In this thesis the author analyses the events between November 9th, 1918 and January 15th 1919 in Germany and Berlin in particular. This period is characterised by political instability. The...Show moreIn this thesis the author analyses the events between November 9th, 1918 and January 15th 1919 in Germany and Berlin in particular. This period is characterised by political instability. The socialist movement had fractured during the First World War over the support of the war effort. Radical socialists were further emboldened by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The struggle between the three main factions of German socialism; the moderate MSPD, the independents of the USPD and the radical Spartakusbund, forms the core of this thesis. This thesis answers the question to what extent was the Spartacist Uprising a revolution to defend the November revolution or a counter revolution which would only damage the gains of the November revolution? By analysing primary sources such as newspapers, autobiographies and personal recollections the attitudes and opinions of these three parties the author traces the evolution these parties and their leaders underwent during the months November, December and January. Recent work by Mark Jones on the role of autosuggestion (self-generated beliefs allowing historical actors to truly and firmly believe that particular events were happening when they in fact were not) and the role and nature of revolutionary crowds provide additional perspectives how the main leaders of the three parties behaved during times of massive pressure.Show less
My primary aim in this investigation is to trace the history of the invention of the Marxist historian’s persona in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, and thereby reveal its specific...Show moreMy primary aim in this investigation is to trace the history of the invention of the Marxist historian’s persona in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, and thereby reveal its specific configuration. This is to be an exercise in the recently emerging research program of what I have termed the empirical philosophy of history, as developed by Herman Paul. I supplemented this framework with certain Bourdieusian insights, adopting analytic tools — concepts like forms of capital and fields — that were specifically constructed to reveal more clearly the social elements and forces at play in the development of the dispositions or embodied commitments to goods that constitute personae. After elaborating my methodological framework, I move to outlining the basic elements that went into the making of the Marxist historian’s persona; the primary commitments to epistemic, moral and political goods that were embodied by the Historians’ Group’s founders — Dona Torr, A. L. Morton, Maurice Dobb and Christopher Hill — who played a primary role in its making. These consisted of the epistemic commitments to obtaining a dialectical and historical view or understanding of history, the moral commitment to the emancipation of the proletariat and the political commitment to Communism of the Soviet variety as espoused by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The obtaining of these commitments required the exercising of the appropriate virtues like employing the dialectical and historical materialist methods, engaging in class analysis and maintaining loyalty to the Communist Party. These virtues in turn implied an opposition to vices that consisted of their lack in other historians’ scholarly personae, pejoratively referred to as ‘bourgeois’. However, there was also a struggle internally regarding the proper interpretation of these commitments and virtues, one that played out both within the Historians’ Group itself and the wider Party. The contours of this struggle and the practices of contestation it involved —abounding in virtue and vice language — is clarified through the prism of dispositional variations that existed among the Group’s members, which I distinguish as the academic and non-academic. However, these are not presented as discreetly definable entities, but rather as consisting of a common network of commonalities (as in a family resemblance concept), thereby allowing for consideration of the variations that existed among members of each, while also allowing for the role of contingency that had a major effect on the making of the Marxist historian’s persona.Show less
