So what is a revolution? This term gets thrown around all the time especially in modern advertising where you can find anything from revolutionary slippers to these revolution apartments in North Carolina where you can live revolution. Now of course this is all completely nonsense and just so we're all clear no one should want to live revolution. People lose their lives, they're incredibly violent and bloody, no one should want to live through that. People only reluctantly go through a revolution.
So what is a revolution? Academically, dozens and dozens and dozens of political scientists and sociologists and economists and historians, etc., have provided a definition of what it is to be a revolution, what qualifies as a revolution. So if we take all of those, we can come up with a pretty concise and well-thought-out definition of revolution.
So here's one. A revolution is a rapid, successful, and significant transformation of at least one institutional structure of a society, and an exchange of fundamental beliefs or values of a society as a result of a popular uprising utilizing non-institutional means. So that's a lengthy little definition, but there are very important parts in there. So let's pick some of them out and go a little more specific. So first off, it has to be rapid.
Now that's a little bit subjective. It's rapid in the course of a day or six months or a century, but at the very least it can't take place over thousands and thousands of years. So that doesn't qualify as a revolution. It must be somewhat quick.
It also has to be successful. So the term a failed revolution, in academics at least, isn't a thing. Something doesn't qualify as a revolution unless it successfully results in change.
It must be a significant transformation. So minor changes in a society are usually reformative, not transformative. They're not changing a society overall, they're just changing small parts of a society. There must be an exchange of beliefs or values or both in a society.
So usually accompanying that large institutional change, the significant change in a social structure, usually that's alongside that is a change in beliefs and values, something new. is important in that society. The way they think, the way they behave, the way they believe, and so on.
Also, it must be a popular uprising, so it must come from the people. Now, this is a debate within academia. Many people talk about top-down revolutions, where the elite in a society are responsible for changing significantly the structure of society. So, just know that that's a debate that is out there, but for our definition, we're going to say it has to be a popular uprising. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it has to use non-institutionalized means, or illegitimate means.
So it has to use some means that aren't widely accepted by the people in society, that don't go along with the norms of society. So as an example, a significant change that would be brought out by democratic means in American society, through the electoral process, voting, etc., that could never be classified as a revolution, because it's using institutionalized, legitimized means. So it must take place using means that go against the norms of the society in which it is taking place.
So that's our definition of revolution.