There are few concepts in political theory as contested as universalism. If one were inclined, one could map the discipline’s postwar life by measuring evolving attitudes toward this concept: liberals defending universalisms over here, postcolonial critics provincializing them over there, feminists discrediting them as ruses or discovering them anew. There were those who theorized universalisms to overcome differences, those who doubled down on a droit à la différence, and everyone else who by choice or necessity fell into the fissures of this riven landscape. Pitched battles among universalists and particularists have waned lately, yet the concept remains one of our most fraught, intractable inheritances.

Massimiliano Tomba’s terrific book, Insurgent Universality, does not join this conversation so much as entreat us into the shadows it casts. It redirects our attention to where it should have been all along: not on “universalisms,” but on “universality” as it is practiced by those fighting for emancipation below and beyond the state’s terms.

Tomba draws this distinction by criticizing the prevailing narrative of modernity. That narrative is associated with Hegel’s universal history and acts, he argues, “like a reverse optical prism,” uniting “a multiplicity of colors to bring out the white light of the progress of humanity” (p. 23). It arcs from feudalism’s disintegration to the nation-state’s coronation as the undivided expression of popular sovereignty. It plots an interlocking ensemble of ideals—private property, unitary states, juridical equality, homogeneous and abstract time—as the telos of a universal human history. Tomba insists on modernity’s violence: it destroys political experiments that do not conform to its normative conception of progress, and it leaves in the “waiting room” of history underdeveloped peoples eternally condemned to catch up with European political development.

For many readers, critiques of a universal, teleological modernity will be familiar. Tomba’s version calls to mind precedents in postcolonial theory like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) and those in critical theory like Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009). Even though his critique builds on both, it may nevertheless strike some readers as rote in comparison. However, where Tomba breaks new ground is in creatively weaponizing experiments in self-government that prevailing views of progress have deemed anachronistic. For the book’s soul resides in its claim that those anachronistic experiments add up to a parallel history of “insurgent universality” that runs alongside modern universalism. The history of insurgent universality lies in episodes wherein ordinary people exercise citizenship against the grain of the state through associations, communes, and local assemblies. These episodes are “insurgent” when they challenge the status quo in its entirety. They are episodes of “universality” when they produce associations and institutions that extend “equal access to politics” (pp. 67, 83, 98). Access to politics was once patterned out by the privileges of birth. It threatens to become so again today. Yet moments of insurgent universality reveal the futility of increasing access to politics as a statist dispensation from above. It takes a rich fabric of associational life to make universal access to politics real. For Tomba, these two aspects are linked: when experiments in self-government are insurgent, they expand access to politics, because when the entire social order is under challenge “anyone can be on the side of the insurgents” (p. 19).

Insurgent universality can sound abstract. The major strength of Tomba’s book is to win this concept from the rough ground of history. The book’s chapters span the French Revolution and Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution and the Zapatistas. Each chapter clarifies “insurgent universality” by studying a neglected experiment in self-government that transcended borders. In the French Revolution, for example, we look away from the Jacobins and Girondins toward the actions of the enragés, insurrectionary women, and their enslaved counterparts in Saint-Domingue. In the 1871 Paris Commune, we read the Parisians’ insurrection together with their Arab and Berber counterparts in Algeria. After 1917, we turn away from the Bolsheviks, the better to dwell with the agrarian socialist possibilities contained in the soviets and the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East. In the case of the Zapatistas, their defense of the mandar obedeciendo is not exoticized as foreign to Western modernity, but is recontextualized as a continuation of the imperative mandate tradition connecting 1793, 1871, and the Soviet Constitution of 1918.

For Tomba, these episodes of self-government can appear as insurgent universality if we forsake a vision of history populated by “progressive” protagonists and “reactionary” antagonists. Indeed, by eschewing teleological history we can rediscover these experiments as something other than anachronisms, namely as “trailmarker[s] of possible futures” (p. 26). Tomba’s method pays off when it uncovers hidden ligaments connecting liberation movements across time and space. In the end, writing a history of insurgent universality is a trustbusting enterprise. Forget nationalist historiographies. Forget monopolies, whether the state’s monopoly on sovereignty, capitalism’s monopoly on time, liberalism’s monopoly on freedom and association, and Western Europe’s monopoly on universality. Moments of insurgent universality could connect everyone, because they belonged to everyone.

Tomba devotes little space to historical exposition. The result is that the book will be of greatest appeal to readers already familiar with events like the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution. Other readers may have a harder time recognizing the work of theoretical excavation that forms each chapter’s contribution. At times, too, Tomba’s ambition can generate frustrating binary characterizations of complex historical affairs. The Paris Commune is staged as a war between individual and collective rights (p. 107), even though newspapers like the Cri du people acclaimed individual rights for the “communal revolution.” Variations of the phrase, “There are two conceptions at stake…” or “There are two traditions…” score the text. This binarism empowers Tomba’s critique of a “dominant modernity” but risks overstating its uniformity. Andrew Sartori’s Liberalism in Empire (2014) has recently challenged us to consider why Bengali peasants could invoke Lockean property to demand the British Empire’s expulsion from their land. These peasants weaponized “dominant modernity” against itself. One wonders what Tomba would make of such experiences.

Even so, there is good reason to accept Tomba’s dramatic staging, even if it sometimes exaggerates, because the book’s goal is not historical documentation. It is the construction of a vantage point to appreciate past experiments in insurgent universality as “something incomplete,” as a legacy for us to resume today (pp. 5, 14, 28). And herein resides the book’s great value: it demonstrates how to use history to do political theory. So much history of political thought unfolds in an expository mode, routinely executed as monographs or chapters contextualizing a single author. Tomba’s book is proof of concept that the history of political thought can be so much more. “When the people are really the protagonists and they act politically,” Tomba claims, “the people don’t need big personalities.” That is why “insurgent universality is mainly anonymous” (pp. 2, 79). Tomba is out to remind us that democratic theory is not the achievement of individual authors; it is the conquest of groups trying to win a more equal form of life. His book models how to do historical political theory that lives up to that conviction.