“The Tunisian Revolution. A long historical work. Tunisia from 1574 to 2023” is a new work by Mahmoud Ben Romdhane, the current President of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, Beït al-Hikma.
This opus will be presented this Friday, November 15, at the Academy Palace, in Carthage, by Abdelhamid Henia, member of Beït al-Hikma and Head of the Department of Human and Social Sciences.
“The subject of the work is the Tunisian Revolution, the first and, so far, last democratic revolution of the 21st century on a universal scale, at a time when democracy has been facing a systematic decline for nearly two decades . A “great revolution”, which triggered a chain of insurrections in the Arab world, which quickly fell apart, for lack of a prior historical work, we can read in the presentation of the book.
The approach followed is of Tocquevillian inspiration, considering that the Revolution can only be understood in and through historical continuity and that it is, in the author’s words, only “the complement of the longest work, the sudden termination of a work on which ten generations of men had worked.”
The work has the subtitle “Tunisia from 1574 to 2023” because it studies the historical process which brings about the passage of the inhabitants of this country, dominated by a foreign power, reduced to the status of subjects, divided into a mosaic of communities fighting against each other, subject to a traditional and patriarchal society; to that of individuals constituted as a sovereign Nation-State; actors, authors of their lives, free citizens.
The Tunisian Revolution presents itself, thus, as the study of the progressive realization of these institutional constructions until the event of the current Revolution and the entry of Tunisia into a highly eventful democratic era, the outcome of which is still uncertain.”
Tunisian academic, economist and politician, Mahmoud Ben Romdhane, has directed or participated in several works, published in Tunisia and France. He is a University Professor of Economics and author of several articles on Tunisia, Africa, the Arab world and the Euro-Mediterranean.
