Aidan Beatty
I’m a historian from Galway, Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Chicago. My research focuses on Irish and British History, Jewish and Israeli History, Masculinity, Nationalism, Race, and Capitalism and Socialism.
I’m a lecturer in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University and have previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Wayne State University and the University of Chicago. I’ve also held postdoctoral positions at Concordia University in Montreal and at Trinity College Dublin and short-term research fellowships at the Truman Presidential Library and the American Jewish Archives.
My first book, "Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism", was published in 2016 and was awarded the prize for best history book of the year by ACIS. My second book, "Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos", was published with Manchester University Press in early 2023. My most recent book, "The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism", came out with Pluto Press in late 2024.
My peer-reviewed work has been published in the Journal of Modern History, Irish Historical Studies and the Journal of Jewish Studies and I have written for the Irish Times, Jacobin and the Washington Post. I’ve been a guest editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Radical History Review and recently co-edited a special issue of the Irish Studies Review focusing on Irish Capitalism. I am also the co-editor of Irish Questions and Jewish Questions, published with Syracuse University Press in 2018.
I currently serve as Vice-President of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), on a term from 2023-25. From 2025-27, I will be president of ACIS.
I’m a lecturer in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University and have previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Wayne State University and the University of Chicago. I’ve also held postdoctoral positions at Concordia University in Montreal and at Trinity College Dublin and short-term research fellowships at the Truman Presidential Library and the American Jewish Archives.
My first book, "Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism", was published in 2016 and was awarded the prize for best history book of the year by ACIS. My second book, "Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos", was published with Manchester University Press in early 2023. My most recent book, "The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism", came out with Pluto Press in late 2024.
My peer-reviewed work has been published in the Journal of Modern History, Irish Historical Studies and the Journal of Jewish Studies and I have written for the Irish Times, Jacobin and the Washington Post. I’ve been a guest editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Radical History Review and recently co-edited a special issue of the Irish Studies Review focusing on Irish Capitalism. I am also the co-editor of Irish Questions and Jewish Questions, published with Syracuse University Press in 2018.
I currently serve as Vice-President of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), on a term from 2023-25. From 2025-27, I will be president of ACIS.
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Books by Aidan Beatty
some fascinating stories. Finding themselves increasingly irrelevant
in modern politics, these political parties and sects often became
twisted aberrations of Comrade Trotsky’s ideals. Gerry Healy’s
Workers Revolutionary Party was no exception.
This new biography tells the story of Healy’s life, picking
apart fact from fiction, to reveal a man rotten to the core with
authoritarian tendencies. Saturating the party with his personality,
Healy took advantage of his comrades’ trust and revolutionary zeal,
eventually creating a split in 1985.
This is a tragic story in the history of Communism, wracked
with accounts of abuse, collaboration with the state, and vicious
infighting. It also reveals the dangers of male-dominated political
movements, secular cults and celebrity culture, and is an important
reminder of what can happen when a working-class movement is
betrayed from within.
Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman's housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of 'the mob' has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.
Essays and Peer-Reviewed Papers by Aidan Beatty
terrorism in Thatcherism, both central concerns of Hall’s, this is a major lacuna. This essay offers some speculative assessments as to why Hall generally ignored Ireland and draws a connection to the broad context of the British Left, which had (and still has) similar blind spots.
Burns (c.1822-1863), Engels’ common law wife, and then her sister Lydia
‘Lizzie’ Burns (1827-1878), who formally married Engels just before her
death. The history of women, like those of the working classes and racial
minorities, is always bedevilled by what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous
condescension of posterity’, in which illiterate peoples are erased
from the historical record. Yet, it is rare to find illiterate women so close
(and seemingly making a major determining impact) on the lives of literate
men. Drawing on Marx and Engels’ sprawling correspondence, as well as
other contemporary records, this paper seeks to uncover how much we
can ever truly know about these two women? How much of a role did
they actually play in Engels’ political and literary work? And how much
have their real lives been covered up with a Marxist romanticising of two
proletarian, illiterate factory workers?
played a strong role in that romance.
• Historical time and mythology;
• The Irish Language;
• Masculinity;
• Land and Agrarian Economics.
Across all of these themes, I argue, de Valera was presented as a saviour for the Irish nation, a man steeped in the Irish national past, and the one who would protect voters from the evils of British rule and restore dignity to a humiliated nation. Such imagery and language, I suggest, deserve a central place in any analysis of Sinn Féin’s electoral victories at the outset of the War of Independence.
There is a conventional view among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and the end of the Civil War in 1923. The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a ‘Revolution.’
As Immanuel Wallerstein has suggested, though, ‘revolution’ is a problematic heuristic device. While the term carries connotations of a sudden rupture or break with the past, the events usually studied under this rubric often have deep temporal and structural roots. In this vein, and drawing on Gramsci's notion of a 'revolution without a revolution', this paper seeks to understand the events in Ireland of 1912-23, not as a sudden rupture with the past but as the culmination of a much longer period of (often British-backed) capitalist development in post-Famine Ireland.
Declan Kiberd has argued that Irish nationalists have often displayed a tendency to remain trapped within the very codes they sought to oppose. Irish nationalists spoke of a ‘break’ with Britain, but in many respects what they demanded was simply the right to manage the country themselves along the same capitalist lines. The nationalist mainstream did not seek an economic or social revolution; this paper seeks to understand the structural reasons why this was so.
Moreover, as both John Hutchinson and Stephen Howe have argued, conventional ‘revisionist’ Irish historians are ‘methodological nationalists’, given their uncritical use of ‘the nation’ as their basic unit of analysis. This paper argues that Irish nationalist politics in the decades before 1912 is better understood via categories such as class, gender, capitalism and the pervasive power of the British state. As such, as well as pursuing a reassessment of the project of Irish historical development and state-building, this paper also seeks a reassessment of the project of (an equally statist) Irish historiography.
some fascinating stories. Finding themselves increasingly irrelevant
in modern politics, these political parties and sects often became
twisted aberrations of Comrade Trotsky’s ideals. Gerry Healy’s
Workers Revolutionary Party was no exception.
This new biography tells the story of Healy’s life, picking
apart fact from fiction, to reveal a man rotten to the core with
authoritarian tendencies. Saturating the party with his personality,
Healy took advantage of his comrades’ trust and revolutionary zeal,
eventually creating a split in 1985.
This is a tragic story in the history of Communism, wracked
with accounts of abuse, collaboration with the state, and vicious
infighting. It also reveals the dangers of male-dominated political
movements, secular cults and celebrity culture, and is an important
reminder of what can happen when a working-class movement is
betrayed from within.
Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman's housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of 'the mob' has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.
terrorism in Thatcherism, both central concerns of Hall’s, this is a major lacuna. This essay offers some speculative assessments as to why Hall generally ignored Ireland and draws a connection to the broad context of the British Left, which had (and still has) similar blind spots.
Burns (c.1822-1863), Engels’ common law wife, and then her sister Lydia
‘Lizzie’ Burns (1827-1878), who formally married Engels just before her
death. The history of women, like those of the working classes and racial
minorities, is always bedevilled by what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous
condescension of posterity’, in which illiterate peoples are erased
from the historical record. Yet, it is rare to find illiterate women so close
(and seemingly making a major determining impact) on the lives of literate
men. Drawing on Marx and Engels’ sprawling correspondence, as well as
other contemporary records, this paper seeks to uncover how much we
can ever truly know about these two women? How much of a role did
they actually play in Engels’ political and literary work? And how much
have their real lives been covered up with a Marxist romanticising of two
proletarian, illiterate factory workers?
played a strong role in that romance.
• Historical time and mythology;
• The Irish Language;
• Masculinity;
• Land and Agrarian Economics.
Across all of these themes, I argue, de Valera was presented as a saviour for the Irish nation, a man steeped in the Irish national past, and the one who would protect voters from the evils of British rule and restore dignity to a humiliated nation. Such imagery and language, I suggest, deserve a central place in any analysis of Sinn Féin’s electoral victories at the outset of the War of Independence.
There is a conventional view among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and the end of the Civil War in 1923. The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a ‘Revolution.’
As Immanuel Wallerstein has suggested, though, ‘revolution’ is a problematic heuristic device. While the term carries connotations of a sudden rupture or break with the past, the events usually studied under this rubric often have deep temporal and structural roots. In this vein, and drawing on Gramsci's notion of a 'revolution without a revolution', this paper seeks to understand the events in Ireland of 1912-23, not as a sudden rupture with the past but as the culmination of a much longer period of (often British-backed) capitalist development in post-Famine Ireland.
Declan Kiberd has argued that Irish nationalists have often displayed a tendency to remain trapped within the very codes they sought to oppose. Irish nationalists spoke of a ‘break’ with Britain, but in many respects what they demanded was simply the right to manage the country themselves along the same capitalist lines. The nationalist mainstream did not seek an economic or social revolution; this paper seeks to understand the structural reasons why this was so.
Moreover, as both John Hutchinson and Stephen Howe have argued, conventional ‘revisionist’ Irish historians are ‘methodological nationalists’, given their uncritical use of ‘the nation’ as their basic unit of analysis. This paper argues that Irish nationalist politics in the decades before 1912 is better understood via categories such as class, gender, capitalism and the pervasive power of the British state. As such, as well as pursuing a reassessment of the project of Irish historical development and state-building, this paper also seeks a reassessment of the project of (an equally statist) Irish historiography.
studies the various pamphlets published in the 1920s and 1930s in which these politico-economic issues were debated, from the socialist writings of Peadar O’Donnell to works produced by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael ideologues.
emotional and economic power of the Irish landscape dating back to the land reforms of the 1880s, Fianna Fáil positioned itself after 1930 as the only Irish political party that could and would achieve the social and economic advancement of the ‘small man’.
A One Day Conference at the University of Chicago
25 April 2015
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Prof. Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College, London.
While much of the scholarly study of masculinity in Britain has focused on the construction of mainstream and normative middle-class ideals of English male behaviour, this conference will focus on the lived realities of those on the fringes of British society, both the Celtic fringe as well as immigrant and working class masculinity. The conference seeks to explore how such fringe masculinities co-existed with, had an influence on, and were influenced by, more mainstream concepts of male behaviour.
Potential papers could include, but are not limited to:
- Working class masculinity
- Manliness, language, and nationalism on the Celtic fringe
- Conflicting ideas of masculinity in post-1945 multi-cultural Britain
- Comparative studies of British masculinities across the Empire
- British Homosexuality
- Everyday life in the Armed Forces
- Masculine ideals and religious minorities
- The division-of-labour as a gender-division in the British economy
Please send abstracts of 300 words to Aidan Beatty ([email protected]) and Amanda Blair ([email protected]). Deadline for submissions – 30 September 2014.
http://tlv1.fm/politics-commentary/2016/05/16/the-shamrock-and-star-of-david-irish-and-jewish-nationalisms/