Book Review: Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, by Massimiliano Tomba

• Author: Gabriel Rockhill
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720930646
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, by Massimiliano Tomba.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 304 pp.
Reviewed by: Gabriel Rockhill, Department of Philosophy, Villanova University,
Villanova, PA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591720930646
Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of
Modernity is a major scholarly achievement that powerfully intervenes in
contemporary debates in political theory, historiography, geography, and the
history of revolutions. It proposes nothing short of a remapping of the mod-
ern world that brings into relief a complex, transnational web of insurgent
struggles for self-determination that contest the developmentalist trajectory
of modern capitalist state formation. Its unique combination of scholarly
rigor, critical acumen, and philosophic originality make it worthy of wide
discussion and debate.
The sheer scope of Tomba’s book—both historically and geographically—
is impressive. After a significant methodological introduction, which I will
turn to in a moment, there are in-depth chapters on the French Revolution, the
Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the Zapatistas, followed by
concluding remarks. In each case, the author combines nuanced knowledge
of scholarly debates in multiple fields with highly original arguments.
However, to fully understand the structure and flow of the book, whose brief
summary might unwittingly suggest a unilinear narrative, it is necessary to
elucidate the author’s unique methodology, which has its roots in the work of
Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin.
While navigating microhistorical debates on revolutionary conjunctures
with impressive intellectual dexterity, Tomba simultaneously develops a
macrohistorical account of what he calls an “alternative legacy of moder-
nity.” He brings this heritage into view by displacing the privileged reference
points of great theorists and leaders in favor of anonymous insurgents from
below, whose theory manifests itself in collective action. His history is thus
one characterized by a multiplicity of agencies and the tug-of-war of ongoing
social struggles, across a space-time continuum that is constitutively

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multidimensional, rather than by a single, grand march of history led by
prominent individuals. The singularization of history and its reduction to
streamlined narratives of development, he argues, is itself part of a colonial
political project and its accompanying Eurocentric ideology. The telos of
development is invariably the modern state and capitalist social relations.
Anything short of that is considered undeveloped, backward, or
anachronistic.
Far from providing his reader with one more diffusionist account of
European modernity, or indulging in the dialectically opposite strategy of
“discovering” European modernity outside of the Western world, Tomba jet-
tisons the entire logic of unidimensional histories and geographies. This is
one of his most powerful and important methodological contributions.
History, for him, is a “multiverse” in which...