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Summary of Theory I
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Summary of all lectures and reader readings of second year course 'Theory I.'With extra description of concepts and examples.
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Theory I: Perspectives on HistoryPerspectives on History
• Metahistorical reflection: HR III Debates; Theory I, II, III
• Concepts, perspectives and theories in historical research
• Our perspective on historical events matters
• A variety of perspectives leads to different positioning, different emphases, historical
debate
Four perspectives on History
• Lecture 1: Intro
• Lectures 2-4: Ethical perspectives
• Antoon de Baets
• Lectures 5-7: Geographical perspectives
• Clemens Six
• Lectures 8-10: Social Science perspectives
• Daniel Franken
• Lectures 11-13: Hermeneutic perspectives
• Reinbert Krol
• Lecture 14: Q & A
Today’s lecture
• Introduction to the course, lecturers, and four perspectives
• Consider one historical event, from these four angles
• What “is” the Russian Revolution of 1917?
Russian citizens carry a banner reading 'Great October Socialist Revolution' during a rally
marking the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in central Moscow, Russia
[Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters]
What “is” history?
In 2017, the Russian Revolution had its 100th anniversary
What do we really know about it?
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927
o By Esfir Shub
o Based on eye-witness accounts
Now we’ll see a National Geographic short film with snipits of it
“The Revolution that Shaped Russia”
Again, what is “history”?
• Can or should history be “objective”, “neutral” or “unbiased”?
• The film appears to claim this by presenting a set of historical “facts” but there is
no such things as a historical truth.
• We argue there is no such one “truth”
• Thus, four lecturers will provide four different approaches to “history”
• They are not mutually exclusive, just four different approaches.
,Social Science Perspectives; By Daniel Franken
“Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the
masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social
order.” - Vladimir Lenin
History and the social sciences
• Social sciences:
• Its Knowledge object: understanding human behaviour
• Under certain laws which are verifiably true it aims to explain social group
interaction.
• The study of groups of people within society (not focussed on individuals)
• From a scientific perspective, using the scientific method
• Individual decisions are less important compared to the description and
analysis of group behaviour
• Positivist (empirical) vs. interpretivist (humanist) approaches in history
• Positivist being empirical, holds that the society shapes the individual and
social facts insert some sort of control over individuals. And there are laws
that govern human behaviour. Quantitive methods. Rely on reliable and
representative evidence.
• interpretivist generally have a different approach, they don’t view humans as
puppets of external forces, but that they are acting with consciousness and
have agency. Individual is a complex that cannot be put in to boxes, that is to
reductionist for a humanist. Reality is perceived different by different
individuals. Prefer to really go in to the lives of the historical subjects that they
study and prefer qualitative methods, sacrificing a bit on representativeness
and reliability of their evidence, at expense of their validity. So diving in to the
lives of historical subjects is according to them more valid than having a
systematic more representative set of evidence.
• Question for history (as a field of study):
What can we learn from the past about social behaviour?
• Contribution to history:
What can insights from the social sciences teach us about the past (history)
Russian Revolution in the Social Sciences perspective
• What “drove” the Russian Revolution?
• A social science attempt is not to look at Lenin or Trotski and their revolutionary zeal,
but rather at the situation of the population in terms of…
a. Income, standard of living, inequality, social mobility
i. Were frequent food shortages to blame? Inflation?
b. Distribution of power
i. From Tsarist autocracy to the dumas (representatieve assemblees fort
he people)
c. Change over time (e.g. industrialization)
i. Urbanisation (late indistrializing country, but when it happend it
happend fast – rapid urbanization -overcrowded- bad life conditions)
Two revolutions swept over Russia in 1917, but social unrest which created it had been
brewing for decades.
,Undertsnading the The Russian Revolution as a Social Experiment
• Trotsky and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (important actor in the RR, marxist
theory as comming of mass democracy. Dictatorship of the porletariat)
• Lenin’s “… new social order” (more extreme interpretation of Marxist theory- depose
the tsar and distribute power back to the people)
• Circulation of elites – Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) (no really power distributed to
below but rather a change of power between elites)
• Wealth, prestige and power – Max Weber (1864-1920) (distribution of wealth)
The Russian Revolution as a Social Experiment II
• Dual Economy (Sir Arthur Lewis) (idea that sectors would reproduce more capital,
manufacturing, agriculture etc, they are what fuel urban migration. This reproducible
capital sector would absorbed people from rural communities, depressing urban
wages to the rural population surpluse is exhausted.
• “..islands of modernity in a sea of rural backwardness”
Social groups (mixture)
• Old political elite
• New economic elite (boursoi capitalist class)
• Urban workers
• Rural landless workers
• All of this groups end of colliding in the RR
Bolshevik claim: “Peace, Bread and Land”
• “Peace”: Russia fought against Germany in World War I, but the army and population
did not support that war
• “Bread”: industrialization led to fast urbanization and poor conditions in cities as well
as impoverished rural areas and ofcourse WWI did not help with food shortages.
• “Land”: centuries of suppression and failed land reform had led to unequal
distribution of land incl. many landless rural workers
Acemoglu & Robinson (2009): “Why Nations Fail”
“[…] the Russian Revolution […] led to a one-party dictatorship that was much more violent,
bloody, and vicious than what it had replaced.”
“The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a bloody affair […]. […] Lenin and his entourage
[…] created a new elite, themselves, at the head of the Bolshevik Party.” Ch. 5, 359, 431
“Geographical Perspectives”: A Global History of 1917
(so how does the Russian revolution look like from a global perspective)
Conference at uni of Essex
Conference title being rethinking the Russian revolution of 1917 as a global event in local
context.
From a “call for papers” published not so long ago (1917/2017) ...
(shows the state of the research on the Russian revolution is about within this field of
global history)
, “…the Russian revolution did not only take place in the former Romanov Empire.
(…)
In the minds of millions it evoked a range of polarizing emotions, influenced people's world
views and thinking; it triggered actions and reactions in local contexts all over the world. In
this sense, the Russian Revolution was a truly global event with many faces.“
so how Russian was the Russian revolution.
1. Revolutionaries in a ‘transnational social field’
Coyocan- 20th/08/1940.
Villa where Leon Trotsky lived. Visited by Frank Jackson (Spanish communist) , but his real
name was Ramon Mercader. Acted out orders from the RKVD and Stalin himself. Mercader
was the financier of a Trotsky women living in new York. Veteran of the Spanish civil war
and was handpicked by Stalin for a job- he came with a special request- Trotsky to look over
his essay- Mercader killed Troksy with an icepcick.
so Trosky biography can not be national history (Mexico city-travelled) not can the life of
the murderer be understood in the terms of national history (Spanish). We need an altogether
different concept in order to analyse these people and where they came from and what they
were made of, ideas etc. transnational social fields.
(networks and biographies that are rooted in more than one territorially and cannot be
captured in one national context or territory)
transnational social fields comprise... (define the transnational social field)
1. Cross-border mobility (move through several boarders, and impact the way they are,
think and act)
2. Global public sphere(s) (they are part of public spheres that so way beyond national
confinements.)
International communication patterns which have evolved since the 19th century and
prominent in the first part of the 20th century.
(applying this transnational social fields to people like trosky, it gives us a complete
different view on the RR revolution and how these ideas have evolved over time)
(stalin and trosky met in Vienna 1913)
2.The global dimensions of the October Revolution
RR is not a singerly event. One element in an era of revolution.
1. Europe (& the U.S.) on the verge of something new
2. The impact of 1917 beyond Europe Asia (India, china—in contact with
Bolsheviks)
2.1. Traces of a “world revolution”?
(imitation of RR)
The Mexican Revolution (1911)
Building up Soviets in Cuba (by tobacco workers)
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