Revolutions

Revolution: Few terms have been as characteristic of the social, political, and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th century as this one. After the «French» and «Industrial Revolution» as well as the «academic and scientific» revolutions and the artistic vanguards from the end of the 19th century onwards, social conflicts have been deeply impregnated by the idea of revolution. «Revolution» was not only regarded in terms of a radical break with the old order swept away in an explosive act of emancipatory practice, but it has often been rejected as a senseless dissolution of all order and as a symptom of social decline. According to neo-conservative and neo-liberal circles, the era of political and social revolutions in world history has ended with the «revolutionary» collapse of state-socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe around 1989. Yet recently these diagnoses have been increasingly called into question, both in theory and in practice. «Revolution» has been set on the agenda again as a result of populist and revolutionary movements, the critique of neoliberalism, but also the new intellectual debates about strategies of the Left in a globalized capitalism.