What is revolution?
The concept of revolution is commonly understood as a radical transformation of a certain political, social, economic, cultural or technological structure, that is, everything that concerns human life. This concept is fundamental to understanding the modern and contemporary historical periods. events like RevolutionEnglish,Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, Russian revolution,chinese revolution, etc., give proof of the importance of this concept.
It should be noted, however, that the word revolution was not always used to designate phenomena of radical transformation in the human sphere, that is, in the relationship between men. On the contrary, originally, revolution nothing else meant that translation– it was, therefore, part of the astronomical language.
Revolution: from astronomy to history
The word revolution comes from the Latin revolution/revolver, which means “take turns”, “complete turns”. The use of the term spread in the scope of astronomy with the publication of the
From revolutionibus orbium coelestium,in Copernicus, in 1543, which described the revolution that the planets completed around the Sun. Revolution, therefore, was the technical term corresponding to what is usually called today “translation”.Until the second half of the 17th century, the concept of revolution was still restricted to the celestial sphere. With the turnaround caused by RemodelingProtestantand the religious civil wars derived from it, there was a sequence of great transformations in the socioeconomic and political structure of some nations, in particular, the England. From 1640 to 1688, England experienced very turbulent events. It went from absolute monarchy to civil war, from civil war to republican dictatorship, from then to monarchy again – but with the parliamentary model. These events came to be called RevolutionEnglish.
In the case of the English Revolution, there is still a resemblance to the astronomical revolution of the planets, as such as these return to their starting point, the British also restored the monarchy, although transformed. So, at the end of the 17th century, there was still the use of the term political revolution as a metaphor, as an analogy to the revolution of the stars.
The concept of revolution only began to be identified as a synonym for rupture, continuity of transformations, with the French Revolution. The French Revolution imploded the foundations of Old Regime European and laid the political bases for the protagonism of the bourgeoisie. The problem is that these bases, which were based on the Enlightenment ideas of equality, liberty, right to property, etc., also presupposed a continuous evolution. More radical revolutionaries like the Jacobins, they glimpsed a "destiny” to be fulfilled by the Humanity as a whole.
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This fate presupposed that the "History”, in the sense of universal history, in which all men share, could “be done”, that is, men could reach a level of perfection (social, political, etc.) through a permanent revolution. This idea of the whole world being “revolutionized” took hold in the 19th and 20th centuries. The revolutionary wave of the first half of the 19th century, which became known as Spring of the Peoples, consolidated our conception of the Revolution.
revolution and acceleration of time
The rapid spread of the effects of the French Revolution was the work ofNapoleonBonaparte, that he intended to “liberate” the peoples of Europe from the absolutist yoke through war. Added to the propagation of the ideals of the French Revolution, was also the propagation of the clear technical advances of the RevolutionIndustrial. The development of heavy industry (steel and metallurgy), means of transport (steam locomotives), communication instruments (telegraph) and everything else that followed caused a continual feeling that time was speeding up and distances becoming shortened.
Revolution, totalitarianism and “the monopoly of the future”
This perception of the acceleration of time through technological innovations lasts until today and ends up being contaminated with the perception of the activity politics, which, in our modern view, also needs to be in constant improvement to lead Humanity to a kind of “Paradise terrestrial". The problem is that ideologiestotalitarian who promised this kind of “paradise”, whether in the form of a classless society or the imperial triumph of a people like the communism (Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, etc.) and the Nazism, respectively, see the revolution as the only possible path to the future. The result of this, as history shows us, has not been the most encouraging.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
