One of Karl Marx’s most famous lines tells us that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” For Italian historian Enzo Traverso, Marx’s reference to trains was no accident. When he wrote these lines in his 1850 work The Class Struggles in France, the railways were a decisive factor in the rise of industrial capitalism; their spread was transforming landscapes, erasing distance, and changing even the experience of time itself. The era of technological and political revolutions allowed humans to rethink their relationship to the world around them: all that seemed solid melted into air.

This theme provides Traverso’s cue for the first chapter of Revolution: An Intellectual History, a vast study of the idea of revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an interview with Jacobin, he told Αthina Rossoglou and Dimitris Gkioulos about the spread of the idea of “revolution” and why it remains relevant to left-wing political action today.