History with Memory of the Revolutions: an uncomfortable truth

Abstract

This critical note deals with a review of book by historian Enzo Traverso on past and present of contemporary revolutions, and the political forces, utopias, theories and intellectuals that inspired them. But it is not only a summary of the content of this work on the history of political ideas, but also includes a personal reflection on the thesis of its author and especially about the challenge of adapting the profession of historian to methodology of interpretation of reality based on the idea of “dialectical images”, coming from the German thinker Walter Benjamin and, more generally, from the Marxian tradition. The legacy and future of the revolutionary processes are thus discussed.