ABSTRACT
Revolutions involve the seizure and retention of power. The ideological enthusiasm for revolution today derives from what revolutions have come to mean in the twentieth century, which is something very different from what they meant in the nineteenth. Eduard Bernstein, pointed out that the Marxist scenario was not being enacted, before the twentieth century even began, the revolutionary dream has been peripheral to the development of western society. The twentieth-century experience of revolution serves as a powerful image of the openness of history, of the ways in which men can take charge of their social fate. The Negro revolution and the student revolution seldom leave the front pages of the newspapers and the agony of Vietnam is claimed optimistically by the students and the black militants for their own. The Russian revolution was the last revolution to be made substantially within the framework of the older conception.
