No Less Than Mystic by John Medhurst
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, John Medhurst trashes Leninism to show us the way forward for a non-authoritarian left.
"The book is very comprehensive and insightful, and linked in perceptive ways to current affairs”
—Noam Chomsky
"Drawing on relevant scholarship and primary texts....Medhurst seeks to dispel the mystique still surrounding the Russian revolutionary leader. Most non-Leninist leftists will sympathise with Medhurst's aims".
—Publishers Weekly
The brilliance of Medhurst's political histories is his sharp eye for the pivot points and the alternative routes history could have taken. Or, put another way - alternate histories are buried in his actual histories. He will lead you to fly off into fascinating could-have-beens, big ones that start with small corrected missteps or slightly different arrangements of personalities. There are wonders compressed in his books.
This is a big, energetic, ambitious book that deserves every success. A hell of a performance.
—Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, NORMAL, RED and GUN MACHINE
"No Less than Mystic is a stunning work of synthetic scholarship which addresses one of the great historical questions of the modern epoch: was the Russian Revolution the worst thing ever to happen to socialism? No Less than Mystic makes a compelling case that it was. Arguing from a radical democratic, libertarian socialist perspective that is as relevant today as in 1917, Medhurst makes the strongest possible riposte to recent fashionable rehabilitations of Leninism. "This account makes no concession to the canard that the failure of revolutionary socialism is always inevitable, but demonstrates that while socialism with democracy may be difficult, socialism without democracy will always fail."
—Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London. Author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.
—Noam Chomsky
"Drawing on relevant scholarship and primary texts....Medhurst seeks to dispel the mystique still surrounding the Russian revolutionary leader. Most non-Leninist leftists will sympathise with Medhurst's aims".
—Publishers Weekly
The brilliance of Medhurst's political histories is his sharp eye for the pivot points and the alternative routes history could have taken. Or, put another way - alternate histories are buried in his actual histories. He will lead you to fly off into fascinating could-have-beens, big ones that start with small corrected missteps or slightly different arrangements of personalities. There are wonders compressed in his books.
This is a big, energetic, ambitious book that deserves every success. A hell of a performance.
—Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, NORMAL, RED and GUN MACHINE
"No Less than Mystic is a stunning work of synthetic scholarship which addresses one of the great historical questions of the modern epoch: was the Russian Revolution the worst thing ever to happen to socialism? No Less than Mystic makes a compelling case that it was. Arguing from a radical democratic, libertarian socialist perspective that is as relevant today as in 1917, Medhurst makes the strongest possible riposte to recent fashionable rehabilitations of Leninism. "This account makes no concession to the canard that the failure of revolutionary socialism is always inevitable, but demonstrates that while socialism with democracy may be difficult, socialism without democracy will always fail."
—Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London. Author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.
John Medhurst was born in London in 1962 and graduated in History & Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has worked at all levels of the British civil service. He is now a full-time officer for the UK's largest civil service trade union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). He was elected to PCS's National Executive Committee 2003-06 and for six years was PCS's representative on the European Public Services Union's (EPSU) Public Services Network. He has written for Novara Media,The Morning Star, Red Pepper, Green Leftand The Journal of Contemporary European Research. He is the author of That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76, a revisionist history of Britain in the 1970s published by Zero Books in 2014, which Hilary Wainwright, author of Beyond the Fragments and editor of Red Pepper, called "A really excellent book" which had "done the left a huge service". He is married with two daughters. He lives in Brighton, England.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781910924471 |
| ISBN 10 | 1910924474 |
| Title | No Less Than Mystic |
| Author | John Medhurst |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Watkins Media Limited |
| Year published | 2017-08-17 |
| Number of pages | 654 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |