Revolution: From science to politics

In sketching the evolution of the concept of ‘revolution’ in Europe between seventeenth and nineteenth century, a great help is given us by the well-known works of Reinhart Koselleck, in which the history of this concept is perfectly described. The turning point of the modern, European idea of revolution is found of course in French Revolution. Before 1789 there was a ‘cyclical’ definition of revolution that revealed and contained its astronomical background. That is what we can still find to some extent in the historical and political accounts of the English notion of revolutions from 1640 to the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688 (as for example in Hobbes’s Behemoth: “I have seen in this revolution a circular motion»). Here we would not find any particular difference with the Polybian idea of metabolé politeion or politeion anakyklosis, so dear to Machiavelli. The main point of this notion is that, like any other natural phenomenon, political movements are subject to unchanging specific laws, acting in a closed and repeatable scheme of time. Every revolution is possibly, eventually, a restoration.

It is precisely this idea that is somehow overthrown by the French Revolution. And it is precisely in this juncture that the concept of revolution becomes – according to Koselleck – a “collective singular”, a “meta-historical concept”. From this standpoint, the entire nineteenth century (French) history can be considered as a continuous sequence of revolutions. From the French Revolution to the Spring of Nations in 1848, from the July Revolution to the Paris Commune in 1871.

On the other side, we can find a specific tendency to think a different idea of revolution. Particularly, in his Discours sur le revolutions de la surface du globe (Discourse of the upheavals of the surface of the globe) Cuvier clearly established his idea of species in relation to other natural phenomena. His catastrophist theory was entirely rooted in his idea of paleontological discontinuity. Every living organism was conceived as a closed system, whose species had been purposely created to fit a specific geographical environment. The only element of movement or change in such fixism were, according to Cuvier, sudden global revolutions or catastrophes, occurring now and then around the world (volcanic eruptions, deluges, earthquakes, etc.). Because of these upheavals, entire species were wiped off and extinguished, being immediately after substituted by neighbouring (migrating) ones.

From this standpoint, my specific aim is to find continuities and discontinuities in the political assumption of Cuvier model of revolutions, particularly in conservative thinkers (Bonald, De Maistre). My hypothesis is that his idea of sudden interruption slips from biology to political thought because it gives the possibility of conceiving history as the field of continuous, miraculous renewals of political institutions, outside of a classical, cyclical (Polibian) conception of time. Moreover, as I will argue, such a conception shaped a specifically European understanding of revolution – one inherently different from the more ‘evolutionist’ American notion.