This chapter develops a theory to explain why counterrevolutions emerge and succeed. This movement-centric theory emphasizes the strategies movement leaders embrace, which, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. All revolutionary governments enjoy an initial power advantage over the old regime. Whether a counterrevolution emerges depends on how much capacity these old regime forces have left and how much their interests are threatened by revolutionary rule. And whether their counterrevolutions succeed depends on how effectively revolutionaries can preserve their initial capacity through the tumultuous transition. Specifically, the chapter lays out a post-revolutionary “governance trilemma,” which requires new leaders to simultaneously manage the concerns of lingering old regime forces, elites in their coalition, and popular groups who supported the revolution. The chapter then explains how these dynamics differ following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements and moderate-unarmed movements. Counterrevolutions are less likely to emerge following extreme versions of both movements – because the former lowers counterrevolutionary capacities and the latter lowers their interests in restoration. However, counterrevolutions are more likely to succeed against moderate-unarmed movements, because they establish governments that lack key tools for effectively navigating the governance trilemma.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

The Conclusion offers a brief recapitulation of the book’s main argument, highlighting its critical and reconstructive components. First, the criticism of the liberal reading that has come to dominate Hegelian scholarship is reiterated. The rational state envisioned in the Philosophy of Right, grounded in a dialectical synthesis of the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, is irreducible to the liberal state found today in most democratic nations. Second, the chapter insists on the need to move beyond Hegel’s own political and economic choices in order to bring out the true implications of his views. As argued throughout the book, only a fully democratic state, in which political and economic power are shared among all the citizens, can be deemed rational, in Hegelian terms. Finally, it is suggested that this alternative reading is not only more faithful to Hegel’s philosophical vision, but also more relevant for contemporary critical theory.

This chapter focuses on the emancipatory sociology developed by the Algerian scholar Abdelmalek Sayad (1933–1998). Sayad’s pathbreaking theory on immigration is progressively acknowledged today. However, we know less about the anticolonial roots of his innovative approach. From the Algerian liberation war against the French Empire to neoliberalism, Sayad’s social thought led to an anticolonial theory of domination and resistance. The chapter shows how Sayad dealt with political concerns scientifically and how his anticolonial engagements challenged conventional ways of doing science. It traces four components of his anticolonial thought: the understanding of the logics of empire; the paths toward decolonization; the epistemic grounds for a social revolution within postcolonial regimes; and the mechanisms that reconfigure the colonized condition into the immigrant experience. Discussing these aspects of Sayad’s social thought against the imperial episteme in the academic and political fields, this chapter proposes to restore the grounds of an anticolonial sociology.

This chapter explores a form of anticolonial resistance that has gone relatively unnoticed by social theorists – insurrections aboard slaving ships. How might social theorists effectively represent, theorize, and contextualize these moments of anticolonial action? Drawing on the materials from the newly opened Lloyd’s archives, we discuss the importance of the insurance archive to histories of slavery and how these materials – despite their colonial ontologies – can offer novel understandings of anticolonial action. The materials permit scholars to uncover a complex set of financial logics that convey multiple different meanings about the category of the human and allow social theorists to ask different questions. Even the smallest details in the most highly localized spaces can provide insight into the nature of resistance and revolution.

This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

The Preface introduces some of the key questions and analytical points of the book, its sources, and some of its contributions. It details how the book was inspired by an art exhibition that the authors co-organized with art historian Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz and the process through which some of the questions posed by the exhibition became a book project. It discusses how it was frequently difficult to assess whether an artist was racialized, at least in some social contexts, as a person of African descent, and the author’s strategies to handle this question.

Mapping the statements of Afro-Cuban artists on the Afrodescendant social condition and their cultural heritage during the revolutionary period, this chapter delves into the Afro-centric art of Manuel Mendive, Rafael Queneditt, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, and others who, during the 1960s–1980s, pointed their emphasis to the Yoruba and Bantú worlds that shaped Antillean societies despite the regime’s religious intolerance. Along with Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés Borrero, and others, they formed the Group Antillano, the first visual art collective grounded on notions of Afrodescendant consciousness that Cuba had ever experienced. The chapter moves chronologically, noting how what could constitute the groundbreaking “New Cuban Art” of the post-1959 period is not Volumen I, but the art of the Queloides collective. While their works were not the first to be concerned with issues of structural racism, they were an unprecedented endeavor that moved beyond previous reformist visions and instead aimed to dismantle the fundamental tenets of Cuban national narratives. The chapter concludes with the internationalization of Afro-Cuban art and how migration and diaspora shape the work of contemporary Afro-Cuban artists.

The War of 1812’s end heralded a new era for the courts, and for the nation. Political leaders emboldened by having fought Great Britain to a standstill were eager to lay the groundwork for a new American empire. But adventurous Americans had their own priorities, and privateering on behalf of South American revolutionary governments offered new opportunities for wartime profit. Like the British in the 1790s, Spanish and Portuguese officials demanded that the federal government suppress such freelancing. To preserve relations, the Madison and Monroe administrations dusted off a tool for suppressing maritime violence that previous administrations had largely eschewed – criminal prosecutions for piracy. But a patchwork statutory regime and popular support for South American rebels made convictions difficult to secure. At a deeper level, privateering cases raised thorny questions about the sovereign status of former colonies seeking autonomy. As Congress and the executive branch struggled to adapt to the rapidly shifting political context in the Americas, federal judges expressed renewed doubts about extending their authority onto the high seas. The renaissance of privateering threatened to derail the American imperial project just as it was getting started.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

The introductory chapter explains and legitimates the approach of the book: why does it make sense to write the long-term (pre)history of democracy as a history of two distinct phenomena – pluralistic participation and individual equality – and of their convergence? Why can it be argued that this convergence was not unavoidable and is not irreversible?

The development of institutionalised political participation is shown for nine of the most important early modern European states – or else those, such as Switzerland, that figure prominently in the history of democracy. The focus is on not only the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the ruptures it created but also the general continuities in essentially all early modern states: they all featured some mode of institutionalised central political participation, but it was always geared towards the participation of the top social elites only.

This chapter asks: how did institutionalised political participation, individual equality and, in particular, their fusion survive into and develop during the nineteenth century, and what can we learn from the historical genesis of democracy as a composite of two different elements, as sketched in this book, for the predicament of democracy today?