Author Description

Scholars commonly take the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for modern concepts of human rights. According to the declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, isn't credible. It's long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico. Some of these movements fade almost as soon as they emerge, perhaps in part because they struggle to find a common legacy. This book argues that these movements do have a common tradition, but that to find it we need to abandon the idea of a universal history. In Europe and elsewhere, since the late eighteenth century, there have been numerous movements or "roads not taken"--The Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, the Haitian Revolution -- that were disrupted. Tomba wants to "reactivate" the legacies of these movements to show what could have been and what can still be. He suggests that we need to think of history as having multiple dimensions that coexist and conflict with one another. The roads not taken show an alternative idea of universality. This is a universalism that isn't based on the idea that we all share some common humanity, but on the opportunity for people to disrupt and reject the existing political and economic order