The Third Revolution, Volume 1
Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era

Publisher:  Cassell, London
Year Published:  1996
Pages:  406pp   ISBN:  9780304335930
Library of Congress Number:  D21.3.B66 1996   Dewey:  321/.094
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX15953

This project is a comprehensive account of the great revolutions that swept over Europe and America during the past three centuries.

Abstract: 
In the vast scope of this work, Murray Bookchin combines the social background and key events of the great revolutions of Europe and America over the past three centuries. Throughout, the emphasis is on the popular movements that propelled the great revolutions to radical peaks, the little-known leaders who spoke for the people and the libertatory social forms to which the revolutions gave rise. The three volumes of The Third Revolution form a dramatic ensemble that encompasses hopes and social conflicts of past eras, as well as prospects for the coming century.

Murray Bookchin begins his account of the great revolutions with the present wars that preceded the modern era, then gives vivid accounts of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, the American Revolution of the 1770s-1780s, and the French Revolution of the closing decade of the eighteenth century. He brings to the foreground material on the democratic features of the New Model Army in England, the vast network of grassroot committees of safety that constituted the organizing centres of the American Revolution, and the neighbourhood popular assemblies of Paris that radicalized the French Revolution - including new material on the insurrection of June 1793 which nearly replaced an oligarchical republic with a direct face-to-face democracy for France as a whole.