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Adams, Samuel (1722-1803): advocated a break with the English Crown and organised a correspondence committee that acted as a revolutionary nucleus in the Boston region during the period that preceded the American revolution.
Adler, Victor (1852-1918): founder and leader of the Social-Democratic Party of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; identified with the centre-left of the Second International.
Albertus Magnus (1200-1280): Bavarian theologian and philosopher of the Scholastic School; tried to legitimate the Christian faith with rational arguments; supported a crude version of the labour theory of value.
Albigensians: religious movement that flourished in Southern France in the 13th century; the pope declared it heretic and the feudal nobility of Northern France organised a bloody crusade against it (also known as Cathars).
Anabaptists: radical Protestant sect of the 16th century that called for a return to the ideas of the first Christians and common ownership of wealth.
Anseele, Edouard (1856-1938): leader of the social-democratic Belgian Workers Party; identified with the right of the Second International.
Aquinas, Thomas (1225-1274): Italian theologian, the main Scholastic philosopher of the 13th century (see Albertus Magnus). His school, called Thomism, borrowed many concepts from Aristotle and Avicenna.
Aristotle (384-322 BC): the main philosopher of ancient Greece, one of the most encyclopaedic thinkers of all times; was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
Avicenna (980-1037): Arab philosopher and physician of Iranian origin; he reintroduced Aristotle’s rationalism into medieval philosophy. Scholasticism (see Albertus Magnus) and Thomism owe him a lot. Had many radical followers, the so-called Avicennian left.
Babeuf, Gracchus (1760-1797): French revolutionary of definite collectivist and communist orientation. His Conspiracy of the Equals was crushed and he was executed in 1797. His followers are called Babouvists.
Bagaudae: literally “beggars”, “vagrants”; bands of run-away slaves who fled the estates and cities of their masters from the 3rd to the 5th century AD, and contributed to the downfall of the Empire and slave mode of production.
Bakunin, Mikhail (1814-1876): Russian revolutionary, one of the founders of Anarchism; an opponent of Marx in the First International.
Ball, John (died 1381): one of the leaders of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (see Jacqueries); the chronicler Froissart reported that he defended revolutionary ideas on common ownership of wealth.
Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850): French author of The Human Comedy, a collection of novels which made a emotive analysis of French society under the Restoration and at the beginning of the July Monarchy (1815-1848).
Bebel, August (1840-1913): founder of the Marxist German Social-Democratic Party, known as the Eisenach Party, which fused with the Lassallean Social-Democratic Party at the Congress of Gotha; he became the leader of the united Social-Democratic Party and the key leader of the Second International, in which he identified with the centre-left.
Bernstein, Eduard (1851-1932): German social-democratic leader who initiated the theoretical controversy over revisionism with his book Evolutionary Socialism (1899).
Biruni, Abu ar Al- (973-1050): Iranian-Arab astronomer and historian who operated in the framework of the conquest of India by Islamic sovereigns, which led him to an interesting comparative study of the civilisations of India, Islam and Ancient Greece; his investigations led him to the verge of historical materialism.
Bissolati, Leonida (1857-1920): Italian right-wing social-democratic leader; advocated participation in the bourgeois government as early as 1902; expelled from the SP in 1912 for his support to the Italian colonial expedition in Tripolitania (Libya).
Blanc, Louis (1811-1882): French utopian socialist and politician; he was made Minister of Labour in the government that emerged during the revolution of 1848, and tried to employ the Parisian jobless in “National Workshops” whose closures subsequently caused the workers’ insurrection of June 1848.
Blanqui, Auguste (1805-1881): French revolutionary communist; his doctrine is called Blanquism (See Chap.V).
Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von (1815-1914): Austrian economist, the founder of the marginalist theory of value; wrote Karl Marx and the End of his System in 1887.
Bolivar, Simon (1783-1830): born in Caracas, main bourgeois leader of the Liberation War in Latin America (1810-1824): he won the battle of Ayacucho (1824) which ended Spanish rule on the continent.
Bourbons: ruling dynasty of France from 1589 to 1792; restored to the throne 1815 to 1830 (Restoration).
Branting, Karl Hjalmar (1860-1925): founder and leader of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party, identified with the right of the Second International; he served as a minister in several cabinets.
“Bra nus” (bare arms): the name given to labourers, pre-proletarians and proletarians in Paris during the French revolution of 1789-1794; they were one of the components of the “sans-culottes” (See this item).
Bray, John Francis (1809-1895): English utopian socialist and economist; made a radical critique of society based on Ricardo’s concepts; author of the theory of a currency based on labour, adopted by Proudhon, among others.
Brissot, Jacques-Pierre (1754-1793): deputy to the Convention, the ruling assembly during the French revolution, where he was a leader of the most clearly bourgeois party, that of the Girondins.
Buonarotti, Philippe (1761-1837): French revolutionary of Italian origin; a follower of Babeuf, he establish the continuity between Babouvism and Blanquism.
Cabet, Etienne (1788-1856): French utopian socialist whose book Voyage in Icaria had a great influence in the French working class.
Calvin, John (1509-1564): French Protestant theologian; took power in Geneva and founded a sort of theocratic republic. His doctrine is called Calvinism and had great influence in the Netherlands, France and Scotland. It was the most bourgeois variant of Protestantism (See Luther).
Campanella, Tommaso (1568-1639): Italian utopian thinker, wrote City of the Sun; spent 27 years in prison.
Cats, Jacob (1804-1885): one of the first Belgian Socialists, he worked as a weaver and authored the People’s Catechism (1839) which notably inspired Engels for the first draft of the Communist Manifesto.
Chrysostom, John (ca. 347-407): Greek bishop of Constantinople, author of the formula “Property is Theft.”
Cobbett, William (1763-1835): English socialist pamphleteer, one of the precursors of the Chartist movement.
Compagnonnages: associations of journeymen, originally parallel to the masters’ corporations of their craft; in early 19th century France many of these journeymen worked for unrelated employers.
Considérant, Victor-Prosper (1808-1893): French utopian socialist, a disciple of Fourier.
Condorcet, Marie (1743-1794): French philosopher, economist and politician who came close to historical materialism in his approach to human prehistory; he advocated equality of the sexes.
Consulate: conservative government of France (1799-1804) that followed Thermidor and the defeat of the radical currents (see Jacobins, Babeuf) it was dominated by Napoleon Bonaparte, who turned it into a more authoritarian Empire (1804-1815).
Croce, Benedetto (1866-1952): Italian philosopher, author of an attempt to refute historical materialism.
Darwin, Charles (1809-1882): English naturalist and biologist, author of Origin of Species (1859).
Debs, Eugene V. (1855-1926): main leader of the US Socialist Party before and during World War One; identified with the left of the Second International.
De Leon, Daniel (1852-1914): American left-wing Socialist who advocated “industrial unions” a prefiguration of certain forms of soviet organisation.
Descartes, René (1596-1650): French philosopher and scientist who took refuge in Holland, one of the founders of naturalist philosophy and the modern scientific method.
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784): French materialist and atheist philosopher of the Enlightenment, editor of the Encyclopédie.
Diggers: a plebeian communistic current of the English revolution, in the 1640s; along with the True Levellers of Winstanley, it acted as a left wing of the radical democratic Levellers’ movement. (Note by MIA: The True Levellers was another name for the movement called the Diggers.)
Don Cossacks: from the Turkish kazak a “free man”; communities of peasants who took refuge in the Ukrainian steppes in the Middle Ages to escape serfdom; beginning in the 18th century, they were used by the Tsars as armed detachments.
Donatians: Christian sect of North Africa from the 4th to the 6th centuries AD; it expressed the interests of the slaves and toilers and aspired to a common wealth.
Enlightenment: the period of the revolutionary struggle of the rising bourgeoisie from 1730 to 1789; the name is derived from the fight against obscurantism (Church dogmas and absolutism).
Esseans: Jewish act from the 2nd century BC to the end of the first century AD, which lived in small communities based on collective ownership; it was fiercely opposed to private property and social inequality. [Note by MIA: the word is usually spelled “Essenes”.)
Fénelon, François (1651-1715): French writer, author of the utopia The Adventures of Télémaque, a precursor of the Enlightenment.
Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804-1872): main representative of the Hegelian left, he turned towards materialism with his critique of religion.
Fourier, Charles (1772-1837): main French utopian socialist (See Chap.IV).
Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642): Italian scientist, a founder of the experimental method in the natural sciences, and of naturalist philosophy, a precursor of materialism.
Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882): Italian revolutionary, led the Expedition of the Thousand which brought down the semi-feudal regime of Sicily and Naples in 1860 and contributed decisively to Italian unification.
Gorter, Herman (1864-1927): Dutch poet, main representative of the Socialist (and later Communist) left in the Netherlands before and after World War One.
Gray, John (1798-1850): disciple of Robert Owen, an advocate of money based on silver.
Greulich, Herman (1842-1925): fender and main leader of Swiss social-democracy before World War One.
Guesde, Jules (1845-1922): leader of the Marxist wing of the French Socialist Party; identified with the centre-left of the Second International until his capitulation to social-patriotism in 1914.
Guizot, François (1787-1874): French politician, conservative prime minister on the eve of the revolution of 1848; as a historian, he used the concepts of “class” and “class struggle” in his History of the English Revolution.
Han dynasty: Chinese emperors (202 BC to 221 AD).
Hardy, Thomas (1752-1832): working-class leader of the London Corresponding Society during the French revolution (see Chap.VI).
Harrington, James (1611-1677): ideologue of the bourgeoisie during the English revolution of 1640-1660; advocated the republic, a written constitution, a bicameral system; influenced the authors of the Constitution of the United States in the 18th century. Author of the utopia Oceana.
Haymarket martyrs: Parsons, Spies, Engel, Fischer and Lingg, Anarchist leaders in Chicago who promote the struggle for the eight-hour day; they were falsely accused of having thrown a bomb and killed seven policemen in Haymarket Square, on May 4, 1886, during a rally that followed a strike of 400,000 workers. The first four were hanged; Lingg killed himself before the execution.
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm (1770-1831): German philosopher, encyclopaedic thinker on a par with Aristotle, Avicenna and Al-Biruni, he exercised a decisive influence on Marx and Engels.
Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856): radical German poet, exiled to Paris where he befriended Marx.
Heraclitus (540-580 BC): Greek philosopher of Asia Minor, the founder of dialectic thought.
Hesiod (flourished mid-8th century BC): ancient Greek poet, author of Labours and Days.
Hess, Moses (1812-1875): German utopian socialist ideologue; influenced Karl Marx, then supported Lassalle and became one of the forerunners of Zionism.
Hodgskin, Thomas (1787-1869): English economist; tried to defend a proletarian standpoint on the basis of Ricardo’s economic theories.
Hussites: Christian religious movement founded by Jan Hus (1369-1415) in 15th century Bohemia and declared heretic; one branch, the Taborites, established a Commune based on collective ownership in the city of Tabor.
Ibn-Khaldun (1332-1406): Arab historian and philosopher, a precursor of historical materialism.
Iglesias, Pablo (1850-1925): Spanish typographical worker; founder and main leader of Spanish social-democracy before World War One.
Jacobins: political party of the radical petty-bourgeoisie during the French revolution; under Danton, Robespierre and Saint Just, it gave impetus to a radical phase, until the Ninth of Thermidor (July 27, 1794), at which point the political counter-revolution gained the upper hand.
Jacqueries: regional peasant revolts of the 14th century, particularly in France (1358), England (1381) and Flanders; the broader revolts of the Hussites (see this article) and Peasant War in Germany (1524-1525), led by Thomas Münzer, drew on the legacy of these earlier revolts.
Juarez, Benito (1806-1872): main leader of the Second Mexican Revolution (see Reforma).
Justo, Juan (1865-1928): leader of the Argentine social-democratic party before World War One.
Kant, Emmanuel (1724-1804): German idealist philosopher.
Katayama, Sen (1859-1933): founder of the Japanese Metalworkers’ Union (1898), of the Marxist Socialist Party (1901) and, after World War One, of the Communist Party; identified with the left of the Second International.
Kautsky, Karl (1854-1938): Engels’s executor, along with Eduard Bernstein; main theoretician of German social-democracy and the Second International before World War One; identified with the centre-left of the International, in which he was the main populariser of Marxist theory.
Kung-Sun Lung (320-250 BC): Chinese philosopher, one of the founders of dialectic thought in that country.
Labriola, Antonio (1843-1904): main theoretician and populariser of Marxism in Italy before World War One.
Lafargue, Paul (1842-1911): French Marxist theoretician of Caribbean ancestry; husband of Marx’s daughter, Laura.
Lassalle, Ferdinand (1825-1864): founder of the first German workers’ party in 1863; a gifted agitator but a weak theoretician; his party fused with the Marxist workers party at the Congress of Gotha (1875).
Lenin, V.I. (1870-1922): Russian revolutionary, leader of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, identified with the left of the Second International.
Levellers: a radical democratic movement of the English revolution, led by John Lillburne; not present in Parliament, its programme, the Agreement of the People (1647), advocated a democratic republic; it stood for economic measures on behalf of small farmers and craftsmen (see Diggers).
Liebknecht, Wilhelm (1826-1900): founder, with Bebel, of the German Marxist workers party in 1869.
Louverture, Toussaint (1743-1803): leader of the revolt of the slaves of Santo Domingo (Haiti), and of the “Black Jacobins”.
Luther, Martin (1483-1546): German theologian who launched the Reformation which gave rise to Protestantism, in 1517; its main offshoots are Lutheranism, which is prevalent mainly in Germany and Sweden, Calvinism and Puritanism (See these articles).
Luxemburg, Rosa (1870-1919): Polish and German revolutionary, a leader of the left of the Second International.
Mably, Gabriel (1709-1785): French philosopher and historian, a forerunner of the utopian socialists.
Marx, Eleanor (1855-1898): English revolutionary, daughter of Marx, helped organise the international Socialist congresses; a founder of the Socialist League (1885) and mass-action oriented Union of Gas Workers (1885).
Masaryk, Thomas (1850-1937): political leader of the Czech bourgeoisie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then, after 1918, president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia; author of an attempt to refute Marxism published in 1898.
Mazdekeans: Manichean religious movement, that is conceiving the world as dominated by the struggle between Good and Evil; flourished in Iran in the 5th and 6th centuries AD; tended towards collective ownership of wealth.
Meslier, Jean (1664-1733): French priest and utopian socialist writer, argued for a common wealth in his Testament.
Michel, Louise (1830-1905): French member of the First International; participated in the Paris Commune and became one of the best known propagandists of the workers movement, in which she defends Anarchism.
Mignet, François Auguste (1796-1884): historian of the French revolution.
Millerand, Alexandre (1859-1943): a leader of the French social-democratic right; he joins the Waldeck bourgeois coalition government in 1898, triggering a debate in the Second International on “Millerandism”; later adhered to the bourgeois right and became an ultra-conservative President of the Republic after World War One.
Montesquieu, Charles de (1689-1755): French Enlightenment author, one of the founders of modern historiography and bourgeois liberal political theory.
More, Thomas (1477-1535): English ideologue and politician; chancellor of King Henry VIII, who had him beheaded for his opposition to absolutism.
Morgan, Lewis (1818-1881): American anthropologist; his materialist research, notably Ancient Society, profoundly influence Marx and Engels and inspired Engels’s book, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Münzer, Thomas (ca. 1489-1525): main leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525.
O’Connor, Feargus (1796-1855): leader of the Chartists (see Chap.V), son of the famous Irish nationalist leader. (Note by MIA: Actually the nephew of the United Irish leader., Arthur O’Connor.)
Owen. Robert (1771-1858): one of the great English utopian socialist thinkers, founder of the co-operative movement (see Chap.V).
Paine, Thomas (1737-181X: Anglo-American ideologue and pamphleteer, one of the main theoreticians of petty-bourgeois radicalism in the late 18th century; his main work was entitled The Rights of Man.
Palacios, Alfredo (1880- ? ): one of the main leaders of Argentine social-democracy before World War One.
Petty, William (1623-1687): English founder of modern political economy; enunciator of the labour theory of value.
Plato (428-348 BC): one of the great Ancient Greek philosophers, he was Aristotle’s teacher and wrote the first sketch of an ideal utopian state, The Republic.
Plekhanov, George (1856-1918): for over a quarter century, the main populariser of Marxism and founder of the Marxist movement in Russia; he drafted the programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party with Lenin but began moving to the right after the Russian revolution of 1905, a drift which accelerated sharply after the outbreak of World War One.
Pugatchev, Yemelyan (1726-1775): Cossack leader of a large-scale peasant revolt in Russia in the 18th century.
Proudhion, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865): French utopian socialist, a precursor of Anarchism; his followers were influential in France between 1848 and 1871, including inside the Paris Commune.
Puritanism: anti-hierarchical current of the Protestant Reformation (see Luther) which was influential in England in the 17th century; it had a big impact on the English revolution of 1640-1688, and subsequently, on the evolution of religious ideas in all Anglo-American countries.
Quesnay, François (1694-1774): French physician and economist, a founder of the Physiocrats’ school of political economy (see Chapter III); presumed creator of the concept of “social class.”
Ravestone, Piercy (ca. 1780-1830): English economist who tried to criticise bourgeois society from the standpoint of Ricardo’s economic principles.
Restoration: France’s regime 1815-1830 (see Bourbons).
Ricardo, David (1772-1823): the greatest English classical economist, a supporter of the labour theory of value; profoundly influenced Karl Marx.
Reforma: name of the Second Mexican Revolution led by Benito Juarez from 1857 to 1867; it targeted mainly the oligarchy and Church wealth.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778): great ideologue of petty-bourgeois radicalism during the Enlightenment (see this entry); born in Geneva, he was one of the forerunners of modern historiography and sociology.
Saint-Simon, Claude de (1760-1825): French philosopher and writer, one of the main utopian socialists.
“Sans-culottes”: the craftsmen, apprentices, fishwives, and other toilers who made up the city people and constituted the urban base of the radical democratic current during the French revolution of 1789 (see “bras nu” and Jacobins).
Schapper, Karl (1812-1870): leader of the League of the Just then of the Communist League, along with the workers Joseph Moll and Heinrich Bauer (see Chap.V).
Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805): the main classical German writer, along with Goethe, but more radical than the latter in history and politics.
Sepoys: soldiers of the Indian army who triggered a revolt against British colonial rule in 1857-1858.
Shelley, Percy (1792-1822): English poet, one of the greatest revolutionary poets of all times.
Smith, Adam (1723-1790): Scots economist, one of the founders of the classical school of political economy.
Spartacus (died 71 BC): Roman slave of Greek origin (from the province of Thrace) who led up to 70,000 slaves in a great revolt in 73-71 BC.
Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677): Judeo-Dutch philosopher, founder with Descartes of modern naturalist philosophy, a precursor of materialism; also one of the founders of modern political science and one of the greatest thinkers of all times, on a par with Aristotle, Avicenna, Al-Biruni and Hegel.
Stauning, Thorvald (1873-1942): founder and main leader of Danish social-democracy before and after World War One; identified with the right of the Second International; several times a minister in the cabinets of Denmark.
Tai-Chen (Tai Tung-Yuan) (1724-1777): great Chinese philosopher, a dialectician who came close to materialism.
Taiping: Chinese revolutionary movement of a populist and peasant nature, inspired by a heretic Chinese Christian sect, between 1851 and 1864; Marx considered it the embryo of a Jacobin-led bourgeois revolution.
Tang dynasty: Chinese Emperors from 618 to 907 AD.
Thermidor: July 27, 1794, decisive conservative turning point of the French revolution (see Jacobins and Consulate).
Thierry, Augustin (1795-1856): French historian, author of the History of the Conquest of England by the Normans.
Thiers, (Louis) Adolphe (1797-1877): French historian and bourgeois politician, author of a History of the French Revolution and of a History of the Consulate and Empire; he led the counter-revolution during the bloody repression of the Paris Commune.
Thucydides (465-388 BC): the greatest historian of Antiquity, born in Athens.
Tokugawa: family of the Japanese feudal nobility which seized the shogunate (the day-to-day government under the nominal authority of the Emperor) in 1603 and ruled until 1867, that is until the Meiji Revolution.
Tone, Theobald Wolfe (1763-1798): Irish revolutionary leader, head of the Free Irishmen, influence by the French Jacobins. (Note by MIA: The organisation was called the United Irishmen.)
Tristan, Flora (1803-1844): Franco-Peruvian radical feminist and utopian socialist; her writings influence Marx and Engels.
Troelstra, Pieter-Jelles (1860-1930): founder and leader of the Social-Democratic Workers Party of the Netherlands before and after World War One; identified first with the centre, then, after 1919, with the right of the Second Intentional.
Trotsky, Leon (1879-1940): Russian revolutionary, identified with the left of the Second International.
Tupac Amaru: leader of a revolt of the Peruvian Indians (1780-1783) against feudal exploitation and Spanish colonialism.
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1727-1781): French economist of the Physiocrats’ school; attempted to introduce reforms when finance minister of the French monarchy (1774-1776).
Turner, Nat (1800-1831): leader of the revolt of the Black slaves of Southampton in 1831, the main such revolt in the Southern United States in the 19th century before the Civil War.
Vandervelde, Emile (1866-1938): founder and main leader of the social-democratic Belgian Workers Party; he was the president of the Second International in which he identified with the centre-left before World War One, and with the centre-right after his capitulation to social-patriotism in 1914.
Voltaire, François Arouet known as (1694-1778): French writer, philosopher and historian of the Enlightenment (see this entry), main revolutionary ideologue of the bourgeoisie; less radical than Rousseau.
Weitling, Wilhelm (1808-1871): one of the first German communists of working-class origin; a leading utopian socialist (see Chap.VII).
Wordsworth, William (1771-1850): English romantic poet.
Last updated on 22.7.2004