Revolutions and History An Essay in Interpretation

by Parker, Noel

• ISBN13: 9780745611358
• ISBN10: 0745611354
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-01-15
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

This book offers a fresh framework for the historical understanding of revolutions and ideas about revolution. As the glow fades on the triumph of liberalism over the so-called Soviet revolutionary bloc, Revolutions and History shows how revolutions can be located in the longer worldwide spread of modernity. Seen in that setting, earlier views have persistently misconstrued the potential of revolution. Rather than being conscious steps forward into the future, revolutions have always been hazardous responses, disrupting and accommodating a complex historical process.Yet if the potential of revolution has been overestimated, so has the meaning of its defeat. The author argues that revolutions do not matter just because they happen. They also have a meaning, and that meaning has historical impacts of its own. By adapting ideas from the theory of narrative and the philosophy of action and of time, Revolutions and History sets out a new concept of 'revolutionary narrative'. The narrative contains the existential force of the idea of revolution, and accounts for its impact in the modern world. Drawing on contemporary history and international relations theory, the book can then show how revolutions may continue to have complex global effects in the future.This is a study that will interest students of revolution, of history, of international relations, and of modernity. The book's interpretations illuminate the revolutionary experiences of the past while challenging facile assumptions that the force of revolution and revolutionary ideas must now simply be at an end.

Author Biography

Noel Parker is Senior Lecturer in European Politics, in the Department of Linguistic and International Studies at the University of Surrey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction: Meanings of Revolution in Time and Space	1	(12)
Part I How Revolutions Happen	13	(96)
Revolutions in Past History	15	(29)
Reformation revolts against centralizing monarchies: their character and associations	16	(3)
Bohemia, the Netherlands, England: the changing impact of Reformation revolts	19	(11)
Constitutional-republican revolutions and the crises of absolutism	30	(6)
Communist (`social-democratic') revolutions	36	(3)
National liberation revolutions	39	(2)
Contemporary revolutions	41	(2)
Conclusion: the problem of revolutions in history	43	(1)
Why Revolutions Have Occurred	44	(20)
Introduction: explanations and logical possibilities	44	(2)
Breakdowns	46	(6)
Change, progress and modernization	52	(4)
The will of human agents	56	(5)
Conclusion: historical trends and changing perspectives	61	(3)
The Trend in Revolutions	64	(23)
Introduction	64	(1)
`Modernization' on the stage of history: the implications of theories	65	(7)
Breakdown, progress, modernization	72	(3)
Change and will in the face of modernity	75	(4)
Revolutions and modernities	79	(7)
Conclusion	86	(1)
Revolutions and Modernity in the Twentieth Century	87	(22)
Introduction	87	(1)
Mid-twentieth-century national liberation revolutions	88	(4)
Anti-Westernizing revolutions	92	(5)
Post-Soviet reversion: pro-Westernizing revolutions	97	(7)
The scope at the margins: two exceptions?	104	(5)
Part II Why Revolutions Matter	109	(75)
Revolutions and Historical Change: the `Revolutionary Narrative'	111	(24)
The broader effects of revolutions and their global narrative	111	(4)
Narratives and historical change	115	(6)
The revolutionary narrative and its collective identities	121	(7)
Collective intention	128	(5)
Conclusion	133	(2)
The Revolutionary Narrative in History	135	(25)
Revolutionary narrations	135	(4)
The revolutionary narrative as ideological currency	139	(2)
The movements of the revolutionary narrative in Europe	141	(6)
The revolutionary narrative displaced	147	(5)
The `return' of the European revolutionary narrative	152	(3)
National identity and collective action in the returning revolutionary narrative	155	(5)
The Revolutionary Narrative at the End of the Twentieth Century	160	(24)
Locating the processes of the current global system	160	(5)
Revolutions and the core in the twentieth century	165	(5)
Revolutions and the core in the era of `globalization'	170	(5)
Looking for legitimizing narratives on the global scene	175	(3)
The future formation of collective agents	178	(6)
Appendix: Revolutions and the Understanding of History	184	(15)
Perceptions of history	184	(6)
The coherence of philosophies of history	190	(5)
Group action in history	195	(4)
Notes	199	(12)
References	211	(16)
Index	227