The Revolution Represented
Marx, the revolutionary tradition, and the double reading of the revolution of 1848
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/endoxa.56.2025.34196Keywords:
Karl Marx, Revolution of 1848, Paris Commune, Revolutionary Tradition, Political RepresentationAbstract
This paper analyzes Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in order to tackle the question of the revolutionary tradition. To this end, I first examine the problems that the German thinker raised around this question in the wake of the revolution of 1848 and compares it with his diagnosis of the Paris Commune. In addition, I highlight the theatrical perspective of Marx's analysis and how this connects with the problem of the representation of the revolutionary past. Thirdly, I emphasize that Marx's analysis coincides in important aspects with those of Tocqueville, Bakunin, Proudhon or Blanqui, something very little known, and how this helps to contextualize and understand his interpretation. Finally, I show that, actually, Marx considered that there had been not only one but two revolutions in 1848, and that the second offered a very different face to the bourgeois and hegemonic one.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Edgar Straehle
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