Crisis and revolution: Europe and ‘the modern’

The rise of the notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’ – two key terms in the development of the idea of Europe from the seventeenth century onwards – mark the irruption of historical time in the political history of the Western world. Both concepts highlight change and acceleration as essential features of the historical epoch of modernity. The great revolutions of modern Europe, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the great French Revolution of 1789 radically remodel modern political culture and its essential shape: the one of the state. All this takes place in the space, in the territory of the nation. This causes a conceptual and actual contradiction with respect to the universalism set forth by the European Enlightenment. Such acute contradiction will later lead some authors to draw an apocalyptic picture: the Decline of the West (Spengler); the crisis of the European mind (Hazard), the end of the European mind (Julien Freund). A comparison with the other great revolution of the eighteenth century, the American Revolution, leads us to reconfigure the very concept of revolution through the works of Hannah Arendt or through Negri’s book The constituent power and to interpret dialectically the idea of Europe arising after the second World War especially in its controversial historical and political articulations. The aim of this paper is to provide insights useful to rethink how and to what an extent the concept of revolution has affected the way in which Europe has imagined and represented itself from the seventeenth century onwards.