A short précis on Flora Tristan of mine just appeared in Age of Revolutions.

Check it out in: Age of Revolutions.

Competing dreams of internationalism shape the history of political thought after Tristan. Some, like those of twentieth century liberal internationalism, will take shape through institutions like the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. They will be dreams of equilibrium and order, of humanitarian intervention and the balancing of great powers, and of the free flow of capital. Others will be dreams of emancipation and global solidarity, of universal liberation from oppression. Pan-Africanists in the twentieth century will dream of a world of self-determining peoples and a New International Economic Order—one built on the redistribution of stolen wealth from empires to newly liberated colonies.

Tristan, however, reminds us that the Age of Revolutions produced its own dreams of internationalism. Her life invites us to inhabit a moment in the history of the left when the trajectories of socialism, feminism, and republicanism were not yet pried apart. She believed, as a matter of common sense, that socialism and feminism shared a joint pursuit of political freedom as collective independence. In so doing, she articulated a horizon that we, almost two centuries later, are still fighting to protect: an international movement of working women and men.