ABSTRACT
The study of revolutionary thought and social movements provided a theoretical frame in which people socialised by their historical conditions could be understood to actively transform those conditions for future generations as part of a liberatory project. The ‘first generation’ of scholarship, spanning roughly 1900 to 1940, tended toward careful study of revolutionary events, without constructing a broader theoretical perspective. In essence, attending to the facts of the events themselves over the how and why. Within this category, Jack Goldstone notes the work of Gustave Le Bon, Charles Ellwood, Pitrim Sorokin, Lyford Edwards, and Crane Brinton. Analysing the development of key political concepts, Raymond Williams noted the social and political use of revolution to have had a strong initial association with the literal ‘revolution’ of physical bodies, particularly the celestial components of the solar system. Revolution thus served as a metaphor for the cyclical turn of history and the ‘restoration of lawful authority’.
