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Anthony D'Agostino

Emeritus Professor
Email: dagostin@sfsu.edu

My area is the history of world politics, mainly war and peace issues among the great states, which I approach as a kind of intellectual and social history necessarily connected to the revolutions of the last three centuries. The country I know best is Russia and a good deal of my published work has dealt with the Russian revolution and its impact on the world. I have devoted attention to its internal power struggles which I have approached as a Kremlinologist, but chiefly as a Kremlinologist of ideas. My early work dealt with the Russian anarchists and Marxists of the nineteenth century and their extended disputes. Then I published a history of all the Kremlin power struggles and what I think is the most detailed history of the fall of Soviet Communism in the era of Gorbachev. My most ambitious work is on the world politics of the era of the two world wars. And I have lately written a short history of the Russian revolution. Presently I am embarking on a world history of our own era of globalization. I comment frequently on world politics for Bay Area radio stations. I am an avid chess player (what good chess players call a “fish”), and I play what a generous jazz musician might call cocktail piano, with special affection for the tunes of Horace Silver, Tadd Dameron and Thelonious Monk.

Education:

  • B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 1959.
  • M.A. University of California, Berkeley, 1962.
  • Graduate Study, University of Warsaw, 1967-8.
  • Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 1971.

Research Interests:

  • The world of ideas, “hegemonic ideas,” jargon.
  • Analyses of capitalism and changing ideas of socialism.
  • Statism, “dirigisme,” neoliberalism, civilizational ideology.
  • Whatever people dream about, aspire to, quarrel about.

Classes Taught:

Surveys:

  • European International History, 1848-1918
  • The Era of the World Wars, 1918-1945
  • The Cold War, 1945-1991
  • The Era of Globalization, 1968-2008
  • The Russian Revolution, 1917-1945

Seminars:

  • Globalization, 1968-2008
  • World History Bibliography

Selected Publications

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Specialized Articles:

  • “Intelligentsia Socialism and the ‘Workers’ Revolution’: The Views of J. W. Machajski,” International Review of Social History (Amsterdam), v. 14,   part 2, 1969.
  • “Ambiguities of Trotsky’s Leninism,” Survey (London), v. 24, n. 1, 107, Winter 1979.
  • “Trotsky on Stalin’s Foreign Policy,” in Francesca Geri (ed.), Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij, Firenze: Leonardo Olschki, 1983.
  • “Machajski and the New Class,” Telos, Fall 1988.
  • “Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,” in George D. Jackson (ed.), Dictionary of the Russian Revolution, Greenwood Press, 1989.       
  • “Stalin Old and New,” Russian Review, July 1995.
  • “The Anarchist Critique of Marxism,” Perspectives, Fall 1998.
  • “The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History,” Journal of the Historical Society, Spring 2004.
  • “Kremlinology,” in James Millar et. al. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Russian History, Thomson-Gale, 2004.
  • “Global Origins of World War One: Part One, The World Crisis over Concessions in China,” Historia Actual (Cadiz) n. 12 (2007).
  • “Global Origins of World War One: Part Two, A Chain of Revolutionary Events across the World Island,” Historia Actual (Cadiz) n. 13 (2007). 
  • “World War One in World History,” in Hall Gardner and Oleg Kobtzeff (eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to War, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2012.
  • "5 things the Sanders Reolution is Not," Tikkun, (Sept.2016).
  • "How the USSR Thought Itself to Death," National Interest, (April.2017).
  • "Anarchism and Marxism in the Russian Revolution," in Carl Levy and Matthew Adams (eds.) Palgrave Handbook on Anarchism, London, 2018.