Abstract
The aim of this volume of essays is to examine political revolution in Europe during the twentieth century. The term ‘revolution’ has been widely applied to developments in areas as diverse as communications, information technology, medicine, science and travel, and indeed revolutions in these areas have arguably been of great significance in shaping European societies last century, but it is politics that is the focus of this present work. Nothing else has raised quite the same passions, or had the same significance, as the struggle to make fundamental and enforced changes to systems of government and the societies in which they are based. We have also limited our discussion to Europe, not because we feel that the revolutionary experiences in East Asia or Latin America, for example, are not significant, but because the global importance of political revolution necessitates some narrowing of scope. Despite confining the analysis of revolution to the European continent, we have still had to be selective for the purposes of a book of this length. Nevertheless, several of the chapters give some sense of the extra-European dimension to revolution and the final piece in the book is wholly devoted to an analysis of European revolutions in a world context.
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Notes and References
J. Dunn, Modern Revolutions: an Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 11–12.
This point is also strongly made in a recent book, F. Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: the Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London, 1999), esp. pp. 234–60.
One of the most ambitious attempts to interpret history in terms of the impact of revolutions is the comparative study by Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (London, 1966).
Two different comments upon it are provided by L. Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, 2nd edn (London, 1987), pp. 154–65
and T. Skocpol et al. (eds), Democracy, Revolution and History (New York, 1998), esp. pp. 1–25.
A recent volume reproducing articles on revolution, with an interesting introduction and bibliographical survey, is provided by A. J. Groth (ed.), Revolution and Revolutionary Change (Aldershot, 1996), esp. pp. xiii-xl.
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962) narrows the period even further.
Interestingly a recent textbook by A. Todd, Revolutions, 1789–1917 (Cambridge, 1998), presents just this classical conception of European revolution.
Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (London, 1953), pp. 2–3.
Compare, for instance, F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992)
J. Lucacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993).
C. Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 1–4 recognises that the revolutions of 1989–91 showed that revolution was not at an end in Europe.
K. Kumar, Revolution: the Theory and Practice of a European Idea (London, 1971), p. 7.
J. De Fronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, 2nd edn (Boulder, Colo., 1996), p. 8.
Similar points are made in D. Close and C. Bridge, Revolution: a History of the Idea (London, 1985).
See R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge, 1986).
Comment on this can be found in J. Goldstone (ed.), Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Studies, 2nd edn (San Diego, Calif., 1996).
T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge, 1979)
Other recent examples include T. Skocpol, Social Revolution in the Modern World (Cambridge, 1994);
J. Goldstone et al. (eds), Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1991);
M. S. Kimmel, Revolution: a Sociological Interpretation (Cambridge, 1990).
A still interesting study of the origins of revolutions is provided by T. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, 1970).
M. N. Katz, Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves (New York, 1997) and Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, esp. pp. 56–132.
For recent overviews of the Comintern see K. McDermott with J. Agnew, The Comintern: International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London, 1996)
T. Rees and A. Thorpe (eds), International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 (Manchester, 1998).
See P. Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914 (London, 1990), pp. 235–93.
See also the comments of T. Kimer, ‘The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises’, American Journal of Sociology, 100 (1995), pp. 1528–51.
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Rees, T., Donald, M. (2001). The Dynamics and Meaning of Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe. In: Donald, M., Rees, T. (eds) Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4026-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4026-1_1
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