ABSTRACT
The modern conception of revolution was formed two centuries ago in France, and the political relationship between rulers and ruled has never been the same since. The compelling example established by the French Revolution of 1789 was that a nations people, by concerted political struggle, could fundamentally transform the political order that governed their lives and, with it, the social and economic structure of society. The revolutionary impulse has far more often been suppressed or diverted into reform than it has succeeded. Of the forty-eight civil and revolutionary wars fought between 1961 and 1965, only nine ended with victory or major concessions for the rebels, compared with thirty-five military defeats and a few protracted struggles that were still going on in 1991, for example, in Eritrea and northern Burma. In 1989, the success of popular revolutionary movements in central Europe was counterbalanced by the brutal suppression of democracy movements in Burma and China. Revolutionary seizures of power often accomplish only limited, sometimes temporary reforms, as happened in Bolivia and Egypt after their 1952 revolutions, in Iraq after the Ba'thist revolution of 1958, and in South Korea after the student-led revolution of 1960. The Philippine revolution of 1986 is going the same way. Nonetheless, the essential idea that rulers are ultimately accountable to their people has persisted and, in uncommon circumstances, has led to political upheavals that profoundly changed for all time the character of the societies in which they occurred.
