Aidan Beatty: “Social Revolutions Beyond the Volga: Egypt and Ireland”

‘Indeed, as Immanuel Wallerstein has noted, revolution is a term that connotes “sudden, dramatic, and extensive change.  It emphasizes discontinuity.”  Yet, when many scholars come to study “revolutions,” what they often end up studying are the much slower, long-term social changes, that feed into ostensibly sudden rupture with the past. This has led Wallerstein to query the analytic utility of such a slippery and contradictory term.[9]  At the very least, the study of a revolution should not be divorced from the formative events of preceding decades.‘