Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism

At a time when terms like restoration, religion, authority, obligations, and natural law--once the rallying cries of the most emancipatory movements--are increasingly coopted by conservative forces, Revolution and Restoration offers a thought-provoking account of how ＂outdated＂ concepts can ignite radical energy and collective action. Through both historical and contemporary examples, the book elaborates the concrete possibilities for reimagining politics and society that emerge out of the clash between incompatible legal and economic structures.

At its core, Tomba’s book confronts the very foundations of the modern state and its three pillars: property, democracy, and citizenship. These pillars, long celebrated in the Western canon, are nevertheless mechanisms of exclusion: property is the denial of communal access, representative democracy the marginalization of the demos from decision-making, and citizenship the exclusion of the foreigner. Revolution and Restoration critiques these pillars to show how new concepts and political possibilities that emerge from political and social conflicts hold the potential to transcend and remake democracies in crisis.

Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford, 2019, pbk 2021, co-winner, David and Elaine Spitz Prize), Attraverso la piccolo porta: Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin (Mimesis, 2017), Marx’s Temporalities (Brill, 2012, Haymarket, 2013), La vera politica: Kant e Benjamin (Quodlibet, 2006), and Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer. Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken (Peter Lang, 2005).