Revolutions Per Second

We have dealt with revolution once, now we will treat it again, as we move backward toward the ‘early modern’. The phenomenon of revolution has been so muddled by both left and right that it is hard to sort out even the facts, let alone the theories. Can our model suggest anything? Indeed it can, and we notice that as our eonic system crosses its modern divide something strange happens. First revolutions are inside the transition, as effects, then they are outside the transition and wish to become new TP4 transitions, theoretically possible but unlikely.

We have everything we need to produce an ‘eonic theory of revolution’, but instead, for good Kantian reasons, we will baulk, and remain with our ‘tracker-approximator’ approach (the problem of the Oedipus effect for theories of revolution was our starting point). Instead of ‘still another theory’ we can adopt the ‘whitewater wave cap’ version of these events in the surf of the modern transition: modern revolution shows perfect correlation as an eonic emergent process. And the French Revolution gives almost perfect expression to the ambiguity of our mainline transitions as they encounter the passage from locality to globality. Thus the question, ‘What causes modern revolution?’ joins our list of eonic enigmas. Looking at Bolshevism we can see that our mainline eonic sequence ignites processes it no longer controls thereafter, as the drama of globalization takes effect.

This reversal between the local and global, climaxing in the period 1848, suggests a clue to the chaotification of revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This says nothing, as such, about the rightness or wrongness of revolutions. Clearly, after millennia of slavery revolution did the trick, so the ‘right to revolution’ enters general action scripts. Marxism is confusing here because it starts by demanding democracy, real democracy, then slides into wishing to do that by change of rules, negating ‘bourgeois civilization’, which is tantamount to redoing a whole transition. But this starts a TP4 jackknife sequence that proves its undoing.

Recall our puzzled sense that while monotheism arose before the Axial period, its ‘actual’ birth seems correlated with that period (Cf. 4.6). In a related way, and the Reformation deserves similar treatment, our emerging model will allow us to distinguish ‘revolutions’ as arbitrary historical episodes (e.g. Spartacus) from those that occur in relation to the early modern (or the eonic effect as a whole) up to 1800 or so, as what we will call the ‘modern transition’. Then a strange insight arises and one of the confusions of modern revolution falls into place. However, our model is not designed for ideological debates, and this insight is simply taken in passing.

As we move to construct our model, the place of revolution in our series of turning points will be highlighted, and the relationship of the phenomenon to our pattern of universal history will become transparent. We see that the rise of the modern is what we will call a ‘transition’ about three centuries in length, the place of revolution therein becoming paradoxical, but absolutely timely. We should note that in our formulation, all revolutions join the family, and that includes the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest. Since we are not going to construct some ‘law of revolutions’, that grab-bag approach based on word recognition has an obvious use. And, indeed, the ‘co-incidence’ of the French, American, and Industrial Revolution is no accident, we will see. But economic transformations and social revolutions will be carefully distinguished in our model, and the last section here will again discuss ‘econosequence’ and ‘technosequence’. We especially confuse modernism with the Industrial Revolution. But it won’t work for theoretical explanation.

The point is that our transitions contain ‘revolutions’, but are distinct from that, although the case could be made for their ‘revolutionary character’ (to say the least). A great confusion arises in Marxism over the category of revolution, in part because of the confusion between ‘revolution’ and our idea of transition. The idea arises that a regime change will create a transition to a society beyond that which we tend to call ‘capitalist modern’. This confuses economic evolution and cultural evolution. To critique Marx’s theories is not to critique his observations about the relations of state and civil society in the wake of capitalism. Nothing in our model predicts or changes the element of post-transitional ‘free action’, but we simply note that a revolution is far short of an eonic transition as we see them. But the plain fact of the matter is that ‘revolution’ is let out of the bag in modern times, and the American and French Revolutions ignite a flood.

The onset of the French Revolution deserves as much as any date in history, beside the more glorious flagship American onset from 1776, the importance that has risen around it, as the period that initiated a shockwave of modernizing change that was national, then continental, and then global in nature, and whose cornucopia of diffusing consequences is still with us. That it was directly influenced from the fringe by the American revolution in its virgin open spaces is itself significant, and it was therefore a subtle recursion, in the broadest sense, of the experience of the English Civil War, and its aftermath, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, against a backdrop of the rising liberalism and deeper underground radicalism generated from the philosophic, scientific, and revolutionary experiences of the English.

In the prismatic view of Dickens, it was the ‘best of times, the worst of times...’ When asked what he thought was the significance of the French revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai is said to have answered, “It’s too soon to tell”.[i] The era invokes a field of potential, against which relative free action passes between hypothetical eonic determination , and the realizations of new forms of society. Francois Furet, the historian of the French Revolution and its ideological history, has declared that the ‘Revolution is over’. It is also true that the Revolution has been repeatedly been declared over, from almost its first phases, and continually spills over into future incidents, 1830, 1848, and finally the Russian Revolution. Perhaps what is not ‘over’ is the lesson learned, after so much passivity, that man must make himself, and not endure the posture of civil or religious slavery . Between the American and the French Revolutions we see the spectrum of historical dynamic pass from Freedom to its reality, cost, and full-scale imposition against inertia, in the drama of Equality, the price of freedom, and a field of change pass from its radicals to its conservatives. The note comes due. Every aspect and stage here has already been prefigured, seminally, in the English Civil War.

The American Revolution seems like a kind of ‘butterfly effect’, a small-scale effect provoking larger and enduring consequences. Note that the endless debates over revolution are really about the intractable nature of simple changes, the French and especially the Russian being the obvious examples, compared to the American. It is all very well to denounce Rousseau and Robespierre but if such an immense convulsion echoing the American example failed to produce a republic these critics are really saying that freedom is impossible or utopian, and that we should, a la de Maistre, revert to primitive systems of barbarous ages past. Let us note at least that our system, upon full study, will be seen to adopt a shotgun approach and the total net effect of democratization springs as much from sources having nothing to do with the French Revolution. So therefore not everything, indeed not much at all, rides on the brief reign of Robespierre, whose failure seems to be grounds for every reactionary sermon delivered up to those who wouldn’t dream of surrendering their own benefits. The classic example here is abolition, about which Enlightenment thinkers were a bit ‘sluggish’, the job done by the epigones of our to-be-secularized Protestant Reformation.

The myth of slow evolutionary change is not here concordant with the facts, and, Burke notwithstanding, our system explodes because change is thwarted even as the American system has set sail (albeit without dealing with abolition). It is a ‘now or never point’ relative to world history. Thus the conditions of the American version were obviously quite exceptional. And the American is the more remarkable for showing the ‘what might have been’ with respect to much modern confusion. If we consider the Decembrists in Russia, and the immense delay in the Russian case, we would do well to lay the violence of revolution as well at the feet of hopelessly muddled reactionaries.

In the final analysis these three revolutions, English, American, French (and what of the early German version in 1625?) are one and the same, and pass into 1848, the business too obviously still incomplete, as the tide climaxes and begins to recede, leaving the ghoulish Russian experiment stranded, with an historical expectation about ‘revolution’ that played them false. Just here we see the drama of ‘permanent revolution’ beginning, and a distinction is essential, between historical process claimed as revolution, and the free activity to create one based on memory, a fatal danger. Beside the late failure of the Russian Revolution, we see the issue of modernism computed against the incidents of its success or failure, and find that, relative to 1500-1800, history successfully reaches a new plateau, whatever the outcome of its particular incidents.

One author notes, “In one comprehensible sense the French Revolution is no longer a historical subject, for it can no longer be understood and explained as a unified and cohesive whole even by specialists. Scholars must specialize within the events we call ‘the Revolution’ and even then they will find it hard to keep up with the flood of relevant publications.” If a mere five years is so incomprehensible, then five thousand may not be any worse, at all. Perhaps we have a piece in a larger puzzle. Sometimes a problem is solved if we make it harder, and we will search for the larger scale that makes the enigma comprehensible.[ii]

Our distinction of eonic determination and free action, as suggested, will provide one clue, for we tend to confuse revolution as social process with revolution as project of action. First revolutions ‘just happen’, then revolutions are projects of action for the future. But that can be misleading. The first is seen looking backwards, the second looking towards the future. The first requires response as ‘relative free action’. The second requires considerably more effort, witness Lenin at the brink. The ‘causality’ of revolutions therefore becomes a paradox, since its creators were once looking forwards, yet now we ‘sociologize’ these events in vain as some kind of physical system of mechanism. So what causes revolutions? Is the result freedom? We cannot generalize a law of revolution as long as we are inside the system, since this creates the contradiction over historical inevitability

Our three centuries since Luther cover immense ground, but we can see the clear unity, as the ‘real Revolution’, by nature’s method. Behind this unity we can as well see the deeper disunity, and catch the mechanism as what we suspect, small scale influences defeating the large, the sourcing of the American system at the fringes being a classic example. And the climax of our period of transition is spectacular, as the economic and democratic revolutions sweep the field in the last generation of the eighteenth century, and then cross a mysterious divide ca. 1800 into a period of relative stabilization. But these are, probably, already relatively contingent outcomes in a process that was complete at the time of the Thirty Years War.

‘Revolution’ in the sense of increasing democratic participation in government appears in the archaic age of Greece, at best, in the time of Solon. The reversal of the term’s usage by Mommsen in the nineteenth century to describe the ‘Roman Revolution’, i.e. the period from the Gracchi to Augustus, would seem a transparent, if unconscious, corruption of the modern meaning. As R. R. Palmer points out, in The World of the French Revolution, one of its consequences was the ‘invention’ of revolution itself, the belief or myth that the social structure of human society is to be ‘determined’ by the free actions of men during a phenomenon called a ‘revolution’. But behind this we see a whole new form of existence emerge and pass toward stability as an almost newly born world, and one generating a vast cone of diffusing influences globally. The issue of revolution is almost a side issue to the clear ‘revolution’ of the rise of the modern as a whole.[iii]

The charge against revolution will soon be that it is impossible to compute the ‘social whole’ without being totalitarian. There is something to this, but it forgets that modernism itself should never have happened, as of 1500, because the effect computes the global whole. Something in history is able to overcome this, and it does not follow we can imitate history. This conservative lament implies, then, that social justice is unachievable, that history, therefore, has never really started. The subject of statist pressgang should conclude from this the release from his bargain with the state, perhaps his better world renunciation as a Buddhist! Our era as a whole, with a string of revolutionary failures, nonetheless achieves a new form of society, relative to its previous global condition.

After the experience of the Russian revolution the rejection of revolution as a process has become the dominant viewpoint. But the issue of ‘revolution’ is fundamental, whatever we think, because the slow evolution of society would never, by incremental change, given human nature and its obsession to dominate and enslave, to say nothing of the clear evidence that long term history keeps getting stuck, have produced the forms of modern freedom, democracy, or even economic development. Only a small fringe area at the boundary of Eurasia seems to have been able to break out of the system of antiquity. But we can grant the point of skepticism to see that revolutions aren’t to be had for the asking, and don’t just come about from audacity.

The point is simply that man as man simply will not, because the record of history shows that he will not, grant freedom to his fellow man. And the great achievements of freedom show initial bursts of eonic determination. There is a mysterious ‘something else’ involved in the appearance of democracy.

We see in the title of the great work by Copernicus, De Orbis Revolutionibus, that ushered in the Scientific Revolution both the unfolding, and a new signature definition, of the term ‘revolution of the ages’, with the ironic new modern meaning for the term, emerging in relation to the other. Christopher Hill, in his The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution, notes the frequent observation that the English Revolution had no ‘ideological forebears’, that noone passing through it “knew they were living through a revolution”, often taking their cue from the Bible![iv]

Note: Theory and ideology The legacy of later Marxism is unique in that it shows what happens when theories become the basis of action. This is a novelty of history created by the rise of science applied to society, and the results are no match for the seminal thought of the early modern, however archaic it seems now, which contains a normal distinction of theoretical and practical reason (although not put in those terms), in the words of Kant attempting to forestall in some alarm the already visible confusing effects of scientism. The founders of the American Republic were not trying to apply a social theory to their practice. This is not the same as rejecting Marxist social critiques. Marx was a brilliant observer and acute critic of emergent liberalism, bar none, but his theories, plus those of Engels, were not up to the task they set for themselves and suffered immediate confusion on the question of teleology.

We see that as we exit our third great turning point the character of revolution ought to change. And so it does. We see the effect ca. 1848. This is not a tool for ideological justification, but a reminder that our type of ‘on-off’ model correctly reflects the sudden change in character of modernism that occurs after our ‘divide’. We should note that abolition fully qualifies a ‘revolution’ and a principal ‘revolutionary’ able to bring off a ‘mideonic course correction’ so far is Abraham Lincoln.

[i] Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. xiii.

[ii] J. M. Roberts, The French Revolution (New York: Oxford, 1997), p. vii. Gary Kates, The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (New York: Routledge, 1998).

[iii] W. Doyle, The French Revolution: Bibliography of Works in English. (1988). R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) Geoffrey Best (ed.), Permanent Revolution (Chicago: Chicago, 1989), Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (1963), Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), “Practical Reason in the Revolution: Kant’s Dialogue with the Revolution”, in Ferenc Feher, The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[iv] Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 7-8.