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Revolution reconsidered
Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr
Extracted from Journal of Democracy: Vol 18, Number 01
January 2007

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Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy. He recently was a Fulbright Fellow in Georgia and served as an election observer there in November 2003.

In the winter of 2006 Georgians and Ukrainians will be marking, and many celebrating, events that they have labeled by the somewhat oldfashioned term, "revolution": the Rose and Orange Revolutions. It is surprising that these historic upheavals have not spurred any reconsideration of the once popular concept of revolution. Modern liberal democracy as we know it today emerged when a "right of revolution" began to be widely asserted in the century leading up to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Over the next two centuries, revolution was a hope always cherished somewhere on the globe, consoling believers in popular rule and guiding their efforts. Some of the subsequent revolutions were amazing successes, like the American, while others turned out to be cruel deceptions. Partly because the last wave of revolutionary enthusiasm after the Second World War had proved deceptive, the collapse of communist rule in the Soviet bloc was accompanied by a feeling that revolutions might be dying out. The recent "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union give us an opportunity to ask ourselves whether this is so, and whether revolution is a good or bad idea overall.

Revolution in the strict sense (what we may call "classical revolution") has a number of essential features. First, there is a public discrediting of the old order, which leads to a quick change of the ruling body-the class or group of people (rich people, the people as a whole, communists, mullahs) that participates politically and therefore rules. Second, it involves a quick change of the ruling group in the name of, but also by means of, the whole community as represented by its majority. Third, the new rulers are specified and legitimized by a body of doctrine or ideology. Fourth, it installs a new system that is created by the state: The characteristic tendency of revolutions is to seize control of the state and to use the state to produce wider changes. Fifth, in revolutions the new rulers and institutions take power by violence or by the threat of violence.

Three elements of this definition deserve to be underscored: 1) A revolution must be fairly brief and well demarcated from the periods before and after in order to differentiate it from a process of gradual reform. 2) Moreover, it must be achieved not only by leaders but by the energies of a broader group of people. Rulers sometimes may relax and broaden their rule, often doing so under some form of pressure, and leaders of coups d'état may proclaim their desire to create a democratic system (as in Mauritania in August 2005), but these are not revolutions in the traditional sense. Because a wide group of people participate in carrying out a revolution, they can take pride in what they accomplish.
3) Finally, violence has been quite important to revolutions. This conclusion was powerfully restated by Simon Schama on the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution: "The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count. From the first year it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect . . . it was the Revolution's source of collective energy."¹

There is a case for violence. Outside the Muslim world, modern man is no longer attracted by revolutionary violence (or by war). As we will discuss, such violence holds great dangers for democratic transformation. But to appreciate the case for classical revolution it is essential to examine the function of violence in past democratic revolutions. Violence heightens the drama of political change, vividly defining friends and enemies. It creates examples-tragic, heroic, and villainous-on the basis of which citizens remodel their characters. One should picture here revolutionary icons such as Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting The Death of Marat. If we ask how passive victims of politics become the owners and operators of politics, these images and stories of revolutionary violence, heroism, and sacrifice must play a great role. It is not clear whether nonviolent substitutes for revolutionary symbolism are as memorable as those that recall violent clashes. In any case, nonviolence relies for its symbolism on the violence of the regimes it opposes, and offers few clues to the character of the nonviolent world to which it aspires.

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1. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 447.

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