Revolution

History of the Concept

• Critically informed by the experience of the revolution in

England, America and France, the term in common
usage designates the epitome of political change, that
is, change not only in laws, policies or government but
in the established order that is both profound and
durable.
• Earlier conceptions of political change are missing the
notions of people’s autonomous ability to act or of its
right to emancipation.
• On the historical level, it is the formation of the ‘strong’
state that is conducive to a political imagination of
radical liberation from state oppression and the
subsequent founding of an essentially different order.
History
• The history of political thought largely attests to the
assessment that the idea of revolution as structural,
justifiable change is unknown prior to modernity.
• Aristotle ‘s reflections on political change in books III
and IV of Politics show that the alterations he takes into
consideration do not amount to the complete
breakdown of an existing order, its organizing hierarchy
and its principles of inclusion/exclusion.
• In ancient and medieval political thought, they are
primarily related to anarchy and civil war.
History-Locke and Rousseau
• In the 17th and 18th Century, the discovery of revolution as a relevant
political category is reflected and supported by political and moral
philosophy, John Locke develops an influential defense of the right to
resistance, rebellion and even revolution.
• Going beyond Thomas Hobbes considerations on a subject’s rights to
defend herself against the sovereign if her life is under threat, his social
contract theory presents this protective right against stately coercion and
oppression as a necessary political characterization of the individuals’
inalienable natural right to “life, liberty and estate”.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau aims at exposing the morally degenerate,
politically illegitimate sate of the Ancien Regime and proposing a liberal,
egalitarian political and legal constitution to replace it. According to
Rousseau, the ‘general will’ ousts the particular will of the monarch as
the guideline in politics, thereby implying that the people attain
autonomy, sovereignty and thus, the status of full political subjectivity.
History
• Lockean and Rousseauian social contract and natural rights theory
in particular, such acts can now be interpreted as an exercise of
rationally and morally justifiable political self determination.
• Although neither Locke or Rousseau present elaborated theories
of revolution, they develop positions that are inherently critical of
any political order that is not built on the principles of consent and
trust and, thus, potentially revolutionary.
• Their reflections on legitimate government and on citizens’ rights
go beyond justified resistance to monarchs and which rely on
expertocratic leadership as opposed to political self-determination
of the people.
• Their works thus prepare the ground for the two main ideas of
revolutionary age: ‘natural’ human rights and national
sovereignty.
History
• Revolution is both a ‘combat term’ in political praxis and an
‘essentially contested concept’ in political theory.
• Condorcet, Kant and Marx are major proponents of the idea of
revolution.
Three Traditions of Thought
• A) Democratic Tradition
• B) The Communist Tradition
• C) the Anarchist Tradition
• A- Democratic Tradition- It is characterized by a strong
emphasis on non-violent, legal means and on politico-legal
liberty and equality as the essential aims of revolution.
• Correspondingly, these thinkers, for the most part, reject notions
of instantaneous rupture and absolute novelty whereby they
undermine rigid distinctions between revolutionary and
reformist change.
• Etienne Balibar suggests an understanding of revolution as a
progressive power that operates from within the democratic
system.
Democratic Traditions
• Instead of aiming at the radical overthrow of this system,
democratic revisions of the existing order and its institutions.
• John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, J A N Condorcet, Kant
• B- Communist Tradition – the defenders of it agree that the
realization of material liberty and equality ( as opposed to
merely ‘formal’, that is, legal liberty and equality) in the social
sphere are its main goals.
• As this sphere include apolitical institutions such as the
market, substantial revolutionary transformation can not
satisfy itself with abstract political principles but needs to
affect te concrete conditions in which a society exists.
• In addition, the notion of solidarity is central to these thinkers’
vision of revolutionary action and of post-revolutionary society
that is realized through these actions.
Communist Tradition
• It share the idea that violence, in general, can function as an
acceptable means of revolution.
• Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
• Vladimir Lenin, Jean Paul Sartre

• C-Anarchist Tradition- As any form of institutionalized

authority is considered incompatible with human autonomy,
their vision is the creation of a society independent of
“imperial institution” in the economic, social and political
realms.
• Consequently, they do not content themselves with a
redistribution of political power, however radical, within the
framework of the state, but aim at its abolition instead.
Anarchist Tradition

• David Graeber, in his contemporary reformulation of

anarchism, describes the way in which the envisaged
revolutionary abolition of vertical structures is linked to the
emergence of new forms of horizontal relations, that is, of
communal existence.
• These forms are no longer organized by the logic of
dominance and of cost/benefit, instead, they are shaped by
the principle of mutual aid and free cooperation, which are
not guided by instrumental rationality.
• Josiah Warren (America), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (France),
Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin (Russia)
• Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Goodman
Concepts of Revolution
• Six questions -
• The questions of novelty, violence, freedom, the
revolutionary subject, the revolutionary object or target,
and the extension of revolution.
• The exclusive focus on the six questions is justified by
the fact that they constantly appear in the theoretical
debates regarding revolution as criteria inn determining
a) if and what conditions political change can be
considered as revolutionary and b) if and under what
conditions such revolutionary change can be considered
as legitimate.