Revolution

From M. Bevir, ed., The Encyclopedia of Political Theory (Sage, 2010).

For the political theorist, it is difficult to be objective in the face of revolutionary

phenomena, and this may explain why—to paraphrase Hannah Arendt—the subject has
been largely left to the technicians, whose sociological approaches have tended to be
largely diagnostic, the objective being to determine scientifically what causes or prevents
revolutionary transformation. Those political theorists who have engaged the subject
have, more often than not, have been more explicit in their loyalties, but not at the
expense of more sociological questions. Rather, the normative questions swirling around
the concept of revolution have been placed in dialogue with the frequently paradoxical
descriptive issues regarding revolutions and their effect on the institutions of the state.

Conflict and Containment

While many would no doubt consider the Plato of The Republic a revolutionary of sorts,
it is clear that he was deeply preoccupied by political change, or the metabolē which
marked the shift between political systems or constitutions. In fact, the very notion of
“revolution”—derived from astronomy but applied to radical social change—was one
which would not emerge until the 17th century. Instead, what would concern Plato and
Aristotle was the stasis, or factional conflict, which would lead to metabolē, and whose
etymological root makes it something of the opposite of our modern notion of revolution.
While Italian theorist Niccolò Machiavelli’s emphasis in The Prince on regime
preservation and stability and his advocacy of mixed government in The Discourses
certainly have ancient overtones, his work lacks the determinism of Plato’s (and
Aristotle’s) six-fold analysis of regimes and the linear path of their breakdown, and hence
their pessimism toward metabolē. Further, if Aristotle’s stasis, or violent strife, was
perceived as the fundamental cause of regime change, this same assumption would not
hold for Machiavelli, as it was precisely the institutionalization of class conflict in the
Roman republic, albeit without factions, that led to its historic greatness.

States and Revolutions

If Machiavelli’s radicalism was a result of his incorporation of class conflict within the
bounds of institutionality, then surely Karl Marx’s radicalism grows from his insistence
that such conflict inevitably surpasses those same bounds, gaining the status of the motor
of history itself. However, for Marx, the study of current and past revolutions plays a
significant part in determining the direction of the class struggle. Hence Marx’s own
experience of the 1848 June Days informed his understanding of the working-class
seizure of the bourgeois state, and the 1871 Paris Commune inspired Marx to correct his
earlier analyses in The Communist Manifesto, laying greater emphasis on the need to not
only seize but also to fundamentally transform the state if revolution is to be more than
mere restoration.
The question of the state would remain at the center of the revolutionary Marxist
tradition well into the 20th century, but its importance would be obscured by the
vicissitudes of state power in the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Lenin is often credited as
the supreme proponent of a vanguardist understanding of revolution—whereby an
intellectual elite bestow upon the masses the consciousness necessary to overthrow the
old order—such a view is too often mobilized as a retrospective explanation of the errors
of Soviet communism. Whereas Lenin had formulated his vanguardist thesis in What is
to be done? (1902), he too was compelled to modify his theory in response to popular
rebellion and revolutionary ferment in both 1905 and 1917 Russia. Returning to Marx’s
own discussion of the Commune in his 1917 State and Revolution, Lenin would
formulate the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional state prefacing the
disintegration of the state entirely, thereby arriving at a more substantive view of
revolution than he is generally credited with.
But if Lenin’s focus remained on the state, later Marxists would see the need to
transform revolutionary theory in order to take into account the broader spheres of social
life, whose impact on political life could no longer be ignored. Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, for example, would come to emphasize the strategic importance of the realm of
civil society, the conquest of which he considered almost a precondition for the conquest
of the state. If the state, as the realm of pure domination, was taken through force,
Gramsci argued that civil society was taken through hegemonic struggle, an organized
deployment of ideas for which the role of the intellectual—understood broadly as a social
organizer—would be paramount.

Revolutionary Restoration

If the progression from Marx to Gramsci represents a growing concern for the question of
the state and the danger that revolutionaries might—unwittingly or not—reproduce the
very structures they had previously opposed, this concern would be of primary concern
for another group of thinkers for whom modern revolutions rarely surpassed the
conditions from which they emerged. That modern revolutions would stimulate this
anxiety, moreover, was far from coincidental, since according to Arendt, modern
revolutions differed qualitiatively from ancient stasis or metabolē in their aspiration to
total change.
Like Edmund Burke, much of this tradition would be characterized by the conflict
between a positive view of the American Revolution and a critical view of the French
Revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, would pen his seminal Democracy in
America in an effort to both determine the causes for the success of republicanism in the
United States and what he perceived as a failure in France. Whereas the French
Revolution nominally sought to oppose the centralizing despotism of the old regime,
Tocqueville attempted to show how the revolutionary process had the paradoxical effect
of strengthening the state. This view would find theoretical sustenance in Max Weber’s
pessimistic view of the paradox of the revolutionary process. For Weber, who
distinguished traditional, charismatic, and legal-bureaucratic forms of domination,
revolutions are more likely to result from charismatic intervention, but the inherent
demands for their eventual institutionalization will lead them to strengthen the “iron
cage” of state bureaucracy.
If Tocqueville critiqued the traditional Marxist account of revolution as the result
of immiseration—arguing instead that radical transformation was as likely in times of
improvement in the lives of the masses—Arendt’s response to the French Revolution
would be slightly different. For Arendt, while Marx’s account bore some truth, its
economism embodied nevertheless all that went wrong in the French Revolution.
Whereas the Revolution made explicitly political promises, creating the potential for new
institutions of deliberation and political action, this political impetus would give way to
social demands and the Revolution would be doomed. In contrast to the French case,
Arendt would see some success in the American Revolution, but like Tocqueville, she
would see such successes as self-limiting, both guaranteed and stifled by the
constitutional arrangements. Ironically, Arendt would appeal instead to a council
structure like that of the Soviets, a structure which—as Lenin was quick to point out—
rarely if ever existed without reference to the social question.

George Ciccariello-Maher

See also Arendt, Hannah; Bureaucracy; Civil Society; Gramsci, Antonio; Lenin,
Vladimir; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Plato; State; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Weber, Max.

Further Reading
Arendt, H. (1963). On Revolution. New York: Viking.
Aristotle. (1992). The Politics. New York: Penguin.
Bondanella, P. and M. Musa, eds. (1979). The Portable Machiavelli. New York:
Penguin.
Christman, H., ed. (1987). Essential Works of Lenin. New York: Dover.
Goldstone, J. (1994). Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical
Studies. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York:
International Publishers.
Tucker, R., ed. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. New York: Norton.