To what extent does revolution replace the existing order of society? Discuss. (2016)
A revolution promises total replacement: Karl Marx called revolutions the locomotives of history, the moment when developing forces of production burst the existing relations of production. Theda Skocpol defines a social revolution as a rapid, basic transformation of a society’s state and class structures, accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below (States and Social Revolutions, 1979). How far the promise is kept depends on which layer of the social order is examined: revolution replaces the political order swiftly, the economic order partially, and the cultural order least of all.
Where replacement is real
- The state. France 1789 abolished feudal privileges, seigneurial dues and the estates, and replaced them with civil equality and the Napoleonic Code. Russia 1917 and China 1949 destroyed the old regimes outright.
- The class structure. Skocpol’s criterion is met where landlord classes are dismantled: Soviet collectivisation and Chinese land reform ended landlordism as a class.
- Ideology and legitimacy. Chalmers Johnson describes power deflation — as legitimacy drains, the regime substitutes force for belief. Revolution installs a new political formula: socialism, republicanism, Islamic government.
Where the old order survives
- Elites are replaced, not abolished. Vilfredo Pareto‘s circulation of elites holds that revolutions exchange one governing minority for another; Robert Michels‘s iron law of oligarchy predicts that the revolutionary party itself becomes oligarchic. Milovan Djilas (The New Class, 1957) found exactly this in communist states.
- The state’s machinery persists and grows. Alexis de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856) showed the Revolution completing the centralisation the monarchy had begun. Max Weber adds that charisma routinises into bureaucracy — the revolutionary order ends as an administrative one.
- Reaction follows. Crane Brinton‘s comparative sequence — defection of the intellectuals, financial breakdown, rule of the moderates, accession of the extremists, terror, and Thermidor — makes restoration part of the pattern.
- Culture, kinship and religion outlive regimes. Soviet attempts to dissolve the family failed, and religion revived across Eastern Europe after 1991.
Degrees of replacement
Skocpol’s own distinctions answer the “extent”:
| Type | What is replaced |
|---|---|
| Rebellion | Nothing structural; revolt without transformation |
| Political revolution | State structures only; class structures survive |
| Social revolution | Both state and class structures |
Recent South Asian cases are political revolutions. Bangladesh’s July Uprising (2024) ended a fifteen-year government and produced a constitutional referendum on the July Charter alongside the February 2026 election; Nepal’s September 2025 uprising forced K. P. Oli out and brought an anti-establishment party to power in March 2026. Neither touched land ownership or class relations.
The Indian case
A. R. Desai read 1947 as a bourgeois-led transfer of power that left the class structure largely intact. B. R. Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly (25 November 1949) that India was entering a life of contradiction — political equality alongside social and economic inequality. That caste remains a live structure is shown by the decision to enumerate caste in Census 2027, the first such count since 1931.
Conclusion
Revolution replaces the order of rule almost completely and the order of society only in part. As Skocpol insists, revolutions are made possible by state breakdown, not by will — and what survives the breakdown is usually more than what perishes.