Introduction
You want to understand how modern revolutionary movements arose and how abstract philosophy transformed the political landscape of Europe. You observe persistent social inequality, yet you struggle to trace the lineage of the ideas meant to cure it. Edmund Wilson examines the historical evolution of socialist thought from the French Revolution to the arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station in Petrograd.
Edmund Wilson traces the historical evolution of socialist thought from the French Revolution to Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station.
You will explore these central questions as you read the book:
- How did the romantic discovery of the common people alter historical writing?
- What caused early utopian experiments to fail before the rise of scientific socialism?
- How did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels forge a revolutionary doctrine from disparate philosophical traditions?
- What mechanisms drove the permanent split between Marxists and anarchists?
- How did Lenin adapt nineteenth-century theory to seize power in twentieth-century Russia?
1. The Historical Method of Michelet
Jules Michelet revolutionized historical writing by resurrecting the collective life of ordinary people through archives and psychological empathy.
You discover historical method in the text through the encounter of young professor Jules Michelet with Giovanni Vico. In January 1824, Michelet found a reference to Vico and immediately learned Italian to read the Scienza Nuova. Vico argued that the social world is the work of man. Societies pass through regular phases of growth driven by human intelligence, language, law, and customs.
Michelet revolutionized historical writing by using state archives and public records to resurrect the collective life and economic realities of past societies. Rather than treating history merely as a series of biographies of great men, Michelet integrated law, art, industry, and religion. He demonstrated how civilizations developed organically through the actions of ordinary people.
Michelet spent twenty years wandering the silent galleries of the French Record Office as Conservateur des Archives. He listened to the whispers of forgotten soldiers and common people.
Michelet completely identified his personal emotions and life events with the historical subjects he wrote about, viewing history as the human spirit fighting through the ages.
Michelet suffered through the revolutions he chronicled. He experienced intense psychological and physical stress as if the historical events were happening directly to him. He viewed human consciousness as finally looking back on history with new insight through his work.
Michelet wrote in his letters about going through the terrors of death during September and standing at the guillotine. He simultaneously noted his wife's pregnancy as a moment of suspense full of fear. He recorded his own birth in 1798 as the culmination of Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties.
2. The Origins of Socialism
Early socialist thinkers like Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen sought to replace capitalist exploitation with cooperative and scientific communities.
Gracchus Babeuf and his Society of Equals attempted to push the French Revolution beyond political liberty toward complete economic equality and the abolition of private property. Babeuf argued that the Revolution was unfinished because the reaction under the Directory had left the people starving while property was concentrated in the hands of a small minority. The Equals drafted a plan for a communist society where land belonged to no one, all citizens worked, and goods were distributed through a national community.
The working people of Paris suffered extreme hunger and cold during the winter of 1795-96. Babeuf's Society of Equals was betrayed by a stool pigeon in May 1796 just before their projected uprising, and Babeuf was taken to Vendôme in a cage before being guillotined. He read a defense extending to three hundred pages at his trial, after which thirty of his followers were executed.
You can trace the core principles of the Society of Equals directly in these rules:
- Defend to the death the interests of the people
- Abolish individual property in land so that it belongs to no one
- Ensure that all able-bodied persons work and unpleasant work is rotated
- Supply the necessities of life through the government and eat at communal tables
The Comte de Saint-Simon rejected the egalitarianism of Babeuf in favor of a scientifically organized society managed by a hierarchical meritocracy of industrialists and savants. Saint-Simon argued that society must be organized around production and consumption rather than military conquest or metaphysical politics. He divided humanity into three classes, placing scientists and intellectuals at the spiritual head and the propertied in charge of governance, while ensuring the ultimate goal was improving the physical and moral lot of the poorest class.
Saint-Simon began publishing his writings in 1802 with the Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva. He ordered his valet to wake him every morning with the reminder that he had great things to do, and later worked as a copyist on Montmartre living in extreme poverty, spending nine hours a day working for small pay.
Robert Owen successfully transformed a wretched population of cotton-mill workers into a high-standard community at New Lanark through shorter hours, higher wages, and strict moral monitoring. Owen took over cotton mills in New Lanark, Scotland, operated by dirty, drunken workers and five-to-ten-year-old orphans, and turned it into a model community within a quarter of a century.
3. The Partnership of Marx and Engels
Karl Marx adopted Prometheus and Lucifer as his personal mythical symbols, rejecting divine authority and traditional religious resignation in favor of human defiance. Early poetry and university writings reveal Marx's deep identification with Promethean defiance against gods who strip humanity of its freedom, culminating in a worldview where he assumed a diabolic, rebellious persona.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels merged German philosophy, French history, and British economic reality into a coherent revolutionary doctrine.
Marx prefixed his doctor's dissertation with the speech of Aeschylus' Prometheus to Hermes, choosing to keep his misfortune rather than remain a faithful messenger. He concluded that German philosophy remained purely ideological because it lacked practical influence under an obsolete feudal regime, leading him to demand that philosophy must actively change the world. In his notes on Feuerbach written in 1845, Marx concluded that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, whereas the real task is to change it.
Friedrich Engels observed the horrifying reality of industrial exploitation during twenty-two months in Manchester in the 1842 economic depression, convincing him that class antagonisms were reshaping political life. Engels maintained a double life in Manchester, working at his father's firm Ermen & Engels by day and spending his evenings with Mary Burns in Salford gathering material on industrial misery.
The intellectual collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began in 1844 in Paris and combined different streams of thought into a new revolutionary doctrine. Engels stopped in Paris on his way home to Barmen in late August 1844 to look up Marx, sparking a ten-day conversation that initiated their lifelong literary and intellectual collaboration.
The Communist Manifesto combined rigorous historical theory with a concrete program for revolutionary action to overthrow the bourgeois social order. The Communist Manifesto was printed in London in February 1848, distributed to a few hundred members of the Communist League, and initially had little immediate influence.
The Manifesto laid out a ten-point transitional program aimed at centralizing credit and the means of transport:
- Expropriation of landed property, and the use of land rents to defray state expenditure
- A vigorously graded income tax
- Abolition of the right of inheritance
- Confiscation of the property of all emigres and rebels
- Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly
- Centralization of the means of transport in the hands of the State
- Increase of national factories and means of production, cultivation of uncultivated land, and improvement of cultivated land in accordance with a general plan
- Universal and equal obligation to work; organization of industrial armies, especially for agriculture
- Agriculture and urban industry to work hand-in-hand, in such a way as, by degrees, to obliterate the distinction between town and country
- Public and free education of all children. Abolition of factory work for children in its present form. Education and material production to be combined
4. The Revolutions of 1848 and Exile
The failure of the 1848 revolutions drove Marx and Engels into decades of harsh exile, intense polemics, and rigorous economic studies in London.
During the 1848 revolution, Marx utilized the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as a formidable weapon to goad the assembly into bolder action. Peak circulation reached 6000. Marx contributed 5000 francs out of 6000 from his inheritance to buy arms for Belgian workers. Marx liquidated the Communist League, put his remaining patrimony and Jenny's money into acquiring the newspaper, and campaigned for democracy while suppressing explicit communist talk to win broader support.
Engels declared that every one of their articles struck like a shell and burst, and Lenin later called the paper an unsurpassed model of a revolutionary organ.
The failure of the 1848 revolutions left Marx penniless, hounded by authorities, and forced into exile in England. With the rise of Louis Bonaparte and the onset of reaction, Marx lost his paper, spent all his funds, and had Jenny's family silver pawned. French authorities eventually issued an expulsion order, threatening to exile him to the remote department of Morbihan.
When a French police sergeant told Marx he had to leave Paris within twenty-four hours, Marx decided to flee to London.
Marx and Engels revolutionized historical analysis by discarding abstract slogans and explaining political events through underlying economic motives and class interests. Instead of viewing revolutions through general concepts or parliamentary shadow-plays, they analyzed political shifts through tangible economic pressures, such as peasant land ownership and capitalist speculation. The period 1848-50 was covered by Marx's study The Class Struggles in France. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was published in 1852, followed by The Civil War in France in 1871.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx explained the 1851 coup d'etat not through Napoleonic magic, but through the support of farm-holding peasants wanting a father-protector and a centralized bureaucracy.
Engels sacrificed his personal freedom by returning to commercial trade in Manchester to provide regular financial support for Marx and his family. Recognizing that the revolution was adjourned and that Marx needed uninterrupted leisure to complete his economic studies, Engels went back to the family firm of Ermen & Engels under an arrangement lasting three years.
Engels worked in a gloomy Manchester warehouse office, occasionally fox-hunting for military training, while faithfully sending cash remittances to London.
Marx sustained his family and engaged with global politics for over a decade by writing regular dispatches on European and American affairs for The New York Tribune. Invited by Charles A. Dana, Marx contributed extensive analyses backed by rigorous documentary research from the British Museum, sometimes aided by Engels for military and German topics. Marx supplied sixty articles during his first year as a direct contributor. He and Engels largely focused their dispatches on the Crimean War during 1853-56, and reported on the American Civil War in 1861-62.
5. The Dialectic and Das Kapital
Marx combined political economy, satire, and the Hegelian dialectic in Das Kapital to expose the fetishistic dominance of commodities over human life.
Das Kapital achieves the momentum of an epic by combining abstract economic logic with poetic imagination and a devastating critique of human greed. The poet in Marx welds together diverse intellectual techniques, allowing the book to produce a profound aesthetic and emotional impact on you.
Marx compares the bourgeois justification of crime to the way a philosopher produces ideas or a poet verses, echoing the satirical logic of Jonathan Swift.
In capitalist production, human beings are stultified into material forces while inanimate commodities and money take on a fetishistic autonomy, dominating human destinies. Exchange values and money act as independent fetishes that seem to revolve like electrons, replacing human potency and reducing workers to mere appendages of machines. This illusion arises from the separation of economic abstractions from crude human relations.
Marx cites an 1856 speech arguing that all human progress seems to endow material forces with intellectual life while reducing human life to a material force.
The Marxist Theory of Surplus Value asserts that capitalist profit is derived from unpaid labor time extracted from workers beyond the minimum required for their subsistence. Employers buy labor power at minimum subsistence cost but force workers to labor longer hours, pocketing the difference as surplus value. However, Volume III of Das Kapital revealed that individual profit rates actually tend to level out through capitalist competition, showing that surplus value and profit are distinct magnitudes.
Marx's posthumous Volume III, published by Engels in 1894, explained how total surplus value is pooled and divided proportionally among investors.
The International Working Men's Association was founded as a broad coalition of various European trade unions and socialist factions, with Marx as its directing mind. Driven by global liberal and revolutionary impulses, English trade unions appealed to French workers for a common front against employers. The organization brought together diverse groups:
- Owenites
- Chartists
- Blanquists
- Proudhonists
- nationalists
Marx steered its inaugural address between conflicting dogmas.
The International Working Men's Association was founded in St. Martin's Hall, London, on September 28, 1864, four weeks after the death of Lassalle. It grew rapidly to reach 800,000 regular members by the end of the sixties.
6. The Split in the International
Ideological and tactical clashes between Marx and Bakunin fractured the First International over state authority and revolutionary methods.
Bakunin challenged Marx's leadership within the International by organizing the anarchist faction, promoting direct action, and opposing state authority. He gained a strong following among impoverished watchmakers in the Jura mountains and controlled twelve of seventy-five delegates at the Bâle Congress of 1869. He rejected Marx's prudent strategy, demanded the abolition of the right of inheritance, and founded the secret International Social Democratic Alliance to undermine Marxist centralization.
At the Bâle Congress of 1869, Bakunin's eloquent appeal led delegates to reject the General Council's recommendation on the abolition of inheritance, marking the first major defeat for Marx's directives.
Sergey Nechayev introduced ruthless, amoral conspiracy tactics into the Russian revolutionary movement, culminating in the creation of The Catechism of a Revolutionist with Bakunin. Nechayev was twenty-one when he arrived in Geneva in 1869. He manipulated Bakunin through a forged persona of an ironclad underground committee leader. Together they wrote The Catechism of a Revolutionist, which argued that a true revolutionist must break with all moral codes, treat comrades as expendable capital, and focus solely on total, ruthless destruction of the State.
Nechayev murdered a dissenting student named Ivanov in Moscow to enforce absolute discipline before fleeing back to Geneva and betraying Bakunin. Following Ivanov's murder, police arrested three hundred young people.
The Paris Commune of 1871 served as a pivotal historical event and the first practical realization of a working-class socialist government, despite its brutal suppression. Following the collapse of Napoleon III's Second Empire and the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, the Parisian working class revolted against Thiers' provisional government and established the Commune. Although the Commune enacted radical social decrees, it was crushed by Versailles troops in May 1871, resulting in tens of thousands of executions. The Commune set a 6,000 francs yearly maximum salary for public offices.
During a single week in May 1871, twenty to forty thousand Communards were cut down by Versailles troops, while the government's repression executed, imprisoned, or exiled roughly one hundred thousand people.
At the Hague Congress on September 2, 1872, Marx and Engels produced Nechayev's threatening letter and successfully engineered the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume. Recognizing that Bakunin's secret networks and anarchist doctrines threatened their control, Marx and Engels attended the Hague Congress in person. They presented evidence of Nechayev's extortion and maneuvered the transfer of the International's headquarters to New York to prevent it from falling into anarchist hands.
7. Lenin and the Journey to Petrograd
Lenin adapted Marxist theory into a disciplined instrument of professional conspiracy, culminating in his return to Russia in April 1917.
Drawing on Karl Kautsky's principle that the vehicles of science are the bourgeois intelligentsia rather than the proletariat, Lenin insisted that a tightly disciplined, secret staff of professional revolutionaries must direct the broader movement to prevent it from falling into reformism or trade unionism. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin criticized the Economists and legal Marxists who believed historical processes would automatically accomplish socialist goals without direct intervention.
You must build an efficient structure to manage revolutionary action:
- Create a general organization dominated by a small, permanent, and secret staff of persons devoted entirely to the aim.
- Ensure the central committee holds all threads of subsidiary bodies while remaining apart and above them.
- Utilize a wide fringe of sympathizers in various professions as abettors and officials rather than short-term revolutionaries.
The failure of the war with Japan and the January 22, 1905 massacre catalyzed the Russian masses. Industrial workers took the lead, organizing soviets to coordinate strikes and challenge state power. Trotsky returned to Russia early, drafted the Soviet's documents, and became chairman on December 9, leading the historic fifty-day resistance before the government crushed the movement with brutal force.
Father Gapon led a demonstration carrying religious banners to petition the Tsar, but troops shot down men, women, and children indifferently in the square before the palace.
Disgusted by the war and the royal family's secret attempts to make peace through Rasputin, workers poured into the streets of Petrograd. The railway workers stopped the Tsar's train, forcing him to abdicate, while a Workers' Soviet sprang to life alongside the newly formed Provisional Government. On March 8, a new general strike began in Petrograd, and even elite units like the Semyonovovsky Regiment went over to the side of the rebels.
Faced with refusals from French and British authorities to grant passports, and realizing Allied attempts to block internationalist socialists, Lenin embraced Martov's plan. A party of thirty Russian exiles crossed Germany under strict conditions monitored by Swiss and Polish socialists. When a suspected stool-pigeon attempted to claim a seat on the train, Lenin seized him by the collar and pitched him out onto the platform.
Brought into the former Tsar's waiting room, Lenin brushed aside formal welcoming speeches from Menshevik leader Chkheidze. Standing on an armored car outside, he addressed cheering workers, sailors, and soldiers, urging them to fight for the social revolution rather than supporting the war. He was carried on the shoulders of the crowd to an armored car and later spoke at the Kshesinskaya Palace, shocking audience members who felt his tactics were entirely detached from mainstream socialist strategy.
10 Key Ideas
- Jules Michelet revolutionized historical writing by using state archives and public records to resurrect the collective life and economic realities of past societies.
- Gracchus Babeuf and his Society of Equals attempted to push the French Revolution beyond political liberty toward complete economic equality and the abolition of private property.
- The Comte de Saint-Simon rejected the egalitarianism of Babeuf in favor of a scientifically organized society managed by a hierarchical meritocracy of industrialists and savants.
- Karl Marx adopted Prometheus and Lucifer as his personal mythical symbols, rejecting divine authority and traditional religious resignation in favor of human defiance.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels merged German philosophy, French history, and British economic reality into a coherent revolutionary doctrine.
- Marx and Engels revolutionized historical analysis by discarding abstract slogans and explaining political events through underlying economic motives and class interests.
- Das Kapital achieves the momentum of an epic by combining abstract economic logic with poetic imagination and a devastating critique of human greed.
- Bakunin challenged Marx's leadership within the International by organizing the anarchist faction, promoting direct action, and opposing state authority.
- The Paris Commune of 1871 served as a pivotal historical event and the first practical realization of a working-class socialist government, despite its brutal suppression.
- Lenin adapted Marxist theory into a disciplined instrument of professional conspiracy, culminating in his return to Russia in April 1917.