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EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES
The year now departing was the 150th anniversary of publication of Marx's celebrated 1852 study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.I This work examines the period of French history from February 1848 to December 1851, from the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe to the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte and his installation as Napoleon III.
The Brumaire (hereafter 18B) 2 has been the subject of numerous debates since its publication. Some readers find in it a confirmation of the general principles of historical materialism set forth both earlier and later, in the Communist Manifesto and in the Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Others see the opposite: a denial-in-practice of the programmatic statements of Marx's general social theory and a vindication of the contingent, political and subjective over the necessary, economic and objective. About 20 years ago, a student was listening with increasing exasperation to one of this writer's lectures setting forth an attempted rigorous reconstruction of a general historical materialism.3 The student finally exclaimed: "You can have your 1859 Preface;just let me have my Eighteenth Brumaire!" The implication is that one can choose one's own truth - about Marx, about the world, or both. Ah, the joy of hermeneutics! To be able to pick a textual reading to one's liking, without a perceived need to confirm the logical consistency, empirical relevance or practical usefulness of the position thus adopted.
By all accounts, 18B is a difficult, hard-to-penetrate work. To grasp it fully, one must combine the skills of a 19th-century French historian, a Hegel scholar, and a profound student of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, not to mention a solid grounding in political economy. At a century-and-a-half, we have the advantage of being able to do a reading in the light of all subsequent history, offset by the disadvantage of being much further removed from the events and personalities under scrutiny.
Marx's analysis of the 1848-1851 interregnum is based on a detailed periodization. The February 1848 insurrection and overthrow of Louis Philippe marks a brief moment in which the proletariat is center stage. The second period begins May 4, 1848 and lasts until May 29, 1849. This is the period of formation of the Republic (known to history...