Reflections on Civilizational Thinking and World History Book Club on Soviet Civilization

+ introduction to the August Book of the Month, Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood

Over the last week, I sent you all a 4,600 mid-week essay on Foucault and Marxism, and a 6,200 word Long Read on Orders of Imperial Violence. And I also had a little incident of illness that disrupted the end of my week.

So this weekend, I will curtail the length, especially for those enjoying the Northern Summer. This post focuses on the World History Book Club books for June, July, and August, and the common themes of culture history and civilizational thinking, with these sections:

• Book Club Live Call for Paid Subscribers Smith, Exit Stalin Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice

• Introduction to Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood

• Culture, History and Civilizational Thinking

Book Club Live Call for Paid Subscribers

On 31 July The World History Book Club Live Call was held for paid subscribers. We discussed Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as Civilization, 1953-1991, primarily, Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, and a range of current world issues.

Paid subscribers can join me for the Live Call and watch the recorded discussion which appears below as bonus content for paid subscribers. So please subscribe to join the conversation.

Thanks to those who joined me live and please feel free to leave comments and questions if you watch the recorded discussion.

Guide to Lyndall Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood

The August Book of the Month in the World History Book Club, Lyndall Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. This book is a facsinating recovery of the lifeworld, mentality, culture and social processes that produced the great rebellion of the Reformation in 1524/25, the largest social uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution.

I discussed the book in my post on Foucault, especially in the context of Marxism and the historical interpretation of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas imposing a dichotomous, colonial, Western world view. Let me reproduce this introduction to the book in case you missed it.

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From “Why I Am Not a Marxist” in Michel Foucault: Historians Who Made Me (July 29, 2026)

This situation was discussed in one of the Book Club’s early 2026 books, Cervantes, Conquistadores. I am, through habit, temperament and acquired methods, reluctant to posit meta-ideologies that assume dichotomous worldviews. I prefer explanations that assume more tangled, semi-fluid beliefs, emotions and social practices. But that is just me, and I welcome conversation about these ideas.

Indeed, there is another angle on this argument in the August book of the month, Lyndall Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: the German Peasants’ War. The German Peasants’ War in 1524-25 was “the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution.” Luther’s Reformation may have sparked the revolt, but Luther soon joined the conservative forces to crush this rebellion. Roper recovers the deep pulses of the revolt in the beliefs, emotions and life world of German peasants in the sixteenth century.

“The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naïve, and contradictory. Though historians have tried to distil the movement’s ideology from the programmatic writings of some of its leaders, this was not a revolt driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world.”

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 4

In this violent uprising, and internal European conquest, the peasant mentalities were the central drivers and primary victims. Their life world was overwhelmed by the perhaps dualistic, perhaps more complex, meta-ideology of Germany’s ruling strata, which itself was undergoing the turmoil of the Reformation. Many thousands were killed, and the course of European history changed. It was eerily coincident with the clash between European Conquistadores and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Indeed, Roper suggests the conflict was an echo and expression of the same historical forces.

“Despite the forces ranged against them, for most of the war the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 4

This remarkable story has not attracted a history for forty years, not since before the end of the Cold War. One reason for that was the history of the German Peasants’ War became an ideological stomping ground for German nationalists and European Marxists, all the way back to Marx and Engels themselves.

In her concluding chapter on the historical legacy of the Peasants’ War, Roper makes criticisms of the Marxist historical tradition, especially its refusal to listen to or respect the voices of the leading actors of this revolt, and several revolutions over the next five hundred years in Europe, Asia and the Americas: the peasantry.

An unwillingness to theorise how peasants engaged in revolution was one of Marxism’s great failures. Classical Marxism was unable to imagine Maoism and a revolutionary peasantry and had no adequate account of the relationship between human beings and the environment.

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 380

Not only did Marxism fail to understand the peasants; it failed to understand that fundamental part of all our history, emotions.

“Marx’s attraction to a scientific study of history also led him to reject idealism and, above all, emotion. . . . Marx’s suspicion of emotion also means that he accords little significance to the rebels’ dreams and hopes, or to what he termed their ‘ecstasy’, the experience of revolution which, I have insisted, is so central to the story of the German Peasants’ War.”

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 380

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In addition to this introduction - which I hope you can forgive me for repeating due to the disruptions to my schedule - let me share a few details about Lyndal Roper and an exemplary passage from her book.

“The peasants’ side of the story has been forgotten because they did not write it down, either because they were illiterate or because they were slain or executed in the war. . .

The vision that drove them was about humans’ relationship to creation. They were angry that lords claimed ownership of natural resources—the water, the common land, the woods and forests—when these were God’s creation, given to all. They were enraged that the lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood, ‘this the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free’. They were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them, as individuals like the Fuggers, the richest merchants in the world, amassed wealth on scales never seen before. They wanted men to live as brothers, in mutual obligation, and not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal, nourished by bonding among the peasant fighters, though this does not mean the women did not support it too, They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment which God had created. . . .

The peasants’ story matters. It can help us see new answers to questions that confront us today. It also discloses a radical Reformation, whose theological, social and political vision could have taken history in a very different directions. This is the Reformation we have lost sight of, and this is why we need to understand what drove the peasants. For what mattered to them also matters to us.”

Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood, p. 4-5

Lyndal Roper is an Australian historian - see, Australia secretly extends its influence. She specialises in early modern Germany, the Reformation, and witchcraft. In 2011 she became the first woman and first Australian appointed to the prestigious Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford, retiring in 2025.

Her other works include:

• Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe (1994)

• Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004)

• Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (2016)

• Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy (2021)

Her perspective on witchcraft and early modern mentalities will offer an interesting comparison to those of Silvia Federici, who has influenced Nel Bonilla’s viewpoint. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici argued that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were essential to “primitive accumulation,” and forced women into unpaid reproductive labour by stripping away their economic independence. This structural violence was exported to the "New World" during colonization to shatter indigenous social structures and force local populations into submission.

So please join me in reading Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood. The Live Call discussion will be held Monday 31 August at 10:00 AM Eastern Australian time.

Culture, History and Civilizational Thinking

In the 31 July Live Call discussion of Smith Exit Stalin, I expressed the view that the author’s concept of civilization did not cohere. Was there a Soviet civilization, or was there a mix of many cultures? Did Soviet civilization collapse before the Soviet state, or is this argument another version of the ‘moral collapse’ of a society different to ours.

When I sketched out the program for the World History Book Club I saw the last three to four months as the cultural season for 2026, addressing my theme of cultural change and civilizational thinking, while also linking to other themes of decolonisation. Similarly, the historians who made me during that time have investigated culture as a dynamic force in history Weber, Bauman, Foucault and Clendinnen.

Culture is as big a concept in the humanities or social studies. It is even bigger than that other big idea, civilization. Although they are often treated as similar they have their differences In the German tradition, including that which influenced Spengler and Mann, there is a distinction between Kultur and Civilization, in which the first is more organic, fertile and nourishing than the ossified technical abstruseness of civilization.

How writers on the past treat culture, or civilization, tells you a lot about their historical method. Lovers of materialist history notoriously reduced culture and ideas to the status to ideology or the mere superstructure that was determined by the underlying material conditions or class structure of society. Every idea, artwork or social phenomenon became the expression of a bourgeois or proletarian class interest. It is one reason I have acquired over the years an aversion to Marxism. Of course, many Marxists too bristled at the constraints of the materialist science of history. Among them was Walter Benjamin.

Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom | Walter Benjamin's Poetry of History

But Marxists are not the only crude reductionists who write about the past. Among the crudest reductionists who talk about history are the self-designated ‘realists’ in geopolitics and international relations. These thinkers reduce the chaos of history to the simple nostrums of resources, power and rational state actors. But in recent decades many of these thinkers have compensated for the paucity of their thinking about culture, society, history and psychology with an idea of civilization borrowed, with too little thought, from Samuel Huntington, whose The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has been the Bible of the ‘sophisticated’ version of realism in US American strategic thinking for three decades.

Last year I made a video that presented a critique of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which included Huntington’s quite bizarre idea that Australia was a “cleft state” that was about to “defect from the West.”

(And yes, if you are using AI detection, that thumbnail is generated by YouTube Studio’s inbuilt AI - a far more useful service to creators than Substack’s Pangram AI detection partnership, which I opt out of for every post)

I have also written many times here on Substack on the theme of civilisations, including in my first Long Read of 2026.

And of course Founding Subscribers/Angels of History can view my special program on Civilizations in History based on Felipe Fernández-Armesto brilliant book, Civilizations.

Civilizations in History. . . and Nature

The next module in the special program will be coming this week. My illnesses over the last month have caused some delays.

When I appeared recently on Pascal Lottaz’s Neutrality Studies YouTube channel I discussed civilizational thinking with Pascal, and briefly summarised my critique of civilizational thinking as it applies to world politics. Pascal has published a separate clip of this part of our discussion.

In this discussion, I referred briefly to the idea of créolisation, developed by Édouard Glissant. All civilizations, certainly today, intermingle many cultural inheritances. Searching for a single continuous civilizational or national identity is a fool’s errand in history.

I plan to discuss this topic more in weeks and months ahead. Pascal has also published this week his own fascinating contribution to this discussion, The One West: A Civilizational Interpretation of the West’s Body Politic. using a concept of civilization to transcend the billiard-ball unitary national rational-actor assumptions of ‘realist’ international relations.

The One West

Realism tends to imagine the international world as a field of separate states. They are treated as units, like billiard balls, interacting with one another in an anarchic international system: they cooperate, compete, form alliances, go to war, and pursue interests. . . . But the realist discussion also leaves out reflections on the quality and origins of interaction between states, especially the different degrees of integration they can experience. Some states are not just allied with each other. They are integrated so deeply that they behave less like separate bodies and more like parts of a team, even at the expense of what Realism would describe as their core-interests.

To make sense of it, and especially to reframe the behavior of Western nations, I want to propose the concept of the One West as a way of approaching the civilizational dimension of Western behavior in the international arena.

Pascal Lottaz, The One West

I highly recommend reading Pascal’s essay.

It also reminded me of the arguments made by historian Priya Satia, which I discussed in this post from 2024.

I am planning to speak with Pascal again in a few weeks about Australia, the One West, and the place of our little nation lost in the world. So if you are one of my Australian readers, do feel free to make suggestions that I might raise in the conversation.

Thanks for reading

Jeff