The early use of the term revolution referred to the ‘turning around’ of political power and was applied to restorations of monarchies as well as to their overthrowals; analogies could be made to astrology’s revolution of the stars and to the turning of the wheel of fortune. The common feature, however, is clearly a process of change. Revolution is, of course, often used allegorically to refer to any wide-ranging change in society, one instituted, perhaps, by scientific or technological change, but in political science the primary meaning must be the deliberate, intentional, and most probably violent overthrow of one ruling class by another which leads the mobilized masses against the existing system, not only vastly altering the distribution of power in the society, but also resulting in major changes in the whole social structure. As such it is quite different from a coup d’état which simply replaces one set of rulers with another, with no crucial ensuing alteration of the overall political and social scene. This full-blooded form of revolution (which also excludes similarly great socio-political change as a result of defeat in war or success in an anti-colonial uprising) is, almost by definition, a result of class conflict.
It is also very rare. The great revolutions in world history are few: the French Revolution, which led to the creation of a middle-class controlled republic instead of an aristocratically-controlled monarchy; the Russian Revolution, replacing a tyrannical monarchy with an authoritarian and even more totalitarian populist élite; the Chinese Revolution which replaced a corrupt oligarchical republic with a dictatorship; and only a handful of others. There are periods in history, however, when several countries collectively go through so sudden and dramatic a change in both their actual governmental forms, and the publicly accepted ideology that, whether planned or not, whether violent or not, revolution seems the only term. Thus it was common to talk about the revolutions in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 which swept away communist regimes which had, only months before, seemed unmovable. It is interesting that such language seems to have been dropped in favour of the more technical idea of a ‘democratic transition’, largely because of the continued presence of the old ruling parties within the politics of the new nations, and the lack of mass violence involved in the changes.
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