You can deny that "revolution" means what Chazza and I think it means
Er, Charlie agrees with me (because I'm right).
Chazza wrote:Molotov wrote:As far as the study of politics (or its field, whatever) is concerned, Aethers, the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution weren't revolutions.
I agree with you here... it had to happen once in a while
I wasn't even aware this was a matter for debate. They must teach things differently in politics departments in America. As far as I am concerned Aethers and Mr.Yankees, the American Revolution was no such thing, it was the American War of Independence, not a revolution by the modern understanding nor a revolution at the time.
Well, you've already excluded a few good exceptions by artificially narrowing your definition, but what about the Italian unification? Yes, it wasn't a pure revolution since Garibaldi's uprisings coincided with Piedmont's military campaign to unite the peninsula, but it fits most of your criteria. Due to civil unrest and partisan military struggle, an old order (feudalism) is replaced by a new one (constitutional monarchy.) Are you going to make the claim that, once the dust had settled, Italians had been better off as subjects of their peninsula's several feudal fiefs?
Ho, I could write a dissertation on this.
I won't bother. The Risorgimento wasn't a revolution, in many ways it was very damaging, and depending on what you mean by 'better off' then yes, that could very well have been possible.
Look, I'll concede that he's narrowing the definition to make it suit his purposes, but neither of your artificially narrow definitions can hold the weight you each try to give it, that a violent reconstitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran would or would not be a good thing.
I wish you'd stop going on about 'narrowing definitions'. There must be some kind of language barrier, I am using the generally accepted definitions as I have known them. I also find it is much more useful in any discussion to be specific and clear in the terms one uses. Just because, for example, 'reintegration' might mean a number of things in a context of a number of discussions does not mean one need account for them all, one need only say, "reintegration in this instance refers to the repatriation, forcible or otherwise, of former Soviet prisoners of war blah blah..."
I think that most modern French have benefited from the fact that there is a French Republic, and would be worse off if there had never been a French Republic. So you may define a revolution in such a way that it invariably has bad effects, but unless you can argue that they cannot help but have more negative consequences than positive, I see no reason to assume that a new Iranian revolution would have to of necessity be a bad thing.
Roundabout logic of yours, 'it might be good, so it is of necessity not bad'.
Demonstrate to me that the French Revolution has directly benefited the people of France today, and I will concede to you that revolutions are not invariably bad for all time to come. It is enough for me that they are bad at the time of their occurrence, and usually for a long time afterwards.
I can't be bothered to go into it now. I suggest you read something of Michael Oakeshott to get an idea of the philosophical justifications for my position. Obviously Oakeshott on politics.
Fact is, there are maybe only a handful of nations where the essential rubric of government was put in place by electoral democracy. Are you going to say that none of these nations' people are sovereign, because their constitutions weren't debated by a legislature? As for the right of popular consent, the sovereignty of the people is the first principle of democratic theory and if you've studied political science as well as you claim, you're already aware of this.
For the record, I don't really have a position on this, I was merely responding to Chazza's rhetoric, as one should never let blatant statements like that pass. I don't particularly care for the 'sovereignty of peoples' thesis, though, no. As for the 'right of popular consent', this might well be a 'first principle', but one of the very first things I learned is that it is almost impossible to establish or measure consent, implicit or explicit, and claims to consent should never be looked on as infallible. Mostly, they are applied in retrospect, by the current regime. One of the only decent ways we have of measuring consent is through elections, referenda, the democratic process.
I have never studied 'political science'. Personally, I do not believe that politics can ever, or should ever, be studied as a 'science', and neither did my institution.
edit: Sorry, by the way, if I appear to display 'anti-American sentiment'. There are lots of things about America that I don't like, but I don't mean to be anti-American in this thread. Perhaps it's just a reaction to the way Aethers presumes America's political system and democracy are somehow the best, and that this is a fact and in many ways self-evident. I may just be reacting like George when he thought I was boasting about the achievements of Britain.
'Quantitative change in the organisational principles of society'? So is, presumably, an election or a restructuring of civil service departments. To suggest that each revolution is different and, as such, no prediction or valid analysis can be made of revolutions in general, Charlie, is to suggest that the entire study of politics is invalid. Each human interaction, each power-relation, each group formation, is in its specifics different, none have universal (though certainly definable) end goals, must we abandon all attempt at classification, prediction, or understanding? 
