Dr%20Marc%20Mulholland: List of publications

The true story of one of nineteenth-century London’s most notorious murderers.

"Bibliography of the major writings of Roy Foster to 2014"--Pages 283-289.

This article argues that sociologically informed studies of revolution tend to underestimate the importance of counter-revolution and ‘reaction’ in generating radicalisation. Revolutions are inherently political. Most accounts recognise this, but emphasise the executive organs of state – such as monarch, cabinet or ministers – at the expense of the intermediary ‘technicians of power’. Revolutions, however, typically seek to refashion an entire technocracy of power, and in so doing struggle against embedded and powerful sites of reaction. Central to the dynamic of revolution is the ‘purge’ of the technocracy of power. As governing structures are not easily transformed at a stroke, revolutions may be seen as punctuating long processes of struggle. Historically, the governing apparatus has been most effectively revolutionised under conditions of military occupation. The thesis is illustrated here by a narrative of revolution in Europe from the English Civil War to the Liberation of the 1940s, with a coda on ’68.

A Review Essay on Karl Marx <a href=""></a>

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.

This article follows on from a piece by the present author that attempted to explain why Marx thought that proletarians have a tendency towards socialist preference formation. My first intention here is to establish that the historical evidence of Marx's time and since lends weight to Marx's hypothesis that workers, due to their reliance upon labour-power as the form of subsistent property peculiar to their class, incline towards support for socialisation of their mode of subsistence. My second intention is to sketch the interaction over time of labour-power as a property-form and the imperatives of capital. Finally, I seek to understand capitalist crises in this context. The title borrows from Flora Tristan's Union ouvrière.

Analyses of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland tend to underplay the influence of political strategy in the 1970s, preferring to emphasise militarism. Similarly, the persistence of militarism in the 1980s is often obscured by the attention paid to a ‘new’ republican political orientation. This article seeks to draw attention to the IRA's evolving attitude to the ‘problem’ of Ulster unionism, and republicanism's various estimations of the likely efficacy of violence throughout the period. Republicanism is best understood as a deeply rooted working-class ethno-nationalist movement interacting closely with the other agents of the Northern Ireland conflict: constitutional nationalism, unionism and the British government. ‘Armed struggle’ became a declining asset for republicanism as it came to be seen less as a form of ‘popular guerrilla warfare’ and more as ‘terrorism’.

Published in honour and celebration of the work of A. T. Q. Stewart on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, the essays written for this book reflect the range and breadth of his interests.

During the premiership of Captain Terence O’Neill, from 1963 to 1969, an inclusive, liberal unionism for the first time guided the policies of the Northern Ireland state. Liberal roots in the Unionist Party, however, were never deep, and liberal unionism was effectively destroyed by the onset of the ‘Troubles’. It was an ambiguous creed, more pro-British than anxious to conciliate Irish nationalism. Liberal unionism’s aversion to overt and offensive anti-Catholicism struck a chord with perhaps the majority of the Protestant population. However, it did not encourage a proactive stance; rather a passive reciprocation of nationalist ‘goodwill’, defined, in effect, as acquiescence. It was an ideology of comfortable superiority. This can be illustrated by the fate of the Unionist Society. Uniquely for any unionist organisation of the post-war era, this association has left all its records open for inspection. The weaknesses and strengths of liberal unionism over a thirty-year span can thus be elucidated by a case-study examination of the Unionist Society.

After an eighty-year record of remarkable unity in the face of threats from Irish Nationalism, Ulster Unionism suddenly fragmented in the late 1960s. This has been explained by reference both to the fissile nature of the Unionist pan-class alliance and to fundamental divisions over identity. Though important, these were not new factors and were compatible with a high degree of organizational unity. What ruptured the movement was Terence O'Neill's ambition to draw Catholics into the Unionist alliance, even at the expense of alienating some Protestant traditionalists. Increasingly, assimilatory Unionism, dominant in the Civil Service and civil society, confronted segregatory Unionism ensconced in the structures of the Unionist Party. This strategic dichotomy reached a climax with vicious Unionist in-fighting during the 1969 Crossroads election. O'Neill's assimilation-ism ultimately collapsed both because it was unconvincing to the ranks of Ulster Unionism, and because it failed in its primary aim of making inroads into Catholic support. O'Neill underestlimated the tenacity of both traditional Unionism and traditional Nationalism