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Debates on Stalinism gives an up-to-date, concise overview of major debates in the history of Stalinism. It introduces readers to changing approaches since the 1950s, and more broadly to scholarly views on this society reaching back to the 1930s. It argues that writing the history of Stalinism is not only about the Soviet past. It is also centrally shaped by current anxieties and concerns of the scholars studying it. In short, there is a politics of writing the history of Stalinism. Combining biographical investigation of leading historians with thematic and chronological analysis of major topics of study, Debates on Stalinism uncovers the history of these politics. The book provides a snapshot of the state of the field and suggests possible future avenues of further research.
This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularization to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain.
. The range and interconnection of Lake’s scholarship ultimately point to his role as perhaps the primary architect of ‘post-revisionism’, the approach to Elizabethan and early Stuart British political and religious history that was first articulated in the later 1980s and eventually yielded the most widely accepted interpretation of the period. 1 While ‘post-revisionism’ is an umbrella term for a diverse literature, it is possible to generalize about what stands under the umbrella. The post-revisionists sought to retain
Stalinism and the work of the so-called ‘revisionists’. Chapter 4 moves on to the most iconic of them – Sheila Fitzpatrick. Together, these three chapters make several points. One is that the generational narrative of totalitarianism-revisionism-post-revisionism is inadequate to describe the history of this field; another, that this historiography is transnational in more than one respect. Not only do scholars in different countries read each other's works. The scholars themselves are products of international lives: all three of the major American
in relation to events after 1640. Post-revisionism, in other words, made much greater impact in dealing with the causes of the civil wars than with understanding its course and its consequences . 3 Thus the question that Thomas posed, and that remained unanswered, was: what would a post-revisionism of the civil wars and Interregnum look like? Put another way, this was a question about whether
viewed as in many respects a direct continuation of the past twenty years of post-revisionism. At the same time, however, the emphasis on public politics in recent scholarship has arguably left the core of the revisionist argument about (and conceptualization of) political practice largely intact and uninterrogated. Post-revisionism in general and the historiography of public politics in particular were partly the result of a decision by many scholars to follow Russell’s own recommendation to no longer treat
transformed by the upheavals of the seventeenth century. The essays compiled here seek to do the same, even if they do so in ways or to ends he might have rejected. He would not have minded. He loved nothing more than a good debate. The political history of seventeenth-century Britain is more tangled than it used to be. Three-kingdoms, post-revisionism, transatlantic and imperial perspectives: all have enriched our sense of that pivotal epoch, adding to the centrifugal forces unleashed when the revisionism of Mark Kishlansky and his peers first blasted the field apart. As
Church Laudians, the Cavalier elites – doomed to obsolescence in Whig-Marxist teleologies. If the initial phase of Revisionism was essentially sceptical and negative, more concerned with knocking down Whig-Marxist analytics than with what to put in their place, its second phase (‘post-Revisionism’, for lack of a better term) has been more constructive. For as Derek Hirst early observed, in a sympathetic critique of first-wave Revisionist work, ‘historians who ignore what comes before and after can fall victim to a myopia as damaging as that
that when members of the next cohort of scholars tried to define who or what they were, they called themselves ‘post-revisionists’ ( Chapter 7 ). Totalitarian social history The narrative of social-science totalitarianism giving way to historical revisionism only to find its Hegelian synthesis in Foucaultian post-revisionism flattened out the complex history of the field. It required ignoring major scholars who did not fit the mould. Richard Pipes (1923–2018) and Robert Conquest (1917–2015) could probably be accommodated into a generational model as
rich literature of the 1950s and 1960s. This myth was so deeply engrained in anglophone historiography, that when a new cohort of scholars made their debut in US academia in the 1990s, some of them felt compelled to write themselves into the historical narrative as the next step of historiographical progress: ‘post-revisionism’. We shall return to this phenomenon in Chapter 7 . In the long-term, the scuffle in The Russian Review helped confirm Fitzpatrick as one of the leaders in the anglophone social history of Stalinism. If a little methodological essay