Title: Revolution? Revolutions are what Happens to Wheels — the Phenomenon of Revolution, Irish Style
Abstract: Theories of revolution have gone out of fashion, more or less in tandem with the fashionability of the actual phenomenon itself. Trotsky's notion that war was the locomotive of history now gives us images of some appalling third-world train-crash rather than the brushing aside of an effete old order so as to usher in the new, some blood being inevitably spilt on the way. Ironically, the most recent large phenomena which looked something like revolutions were the collapse of the so-called revolutionary regimes in Russia and its satellites in Eastern Europe and Asia ten years ago. Essentially these events represent the philosophical bankruptcy of Leon Trotsky and his theory of history. Similarly, Barrington Moore's well-known historicist thesis of the late sixties that the coming of the modern world could not occur without some essentially violent break with the political and social past ('the destruction of feudal society') looks a little tired, in the year 2001.1KeywordsFeudal SocietyGreat FamineIrish RevolutionRevolutionary ProcessRevolutionary PoliticsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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