On Revolution (Re: Anthony and Mark)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Raymond Williams, Keywords (Glasgow, 1976), 226-30.
(See too my own rather more humble thoughts at
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002/msg06813.htm>.)


*****


REVOLUTION

Revolution now has a predominant and specialized political
meaning, but the historical development of this meaning is
significant. The word came into English from the fourteenth
century, from revolucion (Old French), revolutionem (Latin)
from revolvere (Latin) - to  revolve. In all its early uses
it indicated a revolving movement in space  or time: 'in
whiche the other Planetes, as well as the Sonne, do finyshe
their revolution and course according to their true tyme'
(1559); 'from the day of the date heereof, to the full terme
and revolution of seven yeeres next ensuing' (1589); 'they
recoyl again, and return in a Vortical motion, and so
continue their revolution for ever' (1664). This primary
use, of a recurrent physical movement, survives mainly in a
technical sense of engines: revolutions per minute, usually
shortened to revs.

The emergence of the political sense is very complicated. It
is necessary to look first at what previous word served for
an action against an established order. There was of course
treason (with its root sense of betraying a lawful
authority) but the most general word was rebellion. This was
common in English from the fourteenth century. The sense had
developed in Latin from the literal 'renewal of war' to the
general sense of armed rising or opposition and, by
extension, to open resistance to authority. Rebellion and
rebel (as adjective, verb and noun) were then the central
words for what we would now normally (but significantly not
always) call revolution and revolutionary. There was also,
from the sixteenth century, the significant development of
revolt, from révolter (French), revolutare (Latin) - to roll
or revolve, which from the beginning, in English, was used
in a political sense. The development of two words, revolt
and revolution, from the sense of a circular movement to the
sense of a political rising, can hardly be simple
coincidence.

Revolution was probably affected, in its political
development, by the closeness of revolt, but in English its
sense of a circular movement lasted at least a century
longer. There are probably two underlying causes for the
transfer (in both revolt and revolution) from a circular
movement to a rising. On the one hand there was the simple
physical sense of the normal distribution of power as that
of the high over the low. From the point of view of any
established authority, a revolt is an attempt to turn over,
to turn upside down, to make topsy-turvy, a normal political
order: the low putting themselves against and in that sense
above the high. This is still evident in Hobbes, Leviathan,
II, 28: 'such as are they, that having been by their own act
Subjects, deliberately revolting, deny the Soveraign Power'
(1651). On the other hand, but eventually leading to the
same emphasis, there was the important image of the Wheel of
Fortune, through which so many of the movements of life and
especially the most public movements were interpreted. In
the simplest sense, men revolved, or more strictly were
revolved, on Fortune's wheel, setting them now up, now down.
In practice, in most uses, it was the downward movement, the
fall, that was stressed. But in any case it was the reversal
between up and down that was the main sense of the image:
not so much the steady and continuous movement of a wheel as
the particular isolation of a top and bottom point which
were, as a matter of course, certain to change places. The
crucial change in revolution was at least partly affected by
this. As early as 1400 there was the eventually
characteristic:

It is I, that am come down
Thurgh change and revolucioun. (Romance of the Rose, 4366)

A sense of revolution as alteration or change is certainly
evident from the fifteenth century: 'of Elementys the
Revoluciouns, Chaung of tymes and Complexiouns' (Lydgate, c.
1450). The association with fortune was explicit as late as
the mid seventeenth century: 'whereby one may see, how great
the revolutions of time and fortune are' (1663).

The political sense, already well established in revolt,
began to come through in revolution from the early
seventeenth century, but there was enough overlap with older
ways of seeing change to make most early examples ambiguous.
Cromwell made a revolution, but when he said that 'God's
revolutions' were not to be attributed to mere human
invention (Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Cromwell; III,
590-2) he was probably still using the word with an older
sense (as in Fortune, but now Providential) of external and
determining (q.v.) movements. Indeed the most fascinating
aspect of this complex of words, in the seventeenth century,
is that Cromwell's revolution was called, by its enemies,
the Great Rebellion, while the relatively minor events of
1688 were called by their supporters the Great and
eventually the Glorious Revolution. It is evident from
several uses that revolution was gaining a political sense 
through the seventeenth century, though still, as has been
noted, with overlap to general mutability or to the
movements of Fortune or Providence. But it is very
significant that in the late seventeenth century the lesser
event attracted the description Revolution while the greater
event was still Rebellion. Revolution, that is to say, was
still the more generally favourable word, and from as late
as 1796 we can find that distinction: 'Rebellion is the
subversion of the laws, and Revolution is that of tyrants'.
(Subversion, it will be noted, depends on the same physical
image, of turning over from below; and cf. overthrow.)

>From the late seventeenth century the sense of revolution in
English was dominated by specific reference to the events of
1688. The ordinary  reference (Steele, 1710; Burke, 1790)
was to 'the Revolution', and revolutioner, the first noun
for one engaged in or supporting  revolution, was used
primarily in that specific context. Yet the general sense
was slowly making its way through, and there was renewed
cause for distinction between rebellion and revolution,
according to point of view, in the rising and declaration of
independence of the American states. Revolution won through
in that case, both locally and generally. In a new climate
of political thought, in which the adequacy of a political
system rather than loyalty to a particular sovereign was
more and more taken as the real issue, revolution was
obviously preferred to rebellion, by anyone who supported
independent change. There is a surviving significance in
this, in our own time. Rebellion is still ordinarily used by
a dominant power and its friends, until (or even after) it
has to admit that what has been taking place - with its own
independent cause and loyalties - is a revolution. The same
distinction began to be made between revolt and revolution,
though also with an added sense of scale: 'Sire. . . it is
not a revolt, it is a  revolution' (Carlyle, French
Revolution, V, vii; 1837). (It is worth noting that revolt
and revolting had acquired, from the mid eighteenth century,
an application to feeling as well as to action: a feeling of
disgust, of  turning away, of revulsion; this probably
accentuated the distinction. It  is curious that revulsion
is etymologically associated with revel, which itself goes
back to rebellare (Latin) - to rebel. Revel became
specialized, through a sense of riotous mirth, to any lively
festivity; rebel took its separate unfavourable course;
revulsion, from a physical sense of drawing away, took on
from the early nineteenth century its sense of drawing away
in disgust.)

It was in this state of interaction between the words that
the specific effects of the French Revolution made decisive
the  modern sense of revolution. It was a matter of
confirmation and emphasis, though, rather than innovation.
Already in 1727 there had been 'Savage, restless, turbulent
Revolutionists' and in 1774 a  distinction between
'stationary' and 'revolutionary' principles of government,
the former being preferred. But the full sense of
revolutionary, and the new word revolutionize, belong to the
1790s, and the words have resounded through the nineteenth
century to our own day. The sense of making a new social
order was always as important as that of overthrowing an old
order. That, after all, was the crucial distinction from
rebellion or from what was eventually distinguished as a
palace revolution (changing the leaders but not the forms of
society). Yet in political  controversy arising from the
actual history of armed risings and conflicts, revolution
took on a specialized meaning of violent overthrow, and by
the late nineteenth century was being contrasted with
evolution (q.v.) in its sense of a new social order brought
about by peaceful and constitutional means. The sense of
revolution as bringing about a wholly new social order was
greatly strengthened by the socialist movement, and this led
to some complexity in the distinction between revolutionary
and evolutionary socialism. From one point of view the
distinction was between violent overthrow of the old order
and peaceful and constitutional change. From another point
of view, which is at least equally valid, the distinction
was between working for a wholly new social order (Socialism
as opposed to Capitalism, (qq.v.)) and the more limited
modification or reform (q.v,) of an existing order ('the
pursuit of equality' within a 'mixed economy' or 'post
capitalist society'). The argument about means, which has
often been used to specialize revolution, is also usually an
argument about ends.

Revolution and revolutionary and revolutionize have of
course also come to be used, outside political contexts, to
indicate fundamental changes, or fundamentally new
developments, in a very wide range of activities. It can
seem curious to read of 'a revolution in shopping habits' or
of the 'revolution in  transport', and of course there are
cases when this is simply the language of publicity, to
describe some 'dynamic' new product. But in some ways this
is at least no more strange than the association of
revolution with violence (q.v.), since one of the crucial
tendencies of the word was simply towards important or
fundamental change. Once the factory system and the new
technology of the late eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth century had been called, by analogy with the
French Revolution, the Industrial (q.v.) Revolution, one
basis for description of new institutions and new
technologies as revolutionary had been laid. Variations in
interpretation of the Industrial Revolution - from a new
social system to simply new inventions - had their effect on
this use. The transistor revolution might seem a loose or
trivial phrase to someone who has taken the full weight of
the sense of social revolution, and a technological or
second industrial revolution might seem merely polemical or
distracting descriptions. Yet the history of the word
supports each kind of use. What is more significant, in a
century of major revolutions, is the evident discrimination
of application and tone, so that the storm-clouds that have
gathered around the political sense become fresh and
invigorating winds when they blow in almost any other
direction.


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