With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

You Say You Want a Reference Book About Revolution?

Thanks to an edition now available online from the University of Michigan Library, you can easily look up the word "Revolt" in the great Encyclopedia that Diderot and d'Alembert compiled in the 18th century as part of their challenge to the pre-Enlightenment order of things. A revolt is an "uprising of the people against the sovereign" resulting from (here the entry borrows from Fénelon) "the despair of mistreated people" and "the severity, the loftiness of kings."

That certainly counts as fair warning -- and indeed, the Encyclopedia then shifts into wonkish mode, advising any monarch who happened to be reading that he could best control his subjects "by making himself likable to them... by punishing the guilty, and by relieving the unhappy." Plus he should remember to fund education. Won't someone please, please think of the children? While Louis XVI was by no means a total dullard, it seems this advice was wasted on him. (See also "Regicide.")

Scores of other occasions when "the despair of mistreated people" collided with severe, lofty, and unlikable authority are covered in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present, just published by Wiley-Blackwell. With seven volumes of text, plus one of index, it covers upheavals on every continent except Antarctica, which tends to be pretty quiet. A digital edition is also available.

The work of an international team, the Encyclopedia is edited by Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. I have been reading around in it (as is my wont) for the past few weeks, when not following the latest tweets of resistance from within Iran, and wanted to ask Ness a few questions about his project. He responded to them by email. A transcript of the exchange follows.

Q: The title of this reference work raises a question. Protests do sometimes lead to revolution, of course, but none that I've ever been to ever has. Although both activities involve departures from (and opposition to) the routines of a given society, revolution and protest seem to be rather distinct processes. Why bring them together like this?

A: Revolution and social transformation are ultimate goals of protests that have arisen from collective grievances when leaders of states and societies are unable or unwilling to come to terms with abject inequality or injustice. Undeniably not all protests lead to revolutionary change and most protesters will not live to see the results of their actions. But when successful, they are the culmination of waves of social grievances against authoritarianism, social and economic inequality and injustices frequently expressed over decades and even centuries....
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed