Revolution

In plain terms

A coup replaces who is in charge. A revolution replaces the arrangement that determines who can be in charge.

That is a much larger claim than it sounds, and it is why revolutions are so hard to date. The moment of collapse is usually visible; the change in the order is not, and can turn out later not to have happened.

The standing puzzle is legitimacy. A revolution is by definition unlawful under the order it replaces, so it cannot be justified by that order's rules - and it cannot appeal to the rules of the order it creates, because those do not exist yet. Whatever justifies it has to come from outside both, which is why every revolutionary tradition has needed a doctrine of natural rights, historical necessity, or the will of a people that was not consulted.

As a philosopher would put it

Locke supplies the classical justification: government is a trust, and a sustained pattern of abuse dissolves it, returning authority to the people. Hobbes denies this outright, since a right of resistance defeats the purpose of instituting a sovereign.

Marx's account is structural rather than justificatory. Revolution occurs when the forces of production come into conflict with the relations of production, and the political rupture registers a change already underway. That makes revolution a matter of conditions rather than of decisions, and it produced a century of argument about whether it can be brought about deliberately.

Arendt distinguishes liberation from freedom: expelling a ruler is not the same as founding an order in which people can act politically, and her contrast between the American and French cases turns on whether the social question - poverty - overwhelmed the political one. Skocpol's structural sociology adds that successful social revolutions have generally followed state breakdown under external pressure rather than mass ideological conversion.

What is actually disputed

Whether revolution can be justified.

The conservative argument, made most forcefully by Burke, is that political order is an accumulated inheritance that nobody fully understands, and that dismantling it risks losing what nobody knew was load-bearing - with the Terror as the standing evidence.

The counter-argument is that this makes any existing arrangement self-justifying, however unjust, and that Burke's own defence of the American case shows he did not hold it consistently.

A separate problem is the record. Revolutions have repeatedly produced concentrated power rather than dispersed it, and Arendt's diagnosis - that the attempt to solve the social question by political means destroys the political - is one explanation among several. Whether the pattern is intrinsic to revolution or contingent on circumstances is not settled, and 1989 is the case both sides cite.