Reactions To Revolutions

Explains how bold efforts at profound progressive change provoked a powerful reactionary backlash that led to the imposition of brutal, regressive dictatorships.

Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism is a study of American politics, culture, and foreign relations in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminated through the reactions of Americans to the European revolutions of 1848. Flush from the recent American military victory over Mexico, many Americans celebrated news of democratic revolutions breaking out across Europe as a further sign of divine providence. Others thought that the 1848 revolutions served only to highlight how America’s own revolution had not done enough in the way of reform. Still other Americans renounced the 1848 revolutions and the thought of trans-atlantic unity because they interpreted European revolutionary radicalism and its portents of violence, socialism, and atheism as dangerous to the unique virtues of the United States. When the 1848 revolutions failed to create stable democratic governments in Europe, many Americans declared that their own revolutionary tradition was superior; American reform would be gradual and peaceful. Thus, when violence erupted over the question of territorial slavery in the 1850s, the effect was magnified among antislavery Americans, who reinterpreted the menace of slavery in light of the revolutions and counter-revolutions of Europe. For them a new revolution in America could indeed be necessary, to stop the onset of authoritarian conditions and to cure American exemplarism. The Civil War, then, when it came, was America’s answer to the 1848 revolutions, a testimony to America’s democratic shortcomings, and an American version of a violent, nation-building revolution.

The French Revolution of 1789 is a watershed in European history; no country escaped its impact, which shattered long-standing traditions and set forth new ideals that powerfully affected succeeding generations. In this edition, Charles Breunig incorporates the most recent scholarship in his account of the Revolution and the events it unleashed: the near-conquest of Europe by Napoleon, the "Concert of Europe" established at the Congress of Vienna, the era of Restoration during which efforts were made to preserve the status quo against sporadic outbursts that culminated in the revolutions of 1848. He expands significantly his treatment of the emergence of new classes and the profound economic and cultural changes that were set in motion by the Industrial Revolution.

The outbreak of revolution in Paris in 1789 forced Britain into a political and military conflict that had a profound impact on politics, economy, public discourse and cultural life well into the 19th century. The essays collected here examine the various responses to the revolution and the significant changes wrought within Britain by the events. Some essays discuss the ideological divisions within Britain and Ireland. Others take a closer look at the media and the debate on the press, and reinvestigate responses to the revolution by prominent contemporaries such as William Godwin, Dugald Stewart, and William Wordsworth.

This book provides an analysis of the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions as they exhibit universally applicable patterns of revolutionary thought and action.

Between 2000 and 2005, colour revolutions swept away authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Serbia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Yet, after these initial successes, attempts to replicate the strategies failed to produce regime change elsewhere in the region. The book argues that students of democratization and democracy promotion should study not only the successful colour revolutions, but also the colour revolution prevention strategies adopted by authoritarian elites. Based on a series of qualitative, country-focused studies the book explores the whole spectrum of anti-democratization policies, adopted by autocratic rulers and demonstrates that authoritarian regimes studied democracy promotion techniques, used in various colour revolutions, and focused their prevention strategies on combatting these techniques. The book proposes a new typology of authoritarian reactions to the challenge of democratization and argues that the specific mix of policies and rhetoric, adopted by each authoritarian regime, depended on the perceived intensity of threat to regime survival and the regime’s perceived strength vis-à-vis the democratic opposition. This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.