Enzo Traverso is Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of several of books, including Fire and Blood, Left-Wing Melancholia, and The New Faces of Fascism, which have been translated into a dozen of languages. He regularly writes for Jacobin and Il Manifesto.

A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth century's age of revolutions

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of dialectical images: Marxs locomotives of history, Alexandra Kollontais sexually liberated bodies, Lenins mummified body, Auguste Blanquis barricades and red flags, the Paris Communes demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectualsfrom Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the Southas outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.