Authors: Duhamel & Mény
Summary: In about 1400 words, the entry points out the two defining features of the term. As
a total and irresistible movement, it represents a change of status. Its features are necessity and novelty. Necessity stems out of the immediately preceding status, while novelty always brings about some unprecedent conditions. Thus, necessity and novelty are inestricably intertwined with both structural factors (family, community, etc.) and external ones (military and political competition) in social revolutions (Skocpol). By contrast, in scientific revolutions (Kuhn) they are associated with the replacement of an old paradigm by a new one. The twofold character of the revolution is also an ideological weapon used by revolutionaries to justify violence as an uncontrollable historical necessity, without which revolution would be nothing else but any process of social or technological change (the authors recalls among them also the industrial revolution). Actually, the contemporary meaning of revolution is exactly the violent toppling of government to establish a new constitutional order, whose premises were already present in the old one. In time, also the new order becomes institutionalized thus creating the premises for new changes (not always violent). However, not necessarily it implies a new civil society. The author recalls post-revolutionary Soviet Union as an example.