that "Contemporary culture has a habit of playing fast and loose with the term 'revolution', happy to attribute it to events which are at most the crumbling of an unpopular dictatorship in the face of protest. Real 'world-historical' revolutions, to use a time-honored phrase, are rare. That’s a good thing, because they are also, in their grandeur, terrible."
The full article is available at the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy pages. David Andress' most recent books are 1789: The threshold of the modern age (2008) and The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (2005), both published by Little, Brown.