/lit/ - Literature

>>18333243
>a fairly brief manifesto concerning the concept of revolution:
The term “revolution” has been so relentlessly cheapened in common usage that it can mean almost anything. We have revolutions every week now: banking revolutions, cybernetic revolutions, medical revolutions, an internet revolution every time someone invents some clever new piece of software.
This kind of rhetoric is only possible because the commonplace definition of revolution has always implied something in the nature of a para-digm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply. It is this which makes it possible to, say, claim that the modern world is derived from two “revolutions”: the French revolution and the Industrial revolution, despite the fact that the two had almost nothing else in common other than seeming to mark a break with all that came before.
One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood has noted, we are in the habit of discussing what we call “modernity” as if it involved a combination of English laissez faire economics, and French Republican government, despite the fact that the two never really occurred together: the industrial revolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated, still largely medieval English constitution, and nineteenth-century France was anything but laissez faire.