Revolution

"Political revolution" redirects here. For Trotskyist concept, see Political revolution (Trotskyism). For other uses, see Revolution (disambiguation) and Revolutions (disambiguation).

In political science, a revolution (Latin: revolutio, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's state, class, ethnic or religious structures. As sociologist Jack Goldstone notes, revolutions contain "a common set of elements at their core: (a) efforts to change the political regime that draw on a competing vision (or visions) of a just order, (b) a notable degree of informal or formal mass mobilization, and (c) efforts to force change through noninstitutionalized actions such as mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, or violence."

Revolutions have occurred throughout human history and vary widely in terms of methods, success or failure, duration, and motivating ideology. Revolutions may start with urban insurrections aimed at seizing the national capital, or they may start on a country's periphery through guerrilla warfare or peasant revolts. A regime can become vulnerable to revolution due to a recent military defeat, or economic chaos, or an affront to national pride and identity, or pervasive corruption and repression. Revolutions typically trigger counterrevolutions which seek to halt revolutionary momentum or to reverse the course of an ongoing revolutionary transformation.

Revolutions can be inspired by the rising popularity of certain global ideologies, moral principles, and models of governance such as nationalism, republicanism, egalitarianism, self-determination, human rights, democracy, liberalism, fascism, and socialism.

Notable revolutions in recent centuries include the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), French Revolution (1789–1799), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), Spanish American wars of independence (1808–1826), European Revolutions of 1848, Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), Russian Revolution in 1917, Chinese Communist Revolution of the 1940s, Decolonisation of Africa, Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and European Revolutions of 1989.

Etymology

The French noun "revolucion" traces back to the 13th century, and the English equivalent "revolution" to the late 14th century. The word was limited then to mean the revolving motion of celestial bodies. "Revolution" in the sense of abrupt change in a social order was first recorded in the mid-15th century. By 1688, the political meaning of the word was familiar enough that the replacement of James II with William III was termed the "Glorious Revolution".

Definition

"Revolution" is now employed most often to denote a change in social and political institutions. Jeff Goodwin offers two definitions. First, a broad one, including

any and all instances in which a state or a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional or violent fashion.

Second, a narrow one, in which

revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power.

Jack Goldstone defines a revolution as

an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and noninstitutionalized actions that undermine authorities.

Early scholars debated distinctions between revolutions and civil wars. They also debated whether revolutions were purely political (concerning the transformation of government) or whether they were more expansive in nature to encompass broader social change.

Types

A Watt steam engine in Madrid. The development of the steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the world. The steam engine was created to pump water from coal mines, enabling them to be deepened beyond groundwater levels.

There are numerous typologies of revolution in the social science literature.

Alexis de Tocqueville differentiated between:

• political revolutions, sudden and violent revolutions that seek not only to establish a new political system but to transform an entire society, and;
• slow but sweeping transformations of the entire society that take several generations to bring about (such as changes in religion).

One of the Marxist typologies divides revolutions into:

• pre-capitalist
• early bourgeois
• bourgeois
• bourgeois-democratic
• early proletarian
• socialist

Charles Tilly, a modern scholar of revolutions, differentiated between:

• coup d'état (a top-down seizure of power)
• civil war
• revolt, and
• "great revolution" (a revolution that transforms economic and social structures as well as political institutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917, or Islamic Revolution of Iran).

Revolutions of 1848 were essentially bourgeois revolutions and democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states.

Mark Katz identified six forms of revolution:

• rural revolution
• urban revolution
• Coup d'état, e.g., Egypt, 1952
• revolution from above, e.g., Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958
• revolution from without, e.g., the allied invasions of Italy in 1943 and of Germany in 1945.
• revolution by osmosis, e.g., the gradual Islamization of several countries.

These categories are not mutually exclusive; the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with an urban revolution to depose the Czar, followed by rural revolution, followed by the Bolshevik coup in November. Katz also cross-classified revolutions as follows;

• Central: countries, usually Great Powers, which play a leading role in a revolutionary wave; e.g., the USSR, Nazi Germany, Iran since 1979.
• Aspiring revolutions, which follow the Central revolution
• subordinate or puppet revolutions
• rival revolutions, e.g., communist Yugoslavia, and China after 1969

A further dimension to Katz's typology is that revolutions are either against (anti-monarchy, anti-dictatorial, anti-communist, anti-democratic) or for (pro-fascism, pro-communism, pro-nationalism, etc.). In the latter cases, a transition period is generally necessary to decide which direction to take to achieve the desired form of government.

Other types of revolution, created for other typologies, include proletarian or communist revolutions (inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aim to replace capitalism with communism); failed or abortive revolutions (revolutions that fail to secure power after temporary victories or large-scale mobilization); or violent vs. nonviolent revolutions.

The term revolution has also been used to denote great changes outside the political sphere. Such revolutions, often labeled social revolutions, are recognized as major transformations in a society's culture, philosophy, or technology, rather than in its political system. Some social revolutions are global in scope, while others are limited to single countries. Commonly cited examples of social revolution are the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Commercial Revolution, and Digital Revolution. These revolutions also fit the "slow revolution" type identified by Tocqueville.

Studies of revolution

R E V O L U T I O N, graffiti with political message on a house wall. Four letters have been written backwards and with a different color so that they also form the word Love.

Main article: Social revolution

The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789 during the French Revolution.

George Washington, leader of the American Revolution.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Chinese Xinhai Revolution in 1911.

Khana Ratsadon, a group of military officers and civil officials, who staged the Siamese Revolution of 1932.

Political and socioeconomic revolutions have been studied in many social sciences, particularly sociology, political science and history.

Scholars of revolution differentiate four "generations" of theoretical research on the subject of revolution. Theorists of the first generation, including Gustave Le Bon, Charles A. Ellwood, and Pitirim Sorokin, were mainly descriptive in their approach, and their explanations of the phenomena of revolutions were usually related to social psychology, such as Le Bon's crowd psychology theory.

The second generation sought to develop detailed frameworks, grounded in social behavior theory, to explain why and when revolutions arise. Their work can be divided into three major categories: psychological, sociological and political.

The writings of Ted Robert Gurr, Ivo K. Feierbrand, Rosalind L. Feierbrand, James A. Geschwender, David C. Schwartz, and Denton E. Morrison fall into the first category. They utilized theories of cognitive psychology and frustration-aggression theory to link the cause of revolution to the state of mind of the masses. While these theorists varied in their approach as to what exactly incited the people to revolt (e.g., modernization, recession, or discrimination), they agreed that the primary cause for revolution was a widespread frustration with the socio-political situation.

The second group, composed of academics such as Chalmers Johnson, Neil Smelser, Bob Jessop, Mark Hart, Edward A. Tiryakian, and Mark Hagopian, drew on the work of Talcott Parsons and the structural-functionalist theory in sociology. They saw society as a system in equilibrium between various resources, demands, and subsystems (political, cultural, etc.). As in the psychological school, they differed in their definitions of what causes disequilibrium, but agreed that it is a state of a severe disequilibrium that is responsible for revolutions.

The third group, which included writers such as Charles Tilly, Samuel P. Huntington, Peter Ammann, and Arthur L. Stinchcombe, followed a political science path and looked at pluralist theory and interest group conflict theory. Those theories view events as outcomes of a power struggle between competing interest groups. In such a model, revolutions happen when two or more groups cannot come to terms within the current political system's normal decision-making process, and when they possess the required resources to employ force in pursuit of their goals.

The second-generation theorists regarded the development of revolutionary situations as a two-step process: "First, a pattern of events arises that somehow marks a break or change from previous patterns. This change then affects some critical variable—the cognitive state of the masses, the equilibrium of the system, or the magnitude of conflict and resource control of competing interest groups. If the effect on the critical variable is of sufficient magnitude, a potentially revolutionary situation occurs." Once this point is reached, a negative incident (a war, a riot, a bad harvest) that in the past might not have been enough to trigger a revolt, will now be enough. However, if authorities are cognizant of the danger, they can still prevent revolution through reform or repression.

Many such early studies tended to concentrate on four historical examples that fit virtually all definitions of revolution: England's Glorious Revolution (1688), the French Revolution (1789–1799), the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Communist Revolution (also known as the Chinese Civil War) (1927–1949). In his influential 1938 book The Anatomy of Revolution, historian Crane Brinton altered the list slightly, choosing to focus on the English Civil War, American Revolution, French Revolution, and Russian Revolution.

In subsequent decades, scholars began to categorize hundreds of other events as revolutions (see List of revolutions and rebellions). Their expanded notion of revolution gave rise to new approaches and explanations. The theories of the second generation came under criticism for their limited geographical scope and their lack of empirical verification. Also, while second-generation theories may have been capable of explaining a specific revolution, they could not adequately explain why revolutions failed to occur in other societies in very similar straits.

The criticism of the second generation led to the rise of a third generation of theories, put forth by writers such as Theda Skocpol, Barrington Moore, Jeffrey Paige, and others expanding on the old Marxist class-conflict approach, turning their attention to "rural agrarian-state conflicts, state conflicts with autonomous elites, and the impact of interstate economic and military competition on domestic political change." In particular, Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions became one of the most widely recognized works of the third generation. Skocpol defined revolution as "rapid, basic transformations of society's state and class structures [...] accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below", and she attributed revolutions to "a conjunction of multiple conflicts involving state, elites and the lower classes".

The fall of the Berlin Wall and most of the events of the Autumn of Nations in Europe, 1989, were sudden and peaceful.

From the late 1980s, a new body of scholarly work began questioning the dominance of the third generation's theories. The old theories were also dealt a significant blow by new revolutionary events that could not be easily explained by them. The Iranian and Nicaraguan Revolutions of 1979, the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines and the 1989 Autumn of Nations in Europe saw multi-class coalitions topple seemingly powerful regimes amidst popular demonstrations and mass strikes in nonviolent revolutions.

For some historians, the traditional paradigm of revolutions as class struggle-driven conflicts centered in Europe, and involving a violent state versus its people, was no longer sufficient. The study of revolutions thus evolved in three directions: First, some researchers were applying previous or updated structuralist theories of revolution to events other than the well-analyzed Eurocentric examples. Second, scholars called for greater attention to conscious agency in the form of ideology and culture in shaping revolutionary mobilization and objectives. Third, analysts of both revolutions and social movements realized that those phenomena have much in common, and a new "fourth generation" literature on contentious politics was developed which attempts to combine insights from the study of social movements and revolutions in hopes of understanding both phenomena.

The fourth generation increasingly turned to quantitative techniques when formulating its theories. Political science research moved beyond individual or comparative case studies towards large-N statistical analysis assessing the causes and implications of revolution. The initial studies generally relied on the Polity data series on democratization. Such analyses, like those by Enterline, Maoz, and Mansfield and Snyder, identified a revolution by a significant change in the country's score on Polity's autocracy-to-democracy scale.

More recently, scholars like Jeff Colgan have argued that the Polity data series—which evaluates the degree of democratic or autocratic authority in a state's governing institutions based on the openness of executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition—is inadequate because it measures democratization, not revolution, and fails to account for regimes which come to power by revolution but fail to change the structure of the state and society sufficiently to yield a notable difference in the Polity score. Instead, Colgan offered a new data set to single out governments that "transform the existing social, political, and economic relationships of the state by overthrowing or rejecting the principal existing institutions of society." This data set has been employed to make empirically based contributions to the literature on revolution by finding links between revolution and the likelihood of international disputes.

Revolutions have also been approached from an anthropological perspective. Drawing on Victor Turner's writings on ritual and performance, Bjorn Thomassen argued that revolutions can be understood as "liminal" moments: modern political revolutions very much resemble rituals and can therefore be studied within a process approach. This would imply not only a focus on political behavior "from below", but also a recognition of moments where "high and low" are relativized, subverted, or made irrelevant, and where the micro and macro levels fuse together in critical conjunctions.

Economist Douglass North argued that it is much easier for revolutionaries to alter formal political institutions such as laws and constitutions than to alter informal social conventions. According to North, inconsistencies between rapidly changing formal institutions and slow-changing informal ones can inhibit effective sociopolitical change. Because of this, the long-term effect of revolutionary political restructuring is often more moderate than the ostensible short-term effect.

While revolutions encompass events ranging from the relatively peaceful revolutions that overthrew communist regimes to the violent Islamic revolution in Afghanistan, they exclude coups d'état, civil wars, revolts, and rebellions that make no effort to transform institutions or challenge the justification for authority (such as Józef Piłsudski's May Coup of 1926 or the American Civil War), as well as peaceful transitions to democracy through institutional arrangements such as plebiscites and free elections, as in Spain after the death of Francisco Franco.

See also

• Age of Revolution
• Classless society
• Counterrevolution
• List of revolutions and rebellions
• Passive revolution
• Political warfare
• Preference falsification
• Psychological warfare
• Rebellion
• Reformism
• Revolutionary wave
• Right of revolution
• Social movement
• Subversion
• User revolt

References

Bibliography

• Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-013455-1.
• Getachew, Adom (2019). Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17915-5.
• Gunitsky, Seva (2017). Aftershocks. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17233-0.
• Gunitsky, Seva (2018). "Democratic Waves in Historical Perspective". Perspectives on Politics. 16 (3): 634–651. doi:10.1017/S1537592718001044. ISSN 1537-5927. S2CID 149523316.
• Gunitsky, Seva (2021), Bartel, Fritz; Monteiro, Nuno P. (eds.), "Great Powers and the Spread of Autocracy Since the Cold War", Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, pp. 225–243, doi:10.1017/9781108910194.014, ISBN 978-1-108-84334-8, S2CID 244851964
• Katz, Mark N. (1997). Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves. St Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0312173227.
• Peter Kropotkin (1906), Memoirs of a revolutionist. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd.
• Reus-Smit, Christian (2013). Individual Rights and the Making of the International System. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139046527. ISBN 978-0-521-85777-2.
• Strang, David (1991). "Global Patterns of Decolonization, 1500-1987". International Studies Quarterly. 35 (4): 429–454. doi:10.2307/2600949. ISSN 0020-8833. JSTOR 2600949.

Further reading

• Beissinger, Mark R. (2024). "The Evolving Study of Revolution". World Politics.
• Beck, Colin J. (2018). "The Structure of Comparison in the Study of Revolution". Sociological Theory. 36 (2): 134–161. doi:10.1177/0735275118777004. S2CID 53669466.
• Goldstone, Jack A. (1982). "The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions". Annual Review of Sociology. 8: 187–207
• Ness, Immanuel, ed. (2009). The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present. Malden, MA: Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-8464-9.

External links

• Arendt, Hannah (1963). IEP.UTM.edu. On Revolution. Penguin Classics. New Ed edition: February 8, 1991. ISBN 0-14-018421-X.