Blanqui and Political Will

This project will deliver a new, archive-based assessment of Blanqui's political thought, both in order to fill a telling gap in the recent history of political ideas and to buttress a wider intervention in ongoing debates about the status of the political subject or actor, understood as a conscious, deliberate agent capable of decisive action. The underlying philosophical question at issue in the project concerns the relation between necessity and freedom, or between submission to socio-economic constraints on the one hand, and emancipatory self-determination on the other.
Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was arguably the single most important figure in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a significant role, directly or indirectly, in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life (1830, 1848, 1870-71). He was certainly the most forceful and controversial of those who sought to renew and then to transform the radical Jacobin tradition that drew its inspiration from Rousseau's conception of 'a free society of equals', a society sustained by collective participation in a general will to posit, debate and accomplish goals consistent with the common good.
At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, while Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his lifetime he was quickly forgotten after his death. Although he only resorted to underground forms of political organisation during periods when police repression and censorship blocked all overt agitation for social change (notably in the 1830s and late 1860s), his willingness to rely on conspiracy as a means to popular insurrection led him to be condemned, across the political spectrum, as a mere putchist, and a failed putchist to boot. There has been no searching engagement with Blanqui's work or legacy, in either French or English, since the middle of the twentieth century.
There are two main reasons why this most indomitable of 'failures' deserves to be recovered from historical oblivion. First, Blanqui's distinctive understanding of social problems and political processes is under-appreciated and misunderstood. In large part, this is because of the relative difficulty of accessing his writings, most of which exist only as scattered manuscript fragments, held by the French national library in Paris. In addition to enabling detailed critical engagement with his work via publications, translations and two international conferences, this project will make the entirety of Blanqui's writings available to the public for the first time, through a website that will include high quality reproductions of his many publications and all 26 volumes of his manuscripts, along with a comprehensive selection of critical assessments of Blanqui by figures ranging from Tocqueville and Engels to Bensaïd and Rancière.
A second and more urgent reason for a return to Blanqui, today, is that his work provides a vivid way of framing one of the central questions at issue in any theory of political action, regarding its willed or voluntary quality: to what extent is political action best understood in terms of the actors' own deliberation, purpose and resolve, rather than by the purportedly 'deeper' logics of e.g. economic development, historical tendency, providential design, technological innovation, cultural differentiation, unconscious drive? Against the great majority of today's most influential critical theorists and European philosophers (including the later Heidegger, Adorno, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Latour), this project aims to develop and defend an unabashedly voluntarist conception of the political subject.

Blanqui dedicated his life to a radical transformation of the prevailing order of things, and it would far-fetched to pretend that a project devoted to his legacy might be warmly received by the sorts of institutions and interests he hoped to undermine. If the project may thus not make much of a direct impact on official policy-makers and the commercial sector, it should strike a powerful chord with a wide range of protest movements, civic groups, student activists, and pressure groups or NGOs that rely on forms of direct action, as well as with sections of the media and the wider public - indeed with anyone concerned with democracy in the strong, literal sense of the word.
Blanqui's experience in the midst of the popular mobilisations that overthrew the Restoration monarchy in 1830 made him a lifelong believer in popular empowerment, and in particular the power of the people to overcome any and every form of domination, even when the possibility of such an outcome might seem, to a distant observer, to be very unlikely. At each of the political turning points he confronts, Blanqui assumes that if the people are prepared to do what is necessary to exercise their power, and if they understand what its consequences entail, then, when they are suitably concentrated and organised in a large city like Paris, they already have all the resources they need to challenge an unjust government and defeat its forces of repression. Outmanoeuvred by the compromises that soon stifled the mobilisations of July 1830, February 1848, and 1870-71, moreover, Blanqui came to be an exceptionally lucid analyst of the dynamics of collective protests, and of the techniques deployed by the state in order to contain them. Few people have been better placed than Blanqui to understand why and how popular movements succeed or fail.
Anyone involved or interested in public protest has a great deal to learn both from Blanqui's insights and from his limitations. As activists involved in long-term campaigns around nuclear disarmament, animals rights or climate change will know, our established political systems are exceptionally good at absorbing challenges of all kinds. The perspective of a whole generation has been marked by the experience of the apparent impunity of power, whether exercised by financial institutions in Europe or by armies in the Middle East. In recent years, however, protests have shaken much of southern Europe, students from Québec to Chile have rebelled against the marketisation of education, and financial centres have been occupied and challenged in three continents. Indigenous movements across the Americas have acquired new force, and grassroots campaigns have acquired new means to question the boundaries of established nation states, and to reclaim urban spaces and common resources. Above all, and despite the recent violence in the region, the Arab Spring has left an impression that (to evoke Kant's late appreciation of the French Revolution) remains 'too momentous and too widespread in its influence for nations not to reminded of it when favourable circumstances present themselves.'
Blanqui offers contemporary participants in and analysts of popular protest an invaluable set of conceptual resources for approaching questions of organisation, leadership, mobilisation and its many obstacles and pitfalls.