Up until now we’ve seen revolutions depicted as contingent, even arbitrary events, the overthrow of kings and autocrats little more than happenstance, the unexpected, even unintended consequence of a fateful encounter between stumbling authority and a member of the crowd brave or exhausted enough to finally, definitively, say “no.”

This week’s readings presented us with nearly the opposite scenario:  Revolutions as performance (Furet and Arendt), as incurable pathology (Arendt), an irresistible novelty (again, Arendt, and to a certain extent, Tocqueville), or in the case of Camus’ rebel, as redemption of an irrepressible human spirit.  These accounts were met on the one hand by the skepticism of Burke (revolutions are bad) and Tocqueville (revolutions are unlikely in an era of equality), and on the other by the absolute certainty of Marx and Engels that (class) justice will be served (revolutions as historical necessity, the consequence of teleology).

Very briefly, between the two conceptual poles presented thus far in the course—revolutions as accidental affairs versus revolutions as destiny—where do you stand, and why?  Use this blog post as preparatory notes for next week’s discussion.

Below, I’ve listed a number of passages that may help you as you consider your answer:

“Civil wars have generally been assumed to be sterile, bringing only misery and disaster, while revolutions have often been seen as fertile ground for innovation and improvement…civil wars are local and time-bound, taking place within particular, usually national, communities, at particular moments.  By contrast, revolution seems almost a contagion, occurring when it does across the world, at least the modern world, which in a sense it defines, as an unfolding progress of human liberation.”  Armitage, Civil Wars:  A History in Ideas, pg. 122

“We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration—the passionate side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of living…Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.”  Camus, The Rebel, pg. 19

“…a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame.  That is why rebellion kills men while revolutions destroys both men and principles.”  Camus, The Rebel, pg. 106

“The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the tend of the eighteenth century.  Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new drama was going to be.”  Arendt, On Revolution, pg. 21

“Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.  This means of course that revolutions are more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified in calling every coup d’état a revolution or even in detecting one in each civil war…All these phenomena have in common with revolution that they are brought about by violence…but violence is no more adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change; only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politics, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution.”  Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 27-28

To the Hone. Jno. Hancock Esqre. President of the Continental Congress; This Map of the Seat of Civil War in America is Respectfully Inscribed

At the end of the selection from Armitage’s piece on the Civil War in an Age of Revolutions, he writes that “when tracing the genealogy of modern revolutions, we should seriously consider the hypothesis that civil war was the genus of which revolution was only a species” (p. 158). This is an interesting assertion, for it posits that all revolutions are in fact civil wars, or rather wars between groups belonging to the same political entity, but which, even if not initially, seek to fundamentally change the distribution of power and to gain sovereignty for or over a particular group of people (rather than over a specified territory).

The key words, I believe, are sovereignty and people. Sovereignty is one of those weighty words in political science and international relations, but at its most basic is supreme authority, whether that is supreme authority within specified borders, for a particular group of people, or over one particular aspect of the state. In any event, sovereignty in whatever form is then inherently focused on changing the distribution of power, though in regards to what and how and for or over whom may remain unresolved questions even after the war. If this is so, then is revolution the act of struggling to attain sovereignty for or over a group of people? Or is it the actual fulfillment of sovereignty for or over a group of people, or does it encompass both?

Either way, the critical point is that revolutions are civil wars, but also that civil wars can become revolutionary. They become revolutionary through an assertion of sovereignty for or over a group of people that were once part of the same political entity as the other group(s). This analysis subsequently raises a host of further questions, such as what is the legal status of revolutionary civil wars? How and why does a group of people come to the collective determination of establishing sovereignty (however defined and envisioned)? Is sovereignty inviolable,or should it be? Why or why not? Does sovereignty provide civil war revolutionaries with a strategic, legal, or other advantage that would otherwise be unattainable if it were any other type of civil war? So, instead of asking why revolutions, perhaps the question should be why sovereignty?

“In order to build the new nation of Haiti. . .”

Considering the revolutionary tension of rupture and continuity, I ask myself to what extent is rupture an attempt at dismantling continuity. It seems self-evident, but this question takes a unique position in the context of the Haitian Revolution. In order to build a new nation of Haiti, Dessalines had to reconstruct the Haitian narrative by reconstructing Haitian revolutionist perceptions of race, indigeneity, and territorial claim.  Dessalines’ army, the “Indigenous Army,” claimed the name Haïti in the name of the Taino people, the original inhabitants of the islands. Dubois draws an interesting parallel between the French and African occupation of the island. What does it mean when the colonized become the colonizers?

Dessalines was very aware of this reality. In order to build a new Haiti, the nation had to construct an ancestral claim to the land, making it more of a righteous movement than a political and racial revolution. That is, until the question of who is to be considered Black in the new Black nation. In order to build a new Haiti, the nation had to also redefine constructions around race and racial identity. In various attempts to rupture the colonial legacy on the island, I ask myself how these attempts may have only exacerbated the legacy, simply shifting the lens? In what ways do attempts of historical rupture cause the continuity of historical legacy?