Dizionario di Politica

Authors: Bobbio, Matteucci, Pasquino
Summary: This 7,100-word entry distinguishes the concept of revolution from those of rebellion and revolt; it then considers the origins, causes and future of revolution. Revolution is defined as "the attempt to violently subvert the current political establishment and replace it, in order to carry out far-reaching changes in political relations, in the juridical-constitutional order and in the socio-economic sphere." Revolution is a broader phenomenon than revolt, which is geographically limited, lacking ideology, and aimed at an immediate satisfaction of political and economic claims. Revolutions are typified by the use of violence.
The origin of the term dates back to the 17th century. It first connoted the return to a previous state of affairs, the restoration of an old order. Only with the French Revolution did the term acquires the sense of the establishment of a new political order, in that case one in which freedom was a primary value.
There is a great deal of debate over the causes of revolution. The prevailing hypothesis is that of Davies, that the cause of all revolutions is "relative privation"--that is, the perception of a discrepancy between one's expectations and the capacity to achieve them. The entry considers in some detail Trotsky's notion of "permanent revolution," an effort to strengthen the solidarity of the international working class movement by extending proletarian revolution to the industrialized nations of the west. At the end, the entry looks with some skepticism at the future of revolution: particularly in industrial democracies, a reformist rather than a revolutionary perspective is more plausible.