The Great Modern Revolutions: An overview and occasional series

[Lockesdonkey]

I have, of late, become quite fascinated with the history of revolution in the modern world. It's always rather odd to think of these moments when the order of things gets turned on its head. My particular interest is their status as influences on and effects of the political thought of their day; each represents a particular stage of thought in the development of modernity.

One of my profs proffered the following of great modern revolutions:

The Liberal Revolutions
1. The English Revolution, 1641-1688: A peculiar sort of revolution, in that it was a revolution in fits and starts. The English Civil War happened, then it stopped, then there was the Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution occurred, cementing the overall system. It was the first liberal revolution, calling for recognition of individual rights and popular/accountable government ("popular" being defined loosely). When considered seriously, the English (and, if we are to be honest, Scottish) demands were the beginning of liberalism as a viable political movement: the state's duty is to protect the rights and freedoms of the people, and ought to be accountable to them. On the other hand, liberalism was not yet complete as a general sort of philosophy at the time; the revolution was thus inadvertantly Hobbesian, viewing rights as a grant from the sovereign. As a consequence, the English and Scottish revolutions were difficult to export, the rights were seen as the rights of Englishmen or Scotsmen rather than as human rights.

2. The American Revolution, 1776-1789: The first truly liberal revolution, in that, upon realizing that seeking independence from the king denied them the right to claim the rights of Englishmen, the Americans settled on the expedient of seeking the rights of men, period (no women or persons of color need apply). While the international influence of the American Revolution is debatable (it was, after all, chiefly a war of independence), it can be clearly argued that it was (1) the first revolution to clearly espouse the values of fully-developed classical liberalism, treating rights as inherent in all people, as opposed to grants from the state (2) the first instance of a colony declaring independence from the colonizer (setting the model for numerous other states, particularly in Latin America) and (3) priming the pump in various practical ways for the greatest revolution, which was...

3. The French Revolution, 1789-1799: The last liberal revolution to be useful in the development of liberal theory, it was, despite its long-term failure, a great success in terms of permanently changing the face of Europe. To this day, Europe's politics are defined by the French Revolution. Brought about because of horrible mismanagement (including the King's fortunate misadventure in America--thanks, Louie!), this revolution took liberalism along a different route, with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau holding more weight than those of John Locke (making this the tail-end of liberalism).

The Revolutions of 1848--please note--are intentionally excluded, as their primary intellectual effect was not felt until...

The Socialist Revolutions
4. The Russian Revolution, 1917: The first socialist revolution, it represented the first deep intellectual challenge to liberalism. I cannot hold much further on it for the moment.

5. The Chinese Revolution, 1949: The first significant revolution outside of the West (or Western-oriented societies like Latin America) based on Western ideals, this revolution marked the transfiguration of Western ideas to non-Western societies and modes of thought.

And After Socialism...?
6. The Iranian Revolution, 1979: The first revolution to be based (at the end of the day) not on Western thought but on a non-Western societies reaction to Western modernity. This revolution, when one thinks about it deeply, is the first serious intellectual challenge to the modernist consensus, and it defines our era.

 

[Verbose]

Considering one the one hand the French rev is described as "the greatest" and is credited with permanently transforming the face of Europe in your summary, and the fact that France today is definitely a liberal republic, how does it come out as a "long-term failure"? Shouldn't that be "short-term failure"? The French went back and did it again in 1830 and 1848 to try to make it stick after all.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Considering one the one hand the French rev is described as "the greatest" and is credited with permanently transforming the face of Europe in your summary, and the fact that France today is definitely a liberal republic, how does it come out as a "long-term failure"? Shouldn't that be "short-term failure"? The French went back and did it again in 1830 and 1848 to try to make it stick after all.

I ought to have said "medium-term failure." In the overall long run it was a success.

 

[LightSpectra]

Considering one the one hand the French rev is described as "the greatest" and is credited with permanently transforming the face of Europe in your summary, and the fact that France today is definitely a liberal republic, how does it come out as a "long-term failure"? Shouldn't that be "short-term failure"? The French went back and did it again in 1830 and 1848 to try to make it stick after all.

1830 was moreso a coup against an unpopular king; though that's beside the point. I would call the French Revolution a failure in both the long and short terms. In the short term, it ended with 20 years of war and a tyrant on the throne that suppressed liberties when it was useful to him. It also strengthened the more conservative elements in Europe, convincing them that repression of liberal and nationalist tendencies was the only way to prevent another Reign of Terror.

 

[Verbose]

1830 was moreso a coup against an unpopular king; though that's beside the point. I would call the French Revolution a failure in both the long and short terms. In the short term, it ended with 20 years of war and a tyrant on the throne that suppressed liberties when it was useful to him. It also strengthened the more conservative elements in Europe, convincing them that repression of liberal and nationalist tendencies was the only way to prevent another Reign of Terror.

They were repressing these thing already, and would have, and did, keep doing it regardless.
And while Napoleon undoubtedly was a dictator, possibly the first in a long line of liberal dictators, as an actual tyrant he doesn't rate very high.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

5. The Chinese Revolution, 1949: The first significant revolution outside of the West (or Western-oriented societies like Latin America) based on Western ideals, this revolution marked the transfiguration of Western ideas to non-Western societies and modes of thought.

And After Socialism...?
6. The Iranian Revolution, 1979: The first revolution to be based (at the end of the day) not on Western thought but on a non-Western societies reaction to Western modernity. This revolution, when one thinks about it deeply, is the first serious intellectual challenge to the modernist consensus, and it defines our era.

I would think that the Egyptian Revolution would satisfy both of these requirements decades before them.

As for revolutions themselves, I like this quote by Trotsky:

"The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new régime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny."

 

[Lockesdonkey]

You do have a point, and being Egyptian myself (and a great admirer of Saad Zaghloul), I seriously consider it to be on approximately the same level. However, the Egyptian revolution, while it successfully transported some liberal ideas to Egypt, ultimately failed to end the British Occupation, the constitutional monarchy was very quickly corrupted, and the dichotomy between the rulers and the ruled was restored (I should know; my ancestors were among the rulers). It might be good to say that it beat China to the punch (in transferring Western ideals to non-Western societies), but it cannot replace the Iranian: Iran's revolution was the first time that Islam was the basis (or at least a basis) for a political revolution, and thus far Islamism is the only coherent, comprehensive ideology directly challenging the liberal democratic consensus (even the Hindu nationalists of India are at base good liberal democrats). In 1919, none of the great Islamist thinkers was older than 17; Khomeini was born in 1902, while the great Sunni thinkers (Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and Abul Ala Maududi in India) were born in 1906. Before them, there was no real organized Islamist movement; Salafism was still in its modernizing Abduhist phase in Egypt; and in India the ideas of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan were predominant.

At the end of the day, the Egyptian Revolution didn't have the opportunity to imprint itself on Egyptian politics (much to my personal dismay, as much as it may have benefited my own ancestors). It did change things, but unfortunately the Brits were just too powerful to give it the chance to make it last.

 

[Dachs]

They were repressing these thing already, and would have, and did, keep doing it regardless.

Not universally. The old saw about the crowned heads of Europe being chiefly concerned about crushing the revolution in France from its inception is certainly a false one, for in stark comparison to reactionaries like Burke, men such as Leopold II considered the first two years of Revolution in France to be useful, productive steps placing France on the reformist path towards an enlightened, Prussia-like government. The Declaration of Pillnitz was representative of nobody's thoughts save those of the duke of Braunschweig and some uncontrollable French émigrés, and the war of the First Coalition was never really a conflict with aims of repressing the young Revolutionary state and restoring a monarchy even after the Bourbons were executed. For Austria, the war was a search for territorial compensations to match the Second Polish Partition; for Prussia, the war was a way to get paid for doing essentially nothing productive, certainly in terms of British subsidies and possibly, if the war were successful (it wasn't), in terms of territory too. Outside of France, nationalism in and of itself was never really a problem for any of the states (save for a few individual incidents and the statements of monarchs who didn't tend to matter a whole lot), but losing territory and power and, in some cases, autonomy would have been.

It's hard to see how one can characterize, say, the same Austria that founded and headed an explicitly German confederal organization and which played up German nationalist concerns during crises such as Thiers' idiotic Rhenish crisis in 1840 as one which worked to repress German nationalism to keep its power intact; Austria was chiefly interested in repressing anti-Austrian sentiments insofar as its government was interested in shutting down any at all, and German nationalism was in no way anti-Austrian in general. As for liberalism, well, that's again a rather general statement; one can't really apply an anti-Liberal moniker to von Hardenberg's Prussia or to the Vormärz Austrian Empire, without having to make wide exceptions to the rule.

 

[LightSpectra]

They were repressing these thing already, and would have, and did, keep doing it regardless.

Not necessarily. Moderate liberalism, such as that of the Federalist American variety, could have overtaken Europe at some point. Liberalism was more profitable than autocratic orthodoxy. However, the insanity of revolutionary France pushed everybody into the extreme ends of it.

reactionaries like Burke

I don't know how carefully you picked the word "reactionary" here, but Edmund Burke was of no such sort. He was in favor of Catholic Emancipation, granting the petitions of the American Founding Fathers, and Polish liberation.

 

[ParkCungHee]

To be honest, I have a hard time accepting the American War of Independence as a real revolution.

 

[LightSpectra]

To be honest, I have a hard time accepting the American War of Independence as a real revolution.

It fits the literal definition:

rev⋅o⋅lu⋅tion
  /ˌrɛvəˈluʃən/
–noun
1. an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Yes, but then we get loads of revolutions everywhere. That gives us a second American Revolution, and a handful of French Revolutions between 1789 and Napoleon. The war of independence represented less a dramatic change in governmental belief or ideas, much less dramatic societal change, then breaking off in the Face of Britains inequal politcal system.

 

[LightSpectra]

I'm not sure what you mean by the "Second American Revolution" (the Revolution of 1800?), but I would say that all of the others you mentioned were indeed revolutions. I think changing from a constitutional hereditary monarchy to a republic -- while not perhaps as drastic as going from absolute monarchy to totalitarianism as France did -- is a rather big change.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I don't know how carefully you picked the word "reactionary" here, but Edmund Burke was of no such sort. He was in favor of Catholic Emancipation, granting the petitions of the American Founding Fathers, and Polish liberation.

Edmund Burke was the very image of a reactionary. I'm sure you've heard of, if not read, Reflections on the Revolution in France. There's a reason Miss Wollstonecraft and Mr. Paine wrote what they did, and it was directly because of Burke's outlandish reactionary defense of the French aristocracy.

 

[Arwon]

I'm not sure what you mean by the "Second American Revolution" (the Revolution of 1800?), but I would say that all of the others you mentioned were indeed revolutions. I think changing from a constitutional hereditary monarchy to a republic -- while not perhaps as drastic as going from absolute monarchy to totalitarianism as France did -- is a rather big change.

The Civil War?

 

[ParkCungHee]

The Civil War?

The repudiation of the Articles of Confederation.

 

[aelf]

And After Socialism...?
6. The Iranian Revolution, 1979: The first revolution to be based (at the end of the day) not on Western thought but on a non-Western societies reaction to Western modernity. This revolution, when one thinks about it deeply, is the first serious intellectual challenge to the modernist consensus, and it defines our era.

It might be too simplistic to call it a reaction to Western modernity. There were a collection of groups behind the 1979 revolution and the Islamists were really only allowed to gain control by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. And in fact, their political power isn't so absolute that they've been able to get everything they wanted. On some fronts, they were forced to grant concessions, such as on women's rights. Everything is overtly conservative (at least in tone if not at all in substance in some instances), but there are still surprisingly liberal elements to be found in Iranian society.

Heck, even the Khoemini himself was not always party to the conservatives' interests. Witness the creation of the Expediency Council and his declaration before that that the state can contradict sharia if it's in the interest of the public. Such measures were meant to combat the obstructionist tendencies of the Council of Guardians at that time, which naturally had an Islamist agenda.

 

[JohnRM]

The Iranian Revolution was a rejection of the idea that the West could intervene and force their way of life upon the people of Iran. They wanted desperately to determine their own way of living and their own system of governmen, but of course, like most revolutions, it was hijacked by some strong-arm dictatorship.

 

[North King]

The repudiation of the Articles of Confederation.

I don't think you can call "overthrow" and "abolishment"* the same thing.

Also, the American Revolution had a great deal of influence internationally if only through the global war it spawned.


*Or whatever you want to call it. Overthrow generally indicates a great deal of violence.

 

[ParkCungHee]

If you're going by that definition, then the French Revolution is very tricky to define, because the ones that were violent overthrows weren't very important, and the ones that were important were not violent.