Wir haben uns heute so sehr an die Tatsache gewöhnt, in einer Massengesellschaft zu leben, daß es uns schwer fällt, die besonderen Gefühle, die das Stichwort „Masse” jahrzehntelang ausgelöst hat, nachzuempfinden. Das „tiefe Erschrecken vor dem Auftreten der Massen auf der Bühne der Weltgeschichte” ist inzwischen abgeklungen und einer sachlicheren Einstellung zu den Problemen der modernen Gesellschaft gewichen. Dennoch erfreuen sich, abgesehen von der nun schon beinahe legendären „Psychologie der Massen” des französischen Gelehrten Gustave Le Bon, solche einseitigen Darstellungen wie José Ortega y Gassets „Aufstand der Massen” noch einer großen Verbreitung, so daß es nicht ganz belanglos sein dürfte, sich zu vergegenwärtigen, welche Ansichten ursprünglich über den Charakter der Massen bestanden haben und welche Traditionen sich hierfür anführen lassen.

The processes of control and collection are prominent themes throughout pharaonic history. However, the extent that the central regime attempted to administer agricultural fields to collect revenues directly from the farmer who actually worked the land is unclear during the pharaonic period (c.2686–1069). Relations between those involved in agricultural cultivation and local headships of extended families and wider kinship groups were deeply embedded within a broad range of interpersonal discourses, behaviours, and practices. Village headmen and officials at all levels of an impersonalized “state” hierarchy were themselves landholders who drew income from the land and were held responsible for collecting revenues from their fields. It is therefore necessary to define, with a focus on the imperatives of a subsistence economy, who was working the land and what the relationship was between them, the headmen, and those from within outside power structures (in the context of direct intervention against specific groups of the population). To address these points, I will focus on revenue extraction as a “state” process, how it was connected to the role of punishment, and its impact on local hierarchies (the targets of revenue extraction).

By the early years of the twentieth century, the two major socialist parties in Russia, the Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had taken shape. But these two parties did not win the adherence of all of Russia's revolutionary activists. There existed in addition a series of small extremist groups that formed what might be called the “militant fringe” of the revolutionary movement. These groups differed among themselves on programs, methods and ultimate objectives, but they all rejected the leading parties as insufficiently committed to revolution or too slow-moving in their tactics to achieve it. Although they never attained the numerical or organizational strength of the SD's and SR's, they remained a significant element in the revolutionary movement and left their mark on Russia's political life. The three main components of the militant fringe were the anarchists, the SR Maximalists, and the Makhaevists. Of these the Makhaevists are almost unknown today, although they formed organizations in several cities and rivalled the Maximalists and anarchists for the allegiance of the revolutionary extremists. An account of their program and activities will help to shed light on a segment of the Russian political spectrum whose insight into Russia's social and political condition has been underestimated, and on the revolutionary role of its smallest but in many ways most original element.

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.

Von den verschiedenen Auslandsorganisationen sozialdemokratischer deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker im neunzehnten Jahrhundert sind die drei Kopenhagener, der Deutsche social-demokratische Arbeiterverein (1875–77), die Deutsche Lesegesellschaft (1887–91) und der Deutsche Arbeiterverein Vorwärts (1894–1914) bislang von der historischen Forschung unbeachtet geblieben. Dies erscheint unberechtigt, denn, mag es auch zutreffen, dass die drei Vereine zu den weniger bedeutenden Auslandsorganisationen deutscher Sozialdemokraten gehörten, für die dänische Arbeiterbewegung war der älteste der drei Vereine von grosser Bedeutung. In der Mitte der siebziger Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts war er nicht nur das einzige Bindeglied der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung zwar weniger zur organisierten deutschen Sozialdemokratie als zur Ideenwelt deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker, sondern zeitweilig auch das einzige Milieu innerhalb der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in dem theoretische Fragen diskutiert wurden. Die Aufgabe, diesen Verein darzustellen, erschien deshalb lohnend; dabei erwies es sich als notwendig, ihn in die Geschichte der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in die er voll integriert war, einzubetten.

In the translation of Trotsky's letter to Krupskaya the sentence “But they have not denied us this request” (previous issue, p. 118, line 15) should read:

But they have denied us this request.

The different elements which came together to form the Labour Representation Committee in February 1900 were, when it came to party organisation, at once its strength and its weakness. Labour was not in the position of a totally new political party having to build up a political machine from scratch, rather the LRC was able to utilise and build upon existing organisations: these were the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, those trade unions which supported the LRC, and trades councils throughout the country (the Social Democratic Federation disaffiliated from the LRC after little more than a year's membership). At both a local and a national level, however, these organisations were often hostile to each other, jealous of their independence and suspicious of attempts by the LRC Executive to control them.

Historians of the Second Republic have long given over stage center in their accounts to Paris. Indeed, the role of the capital in most histories of the period has been so great that we often seem to be reading not about the French revolution of 1848, but the Parisian revolution. Correspondingly, the role of the provinces has rarely been recognized: Paris acts and France reacts. It is from Paris, not only the seat of government but also France's most important and most turbulent city, that all the great revolutionary stimuli proceed. Until lately, we have been accustomed to thinking of the provinces as conditioned to salivate at the sound of the Parisian bell – voting in negative response to Parisian radicalism, sending off volunteers to help crush the June insurgents, and so forth.

The engineers' lock-out of 1852 is just one of those historical events which, while receiving extensive coverage and being long pondered over, remain to this day a bone of contention. In terms of scale and in the sophistication of the tactics employed, it “was the first of a new class of strikes or lock-outs”. It aroused more sustained interest than any previous industrial dispute. It stimulated “a discussion of the strike by the press, so comprehensive and exhaustive that a reproduction of the newspaper articles would fill volumes”. At this time, the only other trade unions of any appreciable size were still less than half the strength of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Some earlier combinations had been larger, but they had been formed solely in relation to specific strikes and, as such, were ephemeral in character. The mass movements of 1830–34 generally rested upon the precarious financial foundations of irregular levies. The Webbs concluded that a “trade society which […] could count on a regular income of £500 a week was without precedent.”

Few problems in modern Russian history are more complex or more bewildering than that of political Masonry (politicheskoe masonstvo) and its contribution to early-twentieth-century oppositional politics. A decade and a half ago Nathan Smith observed that “Available firsthand evidence about the [political Masonic] movement […] is incredibly limited and raises as many questions as it answers.” That observation is still valid as the origins, structure, composition and activities of the conspiratorial political Masonic organization remain among the best-kept secrets of Russia's past. Indeed, political Masonry was first mentioned in the historiography on the February Revolution only in the early 1930's. Then, for nearly three decades, scholars simply ignored the problem altogether. This was partially due to a paucity of sources; but equally important was the fact that the subject conjured up images of that pernicious Jewish-Masonicconspiracy theory so popular among right-wing émigré circles. During the 1960's historians once again turned their attention to political Masonry, although infrequently and usually only in passing. Since that time a number of treatments have appeared, yet none takes account of all the available evidence. Moreover, many historians continue to reject out of hand all efforts to deal with political Masonry, dismissing them as attempts to perpetuate the Jewish-Masonic-conspiracy myth, while other scholars reject the suggestion that the political Masonic organization played a crucial role in the overthrow of the Russian Monarchy and the establishment of the Provisional Government in 1917.