A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Widely remembered as a time of heated debate over the westward expansion of slavery, the 1850s in the United States was also a period of mass immigration. As the sectional conflict escalated, discontented Europeans came in record numbers, further dividing the young republic over issues of race, nationality, and citizenship. The arrival of German-speaking “Forty-Eighters,” refugees of the failed European revolutions of 1848–49, fueled apprehensions about the nation’s future. Reaching America did not end the foreign revolutionaries’ pursuit of freedom; it merely transplanted it. In We Are the Revolutionists, Mischa Honeck offers a fresh appraisal of these exiled democrats by probing their relationship to another group of beleaguered agitators: America’s abolitionists. Honeck details how individuals from both camps joined forces in the long, dangerous battle to overthrow slavery. In Texas and in cities like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Boston this cooperation helped them find new sources of belonging in an Atlantic world unsettled by massive migration and revolutionary unrest. Employing previously untapped sources to write the experience of radical German émigrés into the abolitionist struggle, Honeck elucidates how these interethnic encounters affected conversations over slavery and emancipation in the United States and abroad. Forty-Eighters and abolitionists, Honeck argues, made creative use not only of their partnerships but also of their disagreements to redefine notions of freedom, equality, and humanity in a transatlantic age of racial construction and nation making.

"Freedom for the spiritual-cultural life, equality and democracy for human rights, initiative and solidarity for the economic sphere!" Revolutions happen when society does not change and evolve. Stagnation and resistance create a situation in which a leap in development is required. In nature, living organisms suffering from inner blockages must heal or die. The same applies to the social organism--society--which occasionally requires drastic change to avoid complete collapse or violent revolution. With his frequently repeated phrase "We are the Revolution!" the artist and social activist Joseph Beuys was intimating that true transformation develops from within, in an artistic or creative way. People are the source of metamorphosis in the social realm. But in modern times a "we" is also required--an agreement with others. The individual connects with fellow human beings, in active cooperation, as a solid foundation for healthy forms of coexistence. In a series of clear and insightful essays, Ulrich Rösch builds on the "threefold" social thinking of Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Beuys and others, presenting ideas for change in the context of twenty-first-century life. Our world has become unified through the global division of labor and interdependence, which calls for fresh thinking and rejuvenated social forms. Rösch compares the spirituality and social action of Mahatma Gandhi and Rudolf Steiner; takes the living example of a biodynamic farm as a social organism; and studies the tangible situation of the production and worldwide sale of bananas as a symptom of inequitable commerce.

Originally published: Moscow; New York: Progress Publishers/ Militant Publishing Association, 1931.