Abstract

This article disputes the possibility and reason for any general theory of revolution that claims to reveal the “essence” of this phenomenon without regard for the context in which any particular revolution occurs. The article describes revolutions as contingent and self-constituting events. Their triggers, but not their causes, are the dysfunctions of existing orders. Such events are a special kind of historical and political practice and are characterized primarily as the initiation of a mechanism that Kant called causation through freedom, and the emergence of collective actors possessing the properties of a political subject. Such events are possible only in the context of Modernity, just as Modernity itself persists until and to the extent that it bears the imprint of these events, both in its institutional organization and in its historical memory.