Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception 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, is exhausted. It's long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest. This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn't based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Massimiliano Tomba examines these events to show what they could have been and what they can still be. As such he explores how their common legacy can be reactivated. Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations that came out of these experiments considering them as collective works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

About the Author
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Marx's Temporalities.

Reviews
Tomba's Insurgent Universality may be one of the most ambitious works of political philosophy to appear in a decade. * Franco Palazzi, University of Essex, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal *
As someone who has been largely allergic to the term "universal," I nevertheless was won over by Tomba in the end: it's a powerful term; why should liberalism have a monopoly on it? The universe, you could say, in its very vastness has room for many alternatives-alternatives that liberal and neoliberal versions of it cannot preclude. In this way, one of liberalism's own key devices for conquest and obfuscation is turned against it; the capaciousness of the universal shows another way. By illuminating that other way, Tomba offers us all a vision of another world that is not just possible; it is, and has always been, already here. * James Martel, Theory and Event *
This is undoubtedly a timely book which may energise insurgents in new waves of sociopolitical revolts. ... Tomba debunks the myth of the historiographer as a neutral observer of how modernity has evolved across time and space. * Peter T. Jacobs, The Journal of Peasant Studies *
This is a game-changing book and not only for political theorists. Historians (and others who work with historical materials) will find an original argument about time that challenges what have become (at least since the eighteenth century) conventional ways of thinking about it...It is a book that will certainly become a classic across the disciplines and required reading for anyone thinking about the writing or the making of history. * Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, The Review of Politics *
Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity is a major scholarly achievement that powerfully intervenes in contemporary debates in political theory, historiography, geography, and the history of revolutions...Its unique combination of scholarly rigor, critical acumen, and philosophic originality make it worthy of wide discussion and debate. The sheer scope of Tomba's book - both historically and geographically - is impressive. * Gabriel Rockhill, Villanova University, Political Theory *
A text that deserves to be read carefully for the richness of theoretical, political and methodological ideas that it offers. Tomba analyzes historical examples in a way that they canAopen up new possible fields of research and set in motion the 'mole of history.' * Andrea Cengia, Filosofia Politica *
Massimiliano Tomba's terrific book... redirects our attention to where it should have been all along: not on "universalisms," but on "universality" as it is practiced by those fighting for emancipation below and beyond the state's terms. ... Tomba is out to remind us that democratic theory is not the achievement of individual authors; it is the conquest of groups trying to win a more equal form of life. His book models how to do historical political theory that lives up to that conviction. * Kevin Duong, Perspectives on Politics *
Insurgent Universality is deeply refreshing. In a time when liberalism has attempted to sink its decaying teeth into the legacy of class struggles; when Verso publishes a book on a flippant theory of 'fully automated luxury communism'; when modern monetary theory becomes the economic standard for leading democratic socialists in the US - rather than abolishing the form of value and money altogether - Tomba's book reintroduces a communist politics needed to rethink how we want to move forward in a time when it is more than necessary to rethink what needs to be done. * Brant Roberts, Marx and Philosophy *
Tomba's wonderful book signals a new era of political philosophy in which activists are the educators. Insurgent Universality rescues the unrealized visions of past revolutionaries, whose ideas of equality and practices of popular sovereignty shoot past their time to inspire our enthusiasm today. This recounting of radical modernity against the grain of present arrangements of power celebrates humanity's inventive capacities, and gives reason for hope * Susan Buck-Morss, City University of New York *
Brilliant! This is the ingenious Massimiliano Tomba at his very best. Insurgent Universalities imagines and articulates a new vision of a plural historical temporality. Tomba reveals, through a close reading of the manifestos and charters of the Sans-culottes, the Communards, the Russian revolutionaries, and the Zapatistas, how radical uprisings give rise not to that Hobbesian state of nature we learned to expect, but to a rich associative realm and innovative forms of self-government. There are few things I treasure more than basking in the brilliance of Tomba's mind and ideas. * Bernard E. Harcourt, author ofAThe Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens *
Insurgent Universality is a brilliantly instructive yet timely intervention into the question of philosophy's answerability to history. With exacting critical acumen Tomba directs philosophy to excavate history's materiality to extract repressed and forgotten pasts of insurgencies that defied existing political systems. Through a view of mixed historical temporalities that combine pasts with presents, Tomba unearths from different moments in France, Russia, and Mexico the vitally overlooked inheritance of incomplete histories and experiences of unfinished insurgent political practices still capable of generating alternative trajectories of political modernity that speak to all peoples. * Harry Harootunian, author of Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism *
Insurgent Universality is a timely and thoroughly original work. It breaks new ground in how we understand human rights and much of contemporary political discourse." * Uday S. Mehta, City University of New York *
Insurgent Universality is a brilliant and original study, at once philosophical and historical. Tomba documents a long tradition in which alternatives to the liberal notion of universalism have been articulated, only to be foreclosed by proponents of that tradition. Instead of a universalism that rests on abstraction (individuals are abstracted from their differences and enjoy equal access to formal rights), insurgent universality takes into account social differences, insisting that there be no separation between the social and the political. In its analysis, the book looks to the past to help us think differently about the present and the future. * Joan Wallach Scott, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study *
At a time when alternative possibilities for the future seem foreclosed by the unyielding trajectories of the past, Tomba offers a brilliantly creative model for thinking politically. The prison-house of neoliberal capitalist rationality bemoaned by contemporary critics is powerfully challenged by Tomba's concept of 'insurgent universality.' Such universality breaks open the linear development of modernity and its spectre of necessity to reveal a dynamic interplay of radical practices that make visible how things could have been otherwise. This is not a counterfactual story of modernity but one rooted inAactual events of resistance to domination. At once a theoretical and historical tour de force, this agenda-setting book transforms how we think about modernity and the transformative power of political imagination and collective action. * Linda M. G. Zerilli, Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago *


Awards
Winner of Winner, 2021 David and Elaine Spitz Prize, International Conference for the Study of Political Thought.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197577233
Author Massimiliano Tomba
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions(mm) 137mm * 206mm * 20mm