Revolution

Revolution: in modern times, the fact or idea of violent, abrupt, or radical change. In the philosophical discourse of modernity, the idea of revolution is associated with sociology's [Page 642]view that contemporary institutions and culture are the result of the three great revolutions—the French, American, and Industrial. The idea of revolution has a long premodern history, where its meaning is connected less to rupture or break and more to the sense of circular or cyclical meaning or movement. From the Greeks to the Renaissance, revolution is more like its physical or mechanical counterpart, indicating the complete turn of a wheel or a full cycle of the seasons. Here, revolution alternates with restoration, indicating a cyclical conception of time. Modernity inaugurates a new conception of revolution as rupture, absolute innovation, which rests on a linear or stadial, progressivist or evolutionary conception of time.

The sensibility of sociology is that more actually changed in the period since the Great Revolutions than across the longer time span of the many centuries before. The French Revolution, in the sociological imagination, saw the application or pursuit of Enlightenment or humanist principles, where the self emerged as a project, and the prospect of geographical and, especially, social mobility meant that individuals and society could in principle be made in their own image. Hard lines of estate or status were replaced with class structures, which could in principle be transversed. The third estate, or the people, could pit their collective will against the state, kings, and clerics. Socialism, democracy, and the prospect of social engineering became practical values. Liberty, fraternity, and equality would be established as social goals, and their achievement would be viewed as within human reach.

The connotations of the American Revolution were less connected to this sense of rupture with the tradition of aristocracy or feudalism and more celebrative of the idea of establishing a new republic in the New World, where the initial founding project of the 13 colonies of New England would come together as the United States and democracy and liberalism would flourish. The founding of the American colonies and the American Revolution was imagined as a clean break into the field of pure modernity, a view that in different ways influenced modern social theory from Locke through Tocqueville to Weber. As historians from Marx observed, however, those who set out to make the world anew often reached back to old or ancient symbols to do so. They set out actively to make the future in the image of the past. This sensibility, which is connected to the more recent idea articulated by Eric Hobsbawm of the invention of tradition, helps explain the presence of Greek and Roman motifs and design in great experiments such as the construction of Washington D.C. These connections between past and future indicate that even the new, ruptural sense of revolution associated with modernity was never itself complete but still drew on these older cyclical senses of revolution as repetition.

If in retrospect these senses of social and political revolution associated with the French and American events exaggerate the ruptural sense of change, the image of the Industrial Revolution retains its power as an indicator of degree of extraordinary change over the period of a century from, say, 1800 to 1900. While the idea of the Industrial Revolution as an overnight change has long been dismissed, the extent of the change and its consequences are beyond question. By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of industrial revolution was often subsumed to that of technological revolution, a revolution in permanence, suggesting either revolution upon revolution in the modern manner or ongoing cyclical revolution in the traditional sense, or some combination of both. Together with the sense of a revolution in culture, not least as afforded by the informational revolution, we live today in the West with a sense that nothing can or ought to stay the same. Revolution in this sense has been normalized, or at least we have come to think of the idea as second nature. Perhaps revolution has simply lost its meaning in everyday use, in response to the heightened sense that change is the only thing now that stays the same.

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