Vive la Révolution: Social and Political Change and Rebellion

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” wrote Karl Marx, but what exactly does that mean? Revolutions have the power to reshape the political order of the world more than any other social, economic, or cultural forces, and most states today were born out of a revolution. But what exactly is a revolution? Is it, like Marx believed, the inevitable result of a social conflict? Or does it take determined revolutionaries to make a successful revolution? To have a revolution, do you have to call it “a revolution?” To answer these and other questions, this course will take students back to the early revolutions of seventeenth-century England, and the revolutions of America and France. We will then make our way through the revolutions of the nineteenth century, to the revolutions of the twentieth century in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, and Iran. Ultimately, after studying multiple revolutions, we will step back and study the overall “anatomy of a revolution” — a theory popularized by the historian Crane Brinton — and question its validity against modern revolutions that took place after its publication.