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TO ENTERTAIN ANY THEORY ABOUT REVOLUTION," WRITES JOHN DUNN, "-and it is not even possible to identify just what events do constitute revolutions without assuming some theory about the meaning of revolution-is to assume a political posture. . . . The value-free study of revolutions is a logical impossibility for those who live in the real world" (Dunn, 1972:1-2). For the student of revolutions the problem is complicated by the fact that the political postures assumed spontaneously by those who write or speak about them, and, if not careful, by himself or herself, are not necessarily coherent or consistent. We live in an era when rapid and fundamental change has become the norm in everyday life, so that the terms "revolution" and "revolutionary" extend far beyond the field of political science. Moreover, common discourse identifies them, much in the eighteenth-century manner, with progress and the improvement of life, so that, as advertising agencies understand only too well, the word "revolutionary," when attached to a new microwave oven as distinct from a political regime, will sell the product more effectively, even among those most passionately committed to the defense of the status quo against subversion.
Nevertheless, the primary political meaning of "revolution" remains profoundly controversial, as the historiography of the subject demonstrates, and as the debates surrounding the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789 demonstrate even more unmistakably. What usually happens to revolutions sufficiently distant from the present-and two centuries are, by the news agency standards that dominate our information, almost beyond the range of the remembered past-is that they are either transformed into nonrevolutions-that is, integrated into historical continuity or excluded from it as insignificant temporary interruptions-or else they are celebrated by public rites of passage suitable to the occasions that mark the birth of nations and/or regimes. They remain controversial only among historians. Thus the English Revolution or revolutions of the seventeenth century has been tacitly eliminated from political discourse: even in the tercentenary year of what used to be called the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 and the constituting event of British parliamentary sovereignty, its presence in public rhetoric has been subdued and marginal. On the other hand, a celebratory consensus has marked the various bicentenaries connected with the American Revolution, and even...