Abstract
The year 1989 was a challenging one for the student of revolution. In it fell not only the two-hundredth anniversary of the French revolution of 1789, but the fortieth anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 and the tenth anniversary of two of the most resonant upheavals of more recent times, those in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979. In the initial part of the year the battle lines seemed clear enough. For those sympathetic to revolution it was an occasion to proclaim the historical significance of these upheavals, and the legitimacy of at least some of the goals which they had embodied. For those hostile to, or embarrassed by, these events it was the occasion to reassert alternative verities, to warn of the dangers which revolution might bring, as a purported solution to social and political ills.1
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Notes
Antonio Gramsci gave the example of the word ‘disaster’ — originally an astrological term implying an evil start. I have developed this further with regard to misleading etymological investigation in the case of modern Arabic political vocabulary in ‘The Delusions of Etymology’, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996) pp. 205–7.
Karl Griewank, Der Neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff, Entstehung und Entwicklung (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1955)
Raymond Williams, Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976)
Hatto, ‘The Semantics of “Revolution” ’, in P. J. Vatikiotis, Revolution in the Middle East and other Case Studies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972)
Alain Rey, ‘Révolution’, Histoire d’un Mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
On the conceptual history see also R. Kosseleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
Krishan Kumar (ed.), Revolution. The Theory and Practice of a European Idea (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971)
David Close and Carl Bridge, Revolution: A History of the Idea (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
Aristotle, The Politics (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) Book 5, pp. 189–234.
David Hume had talked in his History of England of the Long Parliament of 1641 as representing a ‘revolution in the minds of men’, but it was not until 1826 that François Guizot applied the term in its 1789 sense to the English case: Michael G. Finlayson, Historians, Puritans and the English Revolution (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983), p. 9
Discussion of when the modern concept of ‘Revolution’ can be said to have emerged is similar to that on the modernity, or otherwise, of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’: elements of the idea can certainly be found in earlier periods, but in both instances I favour a modernist account. For the contrary view, that ‘revolution’, in its modern political sense had already been formed by the 1750s, see Calvert, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), p. 3.
Krishan Kumar, Prophecy and Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 19.
Gellner has written that nationalism ‘is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 1).
Bernard Lewis, ‘Islamic Concepts of Revolution’, in Vatikiotis (ed.), The Political Language of Islam (London: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 92–6).
Davoud Norouzi and Ilse Itscherenska, ‘Zur Reflexion der “Islamischen Revolution” in der persischen Sprache’, Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika (Berlin) vol. 11 (1983), p. 268.
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism (London: I.B.Tauris, 1992)
Paul Vieille and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le discours populaire de la Révolution iranienne (Paris: Contemporaneité, 1990).
Alfred Douglas, The Oracle of Change. How to Consult the I Ching (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) pp. 185–6.
On progress, see Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, An Enquiry into its Origins and Growth (New York: Basic Books, 1981)
Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress, History and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1971).
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (London: OUP, 1956) p. 391.
David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (London: University of California Press, 1995) pp. 533
On anarchist internationalism, see E. H. Carr, Bakunin (New York: Octagon Books, 1975)
Quoted in E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1968) p. 134.
Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity. An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991).
N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism. Part 2, ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Upbuilding of Communism’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (London: NLB, 1977).
George Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971)
Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1958)
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (London: Yale University Press, 1968) p. 264.
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995) pp. 230–1.
Ellen Trimberger, Revolution from Above (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978).
On Egypt and Peru see Trimberger. On the case for Ethiopia as a case for revolution from above, see Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1981)
Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Andargachew Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution 1974–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Contrast: ‘The German revolution did happen — in the form of the rise of Hitler to power and his use of that power to carry out far-reaching changes in German society’ (Peter Calvert, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, p. 57); ‘In no case was an actual revolution against constituted authority launched; fascist tactics were invariably those of a sham rebellion arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities who pretended to have been overwhelmed by force’ (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Little, Brown, 1957, p. 238).
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Mercury Books, 1962).
Said Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford: OUP, 1988).
On the revolution itself, see Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs (London: I.B. Tauris, 1985).
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990)
On the modernist content of Khomeini’s ideology see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism; Sami Zubaida, Islam, The People and the State (London: Routledge, 1989)
Fred Halliday, ‘The Iranian Revolution in Comparative Perspective’. On the modern, Jacobin, concept of the state in Islamist thought, Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1993).
See Krishan Kumar, ‘The Revolutions of 1989: Socialism, Capitalism, and Democracy’, Theory and Society, vol. 21, (1992) pp. 309–56
Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. New Theories of the Contemporary World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
Jürgen Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Revolutions of Recuperation and the Need for New Thinking’, in Robin Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall, The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991) p. 27.
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). An Alternative Modernity: The Rise and Fall of ‘Revolution’. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_2
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