Reviews for Sartor Resartus, and on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

The average rating for Sartor Resartus, and on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-08 00:00:00 Geoff Minor Lissagaray was a participant in the struggle to defend the Commune. He narrowly escaped capture after the fall of Paris and spent the next few years with the Marx clan writing this book, which reads not so much like a history in the academic sense as much as a partisan memoir of the struggle. The author's passion and pain is both what makes the book memorable and also not the most enlightening read about the nature of the Commune. Lissagaray was a fighter and journalist during the insurgency and he observed first hand the disastrous machinations of the various attempts at a revolutionary government. The majority of the text is devoted to Lissagaray's tortured hindsights on all the missed opportunities and missteps that led to the movement's demise. These are occasionally interrupted by proclamations about the courage of the Parisian masses and the magical sense of camaraderie that, according to Lissagaray, overtook the rebelling proletarians. But we get no real portrait of life for the common person under the first attempt at a socialist government. The last hundred pages or so are quite visceral. As we all know, the story does not end happily, but we subjects of capitalism still don't hear that much about the mass slaughters of revolutionaries that took place in the aftermath of the Commune. It was a political genocide, claiming far more lives than the terror of the Jacobins. One thing I did learn is that the uprising was initially in no way limited to Paris. The workers of all the major cities of France took up arms. It truly was a national, socialist revolt. The smaller cities, however, fell quickly due to the lack of organization that would eventually doom mighty Paris. The assistance of Karl and Eleanor Marx with the production of this text has made it one of the "official" Marxist statements on the Commune (along with Karl's actually more laudatory article, "The Civil War in France," written while the Commune was still in power). One can see how Lissagaray's focus on the negative, the doomed nature of the improvised insurrection exactly because of its improvised nature, helped to influence the Leninist obsession with preparation and order in the face of revolutionary opportunity. Given the carnage that was the Communards' reward, one can see how no one would ever want to duplicate their experience.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-29 00:00:00 Klaus Meyer This history of the Paris Commune is a well-deserved classic, whose great merit is the author's personal immersion in the political effervescence of Paris during the days of the Commune as a journalist, witness, activist, and combatant. The prose is often dense with information and names, and tends to assume that the reader is familiar with the political landscape of the Second French Empire (1852-1870). At moments, I wished that Lissagaray had better organized his depiction of the events leading to the Commune in late 1870 and early 1871. Yet his narrative is powerful and gripping throughout, especially in the final chapters, when he describes the last days of the Commune and the massacres unlashed by the Versailles army. The chapter "Paris on the eve of Death", in which he takes the reader on a tour of Paris right before the Versailles army enters the city, is outstanding; it powerfully conveys what the space of the city felt like in that moment, and the effervescence and collective energy that the Commune had created in Paris despite facing extremely difficult conditions. What I particularly enjoyed about Lissagaray's narrative is the tone of passionate yet controlled indignation that guides his narrative. This indignation is aimed, first, at the brutality and hypocrisy of the French ruling class, which after defeating the Commune executed about 20,000 men and women in the name of order and civilization. But the author also critically dissects in detail the disorganization and incompetence of many of the men who led the Commune. While the main goal of the book (first published in 1876) was to counter the demonization of the Commune by the French government, Lissagaray is particularly harsh in his criticism of the political and military leadership of the Commune, which, as he says, was often more concerned with "deliberating" than with preparing for an effective defence of the city. When he writes that a more disciplined and determined leadership could have saved the Commune from disaster, one can see the influence of Marx (his daughter Eleanore translated the book into English and Marx revised the translation) and the influence that this interpretation would subsequently have on Lenin and his ideas of a vanguard party, as Alain Badiou shows in his book The Communist Hypothesis. But in retrospect (as Badiou shows), that interpretation also created the hierarchical revolutionary activism that led to the disaster of Stalinism. But that's another story. "The History of the Paris Commune of 1871" is an extraordinary historical document that is worth being revisited today. The grassroots egalitarianism and the democratic, internationalist spirit that guided the Paris Commune, and which Lissagaray documents in detail, continues being a source of inspiration.