Socialist Intellectuals and National(ist) Historiography: The Cases of James Connolly and Franz Mehring

Abstract

This article examines national history writing by socialist intellectuals in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, focusing on James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History and Franz Mehring’s ‘Deutsche Geschichte vom Ausgang des Mittelalters’, studying these texts in parallel for how Irish and German ‘national’ history was understood and written by such individuals. Through the hitherto unexplored parallel study of these highly important socialist intellectuals and activists, this article aims to shed light on the significance of a particular form of nationalism as an ideological and political resource for socialists in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to highlight the importance of national history writing as a paradigm for historical understanding in this period.