Abstract
How should we understand why revolutions occur and have the consequences they do? How far does the category of revolution itself deepen or impede understanding of either their causes or outcomes? The great historical upheavals that lent weight to revolution as a political category, in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917, each took place under a necessitarian banner: the triumph of enlightenment or the elimination of class oppression. In both cases, the outcome belied this optimistic assessment without detracting from the scale of their historical impact across the globe. The French Revolution spawned the category of professional revolutionary, and the Russian Revolution, under its aegis, set the terms for world history for at least half a century. Because neither transformation in due course eventuated as imagined, the idea that revolutions have either necessitated outcomes or intrinsically self-validating objectives has lost credibility. The collapse of regimes will certainly continue to occur. What is in question is whether the re-creation of regimes in the wake of collapse can still align professional revolutionaries with oppressed populations in shared belief and struggle.
The original draft of this essay was prepared for a conference on the ninetieth anniversary of the October Revolution held at the Federal University of Sao Paulo and was printed in Portuguese in Lua Nova in 2008. Further elements were prepared for the introduction to the Spanish translation of my book Modern Revolutions in 2014.
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Notes
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For the context and significance, see Dunn 2018, especially pp. 99–102.
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“So in the greatest part of our Concernment, he has offered us only the twilight, as I may so, of Probability, suitable, I presume to the State of Mediocrity and Probationership, he has been pleased to place us here; wherein to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might by every day’s experience be made sensible of our short-sightedness and liableness to Error.” (Locke 1975, IV, xiv, 652) For attempts to show the centrality of this picture to Locke’s view of human comprehension, see Fagiani (1983) and Casson (2011).
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Dunn, J. (2019). Revolution as a Political Category. In: Namli, E. (eds) Future(s) of the Revolution and the Reformation. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27304-0_2
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