A 4-part definition of "revolution" =

(1) a conscious assault on an existing governmental system.

An assault simply to change who is in power is, by itself, not revolution. We call that "coup d'etat". Therefore,

(2) revolution has the goal of putting another governmental system in the place of the old.

So far, this definition of revolution is a lot like the definition of war, especially wars of conquest. In fact, revolutions have historically been associated with wars -- before, during and/or after revolution. A research group once concluded that revolution ought to be called "internal war". Thus a third component is necessary to distinguish revolution from inter-state or international war (between two existing governmental systems) =

(3) Revolution originates and involves participants from within the sphere of the existing governmental authority.

To be a revolution, events must be largely "home grown", not introduced from beyond the limits of the governmental system under revolutionary assault.

The most famous revolutions involved great masses of participants and a degree of violence, though the numbers involved and the levels of violence are not essential to the definition. Certainly the effects of authentic revolution will always involve great masses of people, whether they actively participate or not. That is so because governmental systems are always intertwined with the full life of those within the systems' jurisdiction.

Let's add a final component to our definition, at least for consideration =

(4) Revolution is a distinctly modern experience.

Not all epochs experienced revolution. For one thing, revolutions are unlikely in times or places where there does not exist the idea of "progress" and the belief in the possibility -- maybe we should say "the democratic imperative" -- of popular political mobilization. Only in the modern historical epoch has revolution become one of the standard (if ultra extreme) forms of domestic political behavior. Three early modern European "thinkers" captured these modern ideas or sentiments and left a legacy that has proved controversial but enduring and globally influential = John Locke [ID], Jean Jacques Rousseau [ID], Jeremy Bentham [ID]. Into the 19th century, two further figures gave wide credence to two different visions of history as progress = Charles Fourier [ID] and Saint-Simon [ID]

Great changes caused by the transition from pre-modern ("feudal") to modern ways have everywhere forced a rebalancing of traditional relationships =
*--Between the individual and the community
*--Between society and government [the central state]
*--Between the old ways of agricultural civilizations and new ways of modern industrialized market economics
*--Between market choice and command economies

THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION, PHASE ONE =

The era of European liberal revolution began with what some call the "Atlantic Revolution"
*--Its roots might be traced to 17th-century England = The Puritan Revolution [ID] and The "Glorious" Revolution [ID].
*--Then came the American Revolution for colonial liberation from English imperialist authority [4-hop LOOP]
*--The 1789:French Revolution [ID], went even further. The "Third Estate" (commoners) rose up against the privileges and social exemptions of the other two estates (clergy and aristocracy), against the dominance of the church in intellectual and social life, and against self-justifying monarchical authority. The ideals of the French Revolution spread variously and unevenly over much of the entire world

"The Left" and "The Right"

Out of the French Revolution came the now universal symbolism for the spectrum of political opinion that arose in response to this transformation of public life = "left", "center", "right". These cardinal points in the European political universe might not be best arrayed in a straight line, left to right, but around a near-circular Greek letter "omega" =

liberal         conservative
radical   Ω   reactionary

Liberals [LOOP on "liberal" from 1780s to 1880s] strive for independence from institutional authority and maximum individual freedom. Social ties are understood less in a "communitarian" way, more in terms of what came to be widely designated as "the social contract", such as espoused by John Locke [EG]

Conservatives strive to preserve traditions and sustain historically proven ways of life. Social ties are understood to be hierarchical and stable in a traditional "community", such as espoused by Edmund Burke [EG]

Radicals strive for a better future, such as has not yet been experienced, only conceptualized. Social ties might be thought of in rigorous and confining communitarian terms [EG], or in an opposite direction, utterly spontaneous and anarchistic [EG]

Reactionaries strive to restore a past perfection, also not yet experienced, only conceptualized. Social ties are generally subordinated to authoritarian regulatory agencies, such as church, state, censors, police and military, as urged by Joseph de Maistre [EG] or Metternich [EG]

The omega form reminds us that liberals and conservatives do group together around the upper curve,
while radicals and reactionaries seem almost to make contact with one another at the lower points

Post-French-Revolutionary Chronology

*1799no09:Napoleon's military coup [ID] brought French Revolution into its fifteen-year militarist-expansionist phase

*1801:1825; the spirit of the unfolding European revolution moved Russian Emperor Alexander I to make significant efforts at reform [LOOP on the word "reform"]

*1814mr30:Russian Emperor Alexander I entered Paris at the head of a great international army of liberation, freeing Europe from the Napoleonic impirial rule [ID], followed soon by the 1814no01:Convocation of the reactionary Congress of Vienna [ID] which tried to put old Europe together again, but Old Europe was not to be revived, whatever the hopes of the Congress of Vienna

*1820s:Revolutions in Latin America [ID] broke away from the imperialist, mercantilist colonial power of West European monarchies

*1776:1826; The Atlantic Revolutionary epoch [MAP]

*1814:+; Certain educated Russians, veteran officers in the Napoleonic Wars, returned home and began organizing themselves, sometimes secretly, to explore possibilities of "liberal" or "progressive" change in their homeland. Ten years later, their several inchoate groups received a single name almost by accident, from the month in which they took clumsy steps to prevent new tsar Nicholas I from assuming the throne = "The Decembrist Movement" [ID]

*1825:1855; Russian Emperor Nicholas I became the paragon of "reactionary reform" [ID]. He introduced changes designed to bring an end to change, all in order to defend autocratic state power

*--European Revolution of 1830 [ID] consolidated earlier radical change

*1836fe04:Irish independence movement against English oppression intensified [ID]
*--That spring, Shamil's Islamic revolution against Russian imperial power had new success [LOOP]
*--And Texas broke from Mexico [LOOP]

Historical Contradictions within Liberalism

At the heart of the "Atlantic" or "liberal" revolution two sets of contradictions festered =
     * freedom vs. equality [EG]
     * nationalism vs. civil liberty [EG]]

Striking different compromises along the ridge of these contradictions, European nations shaped their various domestic political and social futures

Charles Tilly in Coercion, Capital and European States... argued that two forces combined to create modern European nation-states =
(1) coercion (industrialized, state-controlled and state-funded police and military force) and
(2) investment capital ("capitalism" and industrial invigoration of human productive power)

The combinations took three characteristic forms, based on three different ways of balancing coercion and market economics. Thus three sorts of European nation-states were produced =
(1) coercion-intensive
(2) capital-intensive, and
(3) capitalized coercion

Liberalism flourished best in the second of these three options, but not all European states went the middle route. Some nations favored freedom over equality, some leaned the other direction. Some favored "security" and nation-statism over civil liberties, some leaned the other direction

"Crunch Time" =

*1848 Revolution [ID] rocked major European capitals. New fissures opened in social life between property owners ("the capitalist class") and those who had only their labor to sell (workers or "the proletariat"). Those who hungered for equality turned against those who prospered with freedom. Dominant "bourgeois" classes demanded protection, just as they welcomed state-proffered opportunity. They were willing to strengthen the sort of state power that furthered their interests, and they were anxious to curtail that sort of state power that furthered the interests competing economic forces, for example, wage labor. When some said "laissez faire" they seemed to mean "hands off us" and "hands on all those in our way". Increasingly wealthy and powerful bourgeois industrialists and financiers were willing to sacrifice civil liberties for governmentally enforced security. Politics are always beautifully complex [EG = "interests"], but we can discern a major shift in the European revolution. Earlier, the main factional lines were defined by relationships to the pre-modern ("feudal") and agrarian economic and social structures. Now the major factions in European political life were defined by relationships to the modernizing industrial economy. Conflict was no longer "commoners" vs. "aristocrats, monarchs and priests" but prosperous commoners ("owners") vs. commoners who worked for them ("labor")

*--The 1848 Revolution was faintly echoed in Russia by what has come to be called "the Petrashevtsy" [ID]

THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION, PHASE TWO =

The era of social-democratic reform and revolution evolved out of the European liberal revolution and came into conflict with it. Liberalism had long struggled against opponents to the "right". Now opposition arose on the "left". Social democracy sought to resolve the contradictions between freedom and equality in new and more radically egalitarian though not necessarily more democratic ways. This phase, like the liberal phase before it, revealed an eventually tragic set of contradictions visible in the growth of aggressive military-statism and imperialistic internationalism, along with intense self-centered, often racist and chauvinistic nationalism

*1859:A remarkable year in the annals of publication [ID]
*--Karl Marx' first mature expression of the foundations of "Marxism" [ID]
*--John Stuart Mill's On Liberty appeared. About 2/3 through chapter one in this eloquent plea for liberty, Mill stumbled into one of the insoluble problems of European liberalism. Consider this paragraph [boldface added] =

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine [liberty limited only by the need to protect pubic safety] is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.

How do you explain the relationship of the preceding paragraph to the whole set of arguments put forward by Mill?

*1855:1881; the reign of Russian Emperor Alexander II was marked by dramatic episodes of "liberal" reform and revolution [LOOP on "reform"]

*--Italy entered into a long and arduous period of national unification [6-hop LOOP], at first liberal and civilian-oriented, soon also militaristic and imperialistic

*--Polish Rebellion [ID] tried for nationalist independence and social reform, attempting all at once to resolve the conflicts between these two goals, but Russia crushed the uprising

*1871:Paris Commune [ID]. By this time the social contradiction between freedom (e.g., entrepreneurial freedom) and equality (e.g., the growing injustice of industrial working-class conditions) marked the end of the era of the "European Liberal Revolution" and the beginning of a troubled half century of social democratic or labor politics. The interests of workers clashed with the interests of owners [huge LOOP on the word "labor", from 1860s up to WW1]

Transition

The violence and disorder of the Paris Commune came at the tail-end of a disturbing war between France and Prussia. This clusteration of events was evidence of transition from the grand 19th-century liberal phase toward the troubling 20th-century phase of the European revolution. The third phase was predicted in two remarkable developments, in France in the northern German-speaking territories of middle Europe =

*--The two decades (1850-1870) of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) in France [5-hop LOOP] were clear warning that the French Revolution could go sour, not just in the relationship of capitalists with labor but also in the relationship of the nation state to civil freedoms (including the so-called "free market")

*--Otto von Bismarck [6-hop LOOP] was born a Prussian but engineered creation a new European nation-state, Germany [MAP#1] [MAP#2]. Bismarck represented an old Junker [Prussian aristocratic] elitist conservatism and a new "statist welfare" [LOOP on word "welfare"] approach to problems of national unity, security and prosperity. Bismarck had not an ounce of the reactionary in him. He could disavow any conservative doctrinal principle that stood in the way of practical political action. He could embrace liberal, even mildly social-democratic policy, if it forwarded the cause of his newly united nation Deutschland. Bismarck's indistinct political "ideology" reflected general trends = "Liberal" politics evolved away from the careful and insistent attention to institutional procedure (representative government of, by and for the people, independent courts, civil rights, checks and balances). "Conservative" politics evolved toward emphasis on security, economic prosperity (at least for some) and welfare (for all the others). Bismarck liked the term "Realpolitik" [practical politics with emphasis on actual power relations]. Under the influence of these trends, suddenly the power of the state lifted itself above the realm of "radical, liberal, conservative or reactionary" doctrines. In this sense, Bismarck was a thoroughly modern political figure, but in the masterful control he exercised over German politics he showed himself to be extraordinary. His pragmatic, managerial, statist legacy had global implications, but not all later practitioners had his ability. He saw the advantages of carefully calibrated projection of modern statist military power, a form of imperialism that combined European continental expansion [EG] with over-seas ambition [EG].

What was happening to the concept of liberal nationalism when it found itself abroad?

*1889jy14:The founding congress of the Second International [ID] signaled the growing strength of social democratic political movements in Europe. But as European domestic and international politics grew more tense, social democracy showed that it, like liberalism, was riven by contradiction and factional discord
*--Two main trends grew out of this process =
(1) The moderate "economism" of the German theorist and activist Eduard Bernstein [TXT] and
(2) The disciplined revolutionary party politics of the Russian theorist and activist Vladimir Il'ich Lenin [TXT]

*--The Russian Revolution of 1905 [ID] demonstrated the difficulties of combining the ascendant liberal revolutionary tradition with the new social democratic movement. Furthermore, a new reactionary tradition [ID] showed itself in forceful and organized form at this time

*--The looming power of the Austrian, Ottoman and Russian empires had more influence on the development of Serbian nationalism than did concepts of liberal national independence or social-democratic egalitarianism [5 hops on word "Yugoslav" into the period of WW1]

Louis Napoleon's failure, Bismarck's success, Russian disorder and Serbian agony suggested that a third phase in the history of the "European revolution" was dawning. That became abundantly clear after the catastrophe of World War One [ID]

THE EUROPEAN, AND NOW GLOBAL, REVOLUTION, PHASE THREE =

The era of managerial statism followed. Important reverberations of the previous two phases ran through the 20th and into the 21st centuries. The legacy of the previous two phases was far from extinguished. But however frequently we meet it, the traditional European political spectrum of "left" and "right" [ID] gives little authentic guidance to those who would try to understand this third phase of the European revolution

But we can point to two salient features, each of which arose in the late 19th century =
 (1) Managerial authoritarianism in Europe itself, a domestication of imperialist ways of governance
 (2) Assault on European imperialist traditions by those who were earlier its victim

Unnamed Revolution =

At first, the two Russian Revolutions, February (March) 1917 [ID] and October (November) 1917 [ID] seemed to harbinger a new era of social-democratic victory, a resolution of contradictions and a realization of ideals met in the first  [ID] and the second [ID] phases of the European revolutionary tradition. Europeans widely assumed that the first phase made the second phase possible. The strengths of the two phases complimented one another. The second phase fulfilled the first. And now the Russian Revolution seemed to take giant steps toward that fulfillment
*1921:1927; These hopes for the Russian Revolution were bolstered when the Communist Party introduced "The New Economic Policy" [ID]

By 1927 it become clear, however, that the Russian Revolution was not the apotheosis of the 150-year European revolutionary dream. A third and very different phase arose out of the catastrophe of WW1, showing many traces of that world-shaping industrial total war [EG=LOOP on word "mobilization"]

Sociologist Harold Lasswell identified what he called "The Unnamed Revolution" [ID] and thus helped define the third phase of the European revolution which swept across the global landscape in the 20th century. It was not a bourgeois liberal nor a proletarian socialist revolution. Whatever it set out to be, it became a managerial statist enterprise under the disciplined and centralized control of a modernizing cadre party, at the head of which was a "boss", a political chief executive officer who operated on a trans-national globalized field of action

*--Vladimir Lenin, "What's to Be Done?" defined the role of a disciplined, revolutionary cadre party [ID] and his ideological definition of "Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism" [ID] significantly shifted attention away from central and western Europe and out into the imperialized world
*1917 February Revolution in Russia = Beginning | February Revolution as a global event (collapse of four great Empires) [ID]
*1917 October (Soviet) Revolution in Russia [ID] | October Revolution as global event = Third International or Comintern [ID]
*--Revolutionary Civil War and Allied intervention = [LOOPS]

The revolutionary Soviet state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was the first massive expression of the third phase of the European revolution. The politics of Joseph Stalin (Stalinism as a global "ism") were explained in two of Stalin's writings = A theoretical article, "Socialism in one country" [ID], and an urgent speech, "You must abolish backwardness" [ID]

Stalinism in practice can be summarized in four categories of state policy [ID]

By the 1930s, it was clear that this third phase of the European Revolution found expression in several regions [EG]
By the 1940s, it was clear that this third phase of the European Revolution found expression around the world [EG]

--

-- Bibliography --

Work in progress = the following is still highly coded and difficult to use without "translations"

<>Ackerman,Bruce| a{}

*1988:EC&D:153-93| “Neo-federalism?”| ((fdr idl=rvs legitimacy,not an oxymoron but as final essential moment in rvs process; thus of global significance (vs.Arendt idl of local sig of AREV)|Fedor=3rd way of legitimacy (combining #1=permanent rvs & #2=“rvsy amnesia”) by positing “dualistic conception of political life”: (1) common good,ratified [rzr] by mobilized mass,expressing assent through extraordinary tUt forms [cf=mainly #49] [highest cncept,but shd dominate only rarely] & (2) normal politics|Normal plt is “representational”|Not “mimetic” but “semiotic” (symbol is not the thing represented, and obviously so,explicitly a stand-in) [169!] Dahl is most wrong to say Mds sought rxp w/o virtue, i.e., as solution of problem posed by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees [173] idl is to “economize on virtue”;presume neither that it will prevail nor that it will cease to be needed [173,quotes #57] Mds thought highest virtue in pbl life,but recognized duality embraced in common phrase:PRIVATE CITIZEN [174-5] cst=“creative synthesis”of two great zpd traditions of pbl virtue [cvc.virtu] and private salvation))

*1993ap02:MNe#14:3| “Boris Yeltsin and George Washington”| ((RUS/USA2.cst YlcB |W also tore up cst= 1781:Art.of Confdr calling for unanimous assent of 13 colonies to any ammendment|rvs act now forgotten:cst.Convention said 9 wld do| “By lending his immense prestige to the Convention’s revolutionary break with legality,Washington made it possible to make the new cst more than a piece of paper|By seeking ratification [rzr] by the People, and not merely their standing governments, Washington began the long and complex process of making the Constitution into a specially compelling symbol of dmkic legitimacy”|YALE Sterling prf of lwx & plt.scs|W & YlcB “It is easy to mock the comparison”|A contrasts promise of strong YlcB w/ Havel CZC loss of unity & POL decline| Many mistakenly put ekn rfm ahead of plt,but that is mistake|As a man,Yeltsin does not have the qualities of either Havel or Walesa| “But his dmkic instincts are sounder”))

<>Amann,Peter H| a{}

*1962mr:PSQ#77,1:36-53| “Revolution: a Redefinition”| ((8x11 REV.trx|48:REV=“when the state’s mpy of power is effectively challenged & persists until a mpy of power is re-established”| Weakness? fdr rpz gvt etc has no plt.mpy, yet rvs challenge possible| Better say mpy of physical violence cf=BBL/Castoriadis))

<>Artz,F. B| a{}

<>Bertrand,Charles ??, ed| a{}

<>Esler,Anthony| a{}
|>“Youth in Revolt”|In txt Mod EUR Social Hst ??| ((REV rvs std ~~ CIV re.830s:FRN generation REV30 REV48)

<>Forster,Robert| a{}