This term I am teaching a “Modern European” history class, and I had my students read one of my favorite works from Karl Marx, the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” which is a scathing criticism of populism and a warning to the proletariat about making alliances with the bourgeoise in revolutionary situations. It is one of my favorite pieces not only because I love to see Marx be a historian, but also because I think it is one of the clearest self-applications of his theory to history, demonstrating how the class struggle manifests and impacts events in his own time.
I’ve read this article multiple times, but for some reason one of the opening lines immediately broke through and opened a new range of thoughts in my metaphorical mental filing cabinet.
Marx writes:
“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such a period of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”
He goes on to add about the French Revolutionaries of 1789,
“And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic, its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy.”
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