Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytic Framework by Arno J. Mayer

Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytic Framework Reviews

• 
  Kevin Carson

  Regarding its discussion of the class base and political and ideological style of counterrevolutionaries, a careful reading of this book is extremely useful for understanding fascist phenomena in our time like DeSantis, Trumpism, and alt right movements and their paramilitary street tough auxiliaries. Among the parallels:
  Counterrevolutionaries, unlike conservatives or reactionaries, have a mass base in the petty bourgeoisie and other classes that see themselves as threatened, betrayed, or in retreat ("Remember what they took from you").
  Counterrevolutionaries are also adept at the kind of mass politics and rabble-rousing that conservatives and reactionaries find distasteful. Their program generally includes a large component of economic populism, albeit very vague in regard to the concrete details of policy (and prone to become still more vague the closer they are to actually achieving power).
  Counterrevolutionaries in the present-day U.S. contemptuously denounce traditional conservative elites as "RINOs," but quietly depend on their support for substantive inroads into centers of power; meanwhile traditional conservative elites act on the mistaken belief that they can harness counterrevolutionaries for their own purposes with no loss of power.
• 
  Eren Buğlalılar

  Why are there so few studies about counterrevolutions, despite the fact that the modern history is overwhelmingly dominated by counterrevolutions than revolutions?
  
  Mayer, a comrade historian, asks this question and attempts to conceptualise a working definition of "counterrevolution" based on a distinction between reactionaries, conservatives and counter-revolutionaries. There are insightful passages in Mayer's book, but more often than not he loses the narrative thread in very abstract, hypothetical scenarios, without giving the reader a general sense of his direction. This may be because this book was probably intended to be the preliminary draft of his next study titled
  The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War.
  
  For me, the highlights of the book were his emphases i) on the international character of the clash between revolution and its counterpart; ii) on the intra-ruling class struggle and manoeuvring for hegemony among the counterrevolutionary alliance, iii) and on the fact that the main objective of any counterrevolution is to allow the ruling classes "to create the impression that they seek fundamental changes in government, society and community" while avoiding "any consequential changes in class structure and property relations".
  
  Half a century after the publication of this book, "the" book on the counterrevolutions is still waiting to be written.