A historical survey of the phenomenon of revolution will explain much about the present meaning of the word. Its current imprecision and diversity of usage can be accounted for by its tortuous etymology. Its meanings now and in different periods in the past have been coloured by association with certain phenomena with which the word has no essential connection. But we will find that the essential element in the idea, as defined above, has fascinated and stimulated political thinkers in many periods of the last 2,500 years.
Revolutions were not unusual events in the city-states of classical Greece, and then of medieval and Renaissance Italy. Changes of regime occurred in these city-states which sometimes affected the status-system within them, and to some extent the distribution of wealth.6 The changes might be justified by appeals to political ideals, such as the permissive democracy of Periclean Athens, or the republican liberty of Renaissance Florence. These ideals were to a limited extent exportable. Athens encouraged democratic coups, and Sparta oligarchic ones, in other city-states during the Peloponnesian wars (431–404 B.C.). Siena adopted the Florentine cult of republican virtue in the early fifteenth century.7 The use of terms by contemporary historians and theorists showed that they understood the concept of revolution. Aristotle spoke of stasis with metaboli politeias (a violent coup with a change of constitution). In fourteenth-century Italy, the word itself – rivoluzione – appears, and in its modern sense. Its first known use8 was to describe an uprising in Siena in 1355, when an oligarchic regime was replaced by a popular one. Niccolo Machiavelli avoided the word – using such terms as ‘mutazioni del stato’ (changes in the state) instead – but was deeply interested in problems of political changes and stability, partly because he lived through two revolutions in quick succession (1494 and 1512) in Florence.
5. Pace, I. Kramnick, ‘Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in Recent Scholarship’, History and Theory, vol.11, no.l (January 1972), p. 30. But in other respects my definition follows Kramnick’s closely.
6. N.G.L. Hammond, The Classical Age of Greece (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1975), pp. 149–154; B. Pullan, A History of Early Renaissance Italy (Allen Lane, London, 1973), pp. 124–5.
The differences between the revolutions in the city-states and those of the late eighteenth-century onwards were however as important as the similarities. The city-states differed sharply from modern nation-states in being intimate, face-to-face communities, where changes of government were usually if not invariably inspired by the greed, ambitions and resentments of small groups of people, however they might be justified subsequently in terms of political principle. More importantly, the protagonists in the dissensions within city-states invariably assumed that they would leave untouched most aspects of their social environment. Even in allegedly democratic states, they excluded, by tacit consent, the poorer majority of the population from political activity. Revolutions never changed radically the social structure, or the economic organisation, or the moral code, of the city-states concerned. This is certainly not because of prejudice against government interference in these matters. It was because the status quo in these matters was assumed to be natural, or God-given, so that the duty of government – any government – was to intervene (in such matters as food prices, social status, or moral behaviour) in order to maintain it. Ideologies were retrospective rationalisations of the status quo rather than programmes of radical change. In any case, before the diffusion of printing in the fifteenth century, those important prerequisites of the formation of ideology – the articulation and circulation of conflicting ideas – were difficult. The significance of revolution in any city-state was further limited by the fact that each was but a fragment of a recognised national community -classical Greece or medieval Italy – that was bound together by manifest ties of culture, language and religion. For these reasons it seems misleading to compare – as Nicholas Hammond does – the ideological competition of Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C. with the recent Cold War between the USA and the USSR.9
The idea of revolution as applied by contemporaries to the citystates differed in another great respect from its modern counterpart. Far from being seen as the beginning of a new order, revolutions were seen by contemporaries as phases in a sequence of changes which might well include return to an earlier order. This assumption was realistic. The political volatility of the city-states was combined with an underlying continuity of political culture and social structure. Plato in The Republic saw a pattern to the changes in the city-states, his ideal state degenerating into timocracy (e.g. rule by the brave), which led to oligarchy (e.g. rule by the rich few) which led to democracy (rule by the many poor) which led to tyranny (rule by the arbitrary one).10 His notion that extreme democracy tends to change into tyranny has remained influential until the present, partly because it seemed to have been vindicated by the outcome of the French and Russian revolutions. The historian Polybius turned Plato’s succession into a cycle, labelling it by a Greek term ‘anakiklosis’11 – an exact counterpart of revolution, which itself derives from the same Latin origin as the word ‘revolve’. The cyclical idea was borrowed from the astronomical one of the supposed orbit (or revolutions in a now archaic sense) of the stars, the force behind the cycle being the supernatural one of Fortune. The idea of revolution as part of a cycle governed by supernatural forces survived into modern times, being used for example by the English historian Lord Clarendon in the seventeenth century. A specific application of the idea was to label as revolutions those upheavals which were believed to restore an old system. This was the meaning of the famous Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England; and at the time this was a conventional use of the word.12 The influence of the cyclical connotation tells us two things about theories of revolution before the eighteenth century. They lacked a notion of rectilinear (as opposed to cyclical) development such as progress, and they recognised little freedom in humans to change permanently their political environment.
7. H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1955), p. 361.
8. A. Hatto, ‘“Revolution”: an Enquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term’, Mind, vol.58, no.232 (October 1949), p.502.
9. P. 190.
Another type of revolution in medieval and Renaissance Europe was inspired wholly or partly by religion. Christianity, like Judaism, has tended to produce millennarian movements, which are characterised by the belief that existing society is fundamentally evil, and that a community of believers can, with divine aid, overthrow it and establish an ideal one.13 Like modern revolutionary movements, millennarian ones have flourished in conditions of collective anxiety and upheaval. Most such movements have accepted existing governments, while awaiting Christ’s second coming. But some have anticipated this event by trying to establish free communities of the godly which – in the case of movements appealing to the poor – have been revolutionary in their egalitarianism. Such was the Anabaptist regime in the independent German city of Munster (1534–5), whose leaders imposed communal ownership of goods and a reign of terror on the inhabitants.14 Anabaptism thereafter won a European-wide reputation similar to that of communism or anarchism earlier in this century. The movement led by Girolamo Savonarola in Florence in 1494–8 was a form of patriotic millennarianism that appealed to the political and moral beliefs of the socially privileged as well as the humble, and contributed to a radical democratisation of the regime.15 Because the technique of printing was now available for the circulation of ideas, we can more easily speak of revolutions as inspired by ideology, in something like its full sense of a political programme derived from a Weltanschauung or philosophical view of the world. But millennarian movements have never known how to win power on more than a local scale, and even then hav...
