The word "revolution" has an interesting etymology.

When asked by Soviet sociologists what it meant to

them, Russian peasants responded, roughly, "doing what you want." In modern advertising,
"revolutionary" has come to mean "radically new," and hence, by implication, "improved." From such
usage one would hardly suspect that the word had its origins in astronomy and astrology.

"Revolution" derives from the Latin verb revolvere, "to revolve." It was originally applied to the motions
of the planets. Copernicus called his great treatise “On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies”. From
astronomy, the word passed into the vocabulary of astrologers, who claimed the ability to predict the
future from the study of the heavens. Sixteenth-century astrologers serving kings spoke of "revolution"
to designate unforeseen events determined by forces beyond human control. Thus the original sci-entific
meaning of the word, conveying regularity and repetitiveness, came to signify the very opposite of the
currently understood meaning i.e. sudden and unpredictable. The word was first applied to politics in
England in 1688-89, to describe the overthrow of James II in favor of William III and Mary. As the price
for his crown, the new king had to sign a Declaration of Rights by which he committed himself not to
suspend laws or levy taxes without parliamentary approval, thus inaugurating a process that would end
in the triumph of popular sovereignty in England. This was "the Glorious Revolution." It affected only the
country's political constitution. The American Revolution a century later had broader implications, in that
it both asserted the country's independence and altered the relation-ship between the individual and
the state. It combined the principles of popular sovereignty and personal liberty with what came to be
known as the right to national self-determination. But even so, it confined itself to politics. The culture of
the United States, its judiciary system, its guarantees of life and property—all inherited from Great
Britain—remained unaffected by the Revolution. The first modern revolution was the French. In its initial
phase it was largely spontaneous and unconscious: In June 1789, when the represen-tatives of the three
estates swore the Tennis Court Oath, an act of defi-ance that launched the Revolution, they spoke not of
revolution but of "national regeneration."

Rebellions vs Revolutionaries

Historians have noted that popular rebellions are conservative, their objective Icing a restitution of
traditional rights of which the population feels itself unjustly deprived. Rebellions look backward. The
demand of masses have always concrete and realistic . These people don’t have ability to think in
abstract. Hence rebellions are also specific mid limited in scope.

The biggest question is how these conservative rebellions transform into revolutions for change and
creation of new order? This transformation is not natural but engineered, and is brought by professional
revolutionaries known as intelligentsia.

All revolutions till the the American Revolution have confined itself to politics. The culture, its judiciary
system, its guarantees of life and property—all inherited from Great Britain—remained unaffected by the
Revolution. The first modern revolution was the French. In its initial phase it was largely spontaneous
and unconscious: In June 1789, when the represen-tatives of the three estates swore the Tennis Court
Oath, an act of defi-ance that launched the Revolution, they spoke not of revolution but of "national
regeneration." But in time, the leadership of rebellious France passed into the hands of ideologues who
saw a unique opportunity to realize the ideals of the Enlightenment, aspiring to nothing less than the
creation of a new social order and even a new breed of human beings.

"Revolution" henceforth began to refer to grandiose plans to transform the world—no longer to changes
that happened but to changes that were made.

Nineteenth-century Europe witnessed the emergence of professional revolutionaries, intellectuals who

devoted themselves full-time to studying the history of past upheavals in quest of tactical guidelines,
analyzing their own time for signs of coming upheavals, and, once they occurred, stepping in to direct
spontaneous rebellion into conscious revolution.

Such radical intellectuals saw the future progress as requiring the destruction of the traditional system of
human relations. Their objective was to set free the "true" human nature suppressed by the institutions
to which it gave rise. These institutions were namely government institutions and private property.

Radical communists and anarchists imagined the coming revolution as thoroughly transforming not only
every political and socio-economic order previously known, but human existence itself. Its aim, in the
words of famous socialist Leon Trotsky, was "overturning the world." This trend starting from French
Revolution reached its culmination in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Although the breakdown of the Russian monarchy was due to domestic causes, the Bolsheviks, who
emerged the winners of the post-tsarist struggle for power, were internationalists consumed by ideas
common to radical intellectuals in the West.

They seized power to change not Russia but the world. They regarded their own country, the "weakest
link in the chain of imperialism," as nothing more than a springboard for a global upheaval that would
completely alter the human condition and, as it were, reenact the sixth day of Creation.

lbe causes of post-1789 revolutions have been many and complex. I lw impulse of twentieth-century
observers, influenced as they are by socialist and sociological ways of thinking, is to attribute them to
grievances of the population at large. The assumption is that they were acts of desperation and as such
beyond judgment. This view exerts strong attraction in Anglo-Saxon countries, where ideologies have
never played a prominent role. But the notion that every revolution that hap-pens is inevitable and
therefore justified holds true only in a limited SCOW.

Obviously, in a country whose government accurately reflects the wishes of the majority of the people
,peacefully yielding office when it loses the people's confidence, and where the people live in reasonable
prosperity, violent revolutions are unnecessary and hence unlikely; every election is a peaceful
revolution of sorts. But this obvious truth does not imply its opposite: that where violent upheavals do
occur, the population desires a complete change of the political and economic system—that is, A
"revolution" in the leftist sense of the word.
It is radical intellectuals who translate these concrete complaints into an consuming destructive force.
They desire not reforms but a complete obliteration of the present in order to create a world order that
has never existed except in a mythical Golden Age.

Professional revolutionaries, mostly of middle-class background, scorn the modest demands of the
"masses," whose true interests they alone claim to understand. It is they who transform popular
rebellions into revolutions by insisting that nothing can be changed for the better unless everything is
changed. This philosophy, in which idealism inextricably blends with a lust for power, opens the
floodgates to permanent turmoil. And since ordinary people require for their survival a stable and
predictable environment, all post-french revolutions have ended in failure.

The existence of popular grievances is thus a necessary but not suffi-cient explanation of revolutions,
which require the infusion of radical ideas. The upheavals that shook Russia after February 1917 were
made possible by the breakdown of public order under the strains of a world

Intelligensia

Why use the foreign-sounding "intelligentsia" when the English language has the word "intellectuals"?
The answer is that one needs different terms to designate different phenomena—in this case, to
distinguish those who passively contemplate life from activists who are let ermined to reshape it. Marx
succinctly stated the latter position when lie wrote: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

The term "intelligentsia" describes intellectuals who want power in order to change the world.

Whether the conflicts and resentments that exist in every society are peacefully resolved or explode in
revolution is largely determined by 2 factors. Firstly the presence or absence of democratic institutions
capable of redressing grievances through legislation, and secondly the presence or absence of an
intelligentsia determined to fan the flames of popular discontent for the purpose of gaining power.

For it is the radical intelligentsia that transforms specific and therefore remediable, grievances into an
uncompromising rejection of the status quo. Rebellions happen; revolutions are made. And they are
made by bodies of professional "managers of the revolution," namely the radical intelligentsia.

For an intelligentsia to emerge, two conditions must be met. One is a materialistic ideology that regards
human beings not as unique creatures endowed with an immortal soul but as exclusively physical
entities shaped by their environment. This ideology makes it possible to argue that a rational reordering
of man's environment can produce a new breed of perfectly virtuous creatures. This belief elevates
members of the intelligentsia to the status of social engineers and justifies their political ambitions.
Second, the intelligentsia requires economic opportunities to secure independence: The dissolution of
traditional social estates and the emergence of free professions in industrial age (such as journalism and
university teaching etc.) emancipate intellectuals from subjection to the Establishment. These
opportunities, accompanied by guarantees of free speech and association, enable the intelligentsia to
secure a hold on public opinion, its principal means of political leverage.

Intellectuals first appeared in Europe as a distinct group in the sixteenth century in connection with the
emergence of secular society and the progress of science. They were lay thinkers who approached
traditional philosophical questions outside the framework of theology and the church, which in the
postclassical world had enjoyed a monopoly on such speculation. Like the philosophers of ancient
Greece and Rome, they saw their mission as one of teaching virtue and wisdom—educating men to curb
their passions and to accept life with all its dark sides, including the inevitability of death. With the rise
of industrial age a different kind of intellectual made his appearance. Impressed by the advances of
science and the seemingly limitless possibilities inherent in the scientific method, he saw no reason he
should not apply the insights into nature that science had made possible in order to master nature. It
was a notion with very wide applications.

The scientific (empirical) method posited that only that existed which could be observed and measured.
It raised the question whether man could be said to possess an immortal soul or ideas planted in him at
birth, as taught by religion and metaphysics, for neither this soul nor these ideas could be identified by
scientific observation. The full philosophical implications of this empirical approach were first drawn by
John Locke in his seminal Essay Concerning Human Under-standing (1690). In his political writings Locke
laid down the foundations of the liberal constitutions of Great Britain and the United States. But his
philosophical treatise inadvertently fed a very different, illiberal current of political thought. The Essay
challenged the axiom of Western philosophy and theology that human beings were born with "innate
ideas," including knowledge of God and a sense of right and wrong. This notion had made for a
conservative theory of politics because, by postulating that man comes into the world spiritually and
intellectually formed, it also postulated that he was immutable. From this it followed that the principles
of government were the same for all nations and ages. According to Locke, however, man is born a blank
slate on which physical sensations and experiences write the messages that make him what he is. There
is no such dung as free will: man can no more reject the ideas that the senses inscribe on his mind than a
mirror can "refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which objects set before it" produce. The
implications of Locke's theory of knowledge, ignored in his own country, were seized upon and
developed in France by radical thinkers, notably Claude Helvetius. In De lesprit (1758), Helvetius drew on
Locke's epistemology to argue that insofar as man is totally molded by his environment, a perfect
environment will inevitably pro. human beings. The means toward this end are education and It, he task
of the political and social order, therefore, is not to creak wal conditions in which mankind can realize its
potential but rathe. I 'inter mankind "virtuous." Good government not only ensures "du. eatest
happiness of the greatest number" (a formula attributed to I lelvedus) but literally refashions man.

This unprecedented proposition constitutes the premise of both liberal and radical ideologies of modern
nines. It justifies the government's far-reaching intervention in the lives of its citizens. This idea holds an
irresistible attraction for intellectuals because it elevates them from the position of passive observers of
life into its shapers. Their superior knowledge of what is rational and virtuous permits them to aspire to
the status of mankind's "educators." While ordinary people, in pursuit of a living, acquire specific
knowledge relevant to their particular occupation, intellectuals—and they alone—claim to know things
"in general." By creating "sciences" of human affairs—economic science, political science, sociology—
they feel at liberty to dismiss as irrelevant practices and institutions created over millennia by trial and
error. It is this philosophical revolution that has transformed some intellectuals into an intelligentsia,
actively involved in politics. And, of course, involvement in politics makes them politicians, and, like
others of the breed, prone to pursue their private interests in the guise of working for the common
good.

The premises underlying the ideas of Locke and Helvatius can be applied in two ways. In countries with
democratic institutions and guarantees of free speech, members of the intelligentsia pursue their objec-
tive by influencing public opinion and, through it, legislation. Where such institutions and guarantees are
missing, they coalesce into a caste 'hat tirelessly assails the existing order in order to discredit it and pave
du: way for revolutionary change. The latter situation prevailed in pre-1789 France and in tsarist Russia
prior to 1905. 'Hie mental and social preconditions for the emergence of a revolutionary intelligentsia
first emerged in France in the 176os and 17705 in literary associations and "patriotic" clubs. These clubs
had as their immediate purpose the forging of an ideological consensus in which ideas were judged by
their relationship not to living reality but to a priori theoretical principles defining rationality and virtue.
To members of such clubs, politics was not simply a matter of better or worse, to be tested by
experience, but of good or bad, to be decided on principle.

Book 2