The entry below is not typical of the blog posts you'll be entering. But after having quoted from this in class last week, I thought I should 'source' it for us. And note some granular details. FYI.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
-- Karl Marx, "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," first published in German by the one-off journal DIE REVOLUTION (New York, 1852).
Brumaire (in case, like I, you've wondered) was the name of a month devised under the calendar used by the French Republic after the 1789 revolution. The 18th of Brumaire [November 9th] was the date that Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799. Hence, the 18th Brumaire OF Louis Napoleon refers to Napoleon I’s nephew, Louis Bonaparte, seizing power in 1851. Marx, living in England, began writing this response to the news of the coup d’etat straight away.
The pamphlet begins with another famous Marx utterance:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Very Hayden White-ish. However Uncle Karl would today be asked to revise and resubmit this essay. You can’t write “Hegel remarks somewhere….?” Somewhere?? Tell us where! Today we have the luxury of looking that up on the Internet, so no excuses. Fortunately, historian Bruce Mazlish bothered to look it up in 1972. G. W. F. Hegel’s “remarks” were in THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY (1837; trans. John Sibree).
See also Mazlish, “The Tragic Farce of Marx, Hegel, and Engels: A Note,” HISTORY AND THEORY [same journal that published the Hayden White essay] 11.3 (1972): 335-37. There Mazlish (founding editor of H&T, by the way) also shows that the concept of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat as a metaphorical 18th of Brumaire AND the concept of “first time tragedy, second time farce” were both taken from a letter Friedrich Engels sent to Marx as K-M’s writing of the pamphlet was about to begin. Since Marx & Engels were in cahoots, no one calls this plagiarism. But under our expectations of academic integrity, a pamphleteer doing what Uncle Karl did with Engels’s letter should attribute the idea to the letter-writer who inspired it.
"The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" has been translated and reprinted a bazillion times, almost always as THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMIERE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE [same guy; Marx used L.B. in his essay, but for some reason the first publisher printed the title with L.N.].
Some translations read: “People make their own history. . . .”
There being no copyright restrictions on Marx’s writings, you can find the whole text -- at Marxists.org [!].
On to Hollywood.
Dan Streible
