'Revolution' first described planets circling the sky, not governments falling
When English borrowed revolution in the late fourteenth century, it meant the turning of celestial bodies. The sense of an abrupt upheaval in society appeared only in the mid-fifteenth century. By 1688 it was familiar enough that England's replacement of James II with William III became known as the Glorious Revolution.
The Latin root revolutio means a turning around, and the French revolucion dates to the thirteenth century. Today political scientists use the word for a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's structures, whether of class, state, ethnicity or religion. The sociologist Jack Goldstone identifies three shared ingredients: a competing vision of a just order, significant mass mobilisation, and pressure for change through actions outside normal institutions, such as strikes, protests or violence. By that yardstick, peaceful transitions via elections, like Spain's after Franco, do not count.
Scholars have sorted revolutions in many ways. Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted sudden, violent upheavals that remake a whole society with slow transformations, such as religious change, that unfold over generations. Charles Tilly separated a coup, a seizure of power from the top as in Poland in 1926, from a great revolution that reshapes economy and society as well as politics, as in France in 1789, Russia in 1917 or Iran in 1979. Mark Katz added forms such as revolution from above and revolution from without, citing the Allied invasions of Italy in 1943 and Germany in 1945, and noted that types overlap: Russia's 1917 upheaval began in the cities, spread to the countryside and ended in a Bolshevik coup.
In 1938 the historian Crane Brinton published The Anatomy of Revolution, comparing England in 1642, the American colonies in 1775, France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 and outlining shared patterns, though the American case deviated somewhat. His choice set a convention that later comparative studies followed.
Theories have come in waves. Early writers such as Gustave Le Bon and Pitirim Sorokin were largely descriptive. A later generation offered three kinds of explanation: psychological theories linking revolt to mass frustration, structural-functionalist models of a society knocked out of equilibrium, and conflict theories, associated with Tilly and Samuel Huntington, in which rival interest groups can no longer settle their differences within the existing system.
Source: Revolution
