Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record

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The Astrolabe

An ancient instrument for solving problems of location and distance, as well as time

Astrolábon órganon is the word used in Ptolemaeus Syntaxis 5.1 to describe a form of armillary sphere consisting of both fixed and rotating rings for determining the ecliptic co-ordinates of stars. Also called astrolabe were two-dimensional representations of the celestial sphere: over fixed disks with a representation of the horizon of the earth (in each case for a specific geographic latitude) and its parallels up to the zenith lies a rotating representation of the heavens (called ‘spider’ or ‘net’) with zodiac and indicators for some of the brightest stars. On the back is an indicator (‘alidade’) with visor plates for calculating the height of the stars. The astrolabe allows its user to determine the hours of day and night, the positions of stars, and the height and depth of objects on earth (mountains, buildings, wells). The oldest extant descriptions of the flat, planispheric astrolabe come from Iohannes Philoponus, 6th century AD, and (in Syrian) from Severus Sebokht, c. 660 AD. Indirect references may date back as early as Theon (4th cent.). Between the 8th and the 9th centuries the Arabs appropriated the knowledge of the astrolabe. At the end of the 10th century and again in the 12th century, they passed it on to Western Europe, where astrolabes were constructed up until the 17th cent. Today, one Byzantine astrolabe (from 1062) is extant, as are some 750 Arabic-Islamic astrolabes and approximately the same number of European astrolabes.

This information is abstracted from Brill's New Pauly, the English edition of the authoritative Der Neue Pauly, Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. The encyclopaedic coverage and high academic standard of the work, the interdisciplinary and contemporary approach and clear and accessible presentation have made the New Pauly the unrivalled modern reference work for the ancient world. For more information see www.brillsnewpauly.com or visit our website catalog: www.brill.nl/bnp
Brill’s New Pauly and the complete original Der Neue Pauly, the recognized standard reference works for students and scholars of the ancient world are also available online. This dual-language edition offers basic and advanced search facilities and is fully browsable. New English translations are added as they become available. See www.paulyonline.brill.nl for more information and a demo version.

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Publications & Services> Books> Book Series> Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record

Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record

Edited and translated by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido

Books

Available
Publication year: 2009


Series:	Historical Materialism Book Series, 21
ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) has been changed from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007:	978 90 04 16770 4
ISBN-10:	90 04 16770 6

Cover:	Hardback
Number of pages:	xii, 684 pp.

List price:	€ 179.00 / US$ 286.00

Table of contents

Introduction

1. The Slavs and Revolution (1902), Karl Kautsky

2. The Draft Programme of Iskra and the Tasks of Russian Social Democrats (1903), N. Ryazanov

3. ‘Orthodox’ Pedantry (1903), G.V. Plekhanov

4. To What Extent is the Communist Manifesto Obsolete? (First edition: 1903 – Revised edition: June 1906), Karl Kautsky

5. Revolutionary Questions (February 1904), Karl Kautsky

6. What Was Accomplished on 9th January (January 1905), Parvus

7. Up to the Ninth of January (1905), Leon Trotsky

8. After the Petersburg Uprising: What Next? (20 January [2 February] 1905), Leon Trotsky

9. The Revolution in Russia (28 January, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg

10. After the First Act (4 February, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg

11. The Consequences of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy (July 1905), Karl Kautsky

12. Introduction to Ferdinand Lassalle’s Speech to the Jury (July 1905), Leon Trotsky

13. Social Democracy and Revolution (25 November [12 November], 1905), Leon Trotsky

14. The Revolution in Permanence (1 November 1905 - 25 November [12 November], 1905), Franz Mehring

15. The Next Questions of our Movement (September 1905), N. Ryazanov

16. Our Tasks (13 November, 1905), Parvus

17. Foreword to Karl Marx, Parizhskaya Kommuna (December 1905), Leon Trotsky

18. The Russian Revolution (20 December, 1905), Rosa Luxemburg

19. Old and New Revolution (December 1905), Karl Kautsky

20. The Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution (1889, reprinted December 1905), Karl Kautsky

21. The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution: Speech to the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (25 May 1907), Rosa Luxemburg

22. The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and Its Prospects (November 1906), Karl Kautsky

23. The American Worker (February 1906), Karl Kautsky

Readership

All those interested in Marxism, the history of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the contribution of Leon Trotsky to revolutionary theory.

About the author(s)

Richard B. Day, Ph. D. (1970), University of London, is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published extensively on Soviet economic and political history, including Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (Cambridge, 1973).

Daniel F. Gaido, Ph.D. (2000), University of Haifa (Israel), is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina. He is the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and is currently working on the history of German Social Democracy.

The theory of Permanent Revolution has been associated with Leon Trotsky for more than a century since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-7 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov.

This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.

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