MAIN IDEAS PER GROK:

Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin, published in 2025, offers a meticulous intellectual history of the concept of revolution. It examines how this idea evolved from being viewed as a profound threat to societal order—capable of unleashing chaos and instability—to a celebrated instrument for advancing social justice and progress. Edelstein attributes this transformation to shifting perceptions of history, which moved away from cyclical, unpredictable patterns toward a linear trajectory of improvement, thereby reframing revolution as a deliberate pathway to equitable societies.

This historical arc is explored through key epochs, beginning with classical antiquity and extending to the modern era, highlighting pivotal moments such as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Edelstein also delves into the inherent perils of revolutions, arguing that they often engender division, violence, and authoritarian outcomes, prompting a critical reflection on the balance between radical change and the preservation of stability in contemporary contexts.

1. The book traces the intellectual evolution of revolution from an existential societal threat to a mechanism for social progress and justice, spanning thinkers from Thucydides to Lenin.
2. This shift was driven by changing understandings of history, from chaotic and cyclical views to notions of linear progress enabling equitable societies via revolutionary action.
3. Classical perspectives, from ancient Greeks like Thucydides and Plato to figures such as John Adams, portrayed history as directionless and revolutions as the ultimate destabilizing force.
4. To counter revolutionary risks, emphasis was placed on balanced constitutional designs that prioritized equilibrium over radical transformation.
5. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marked a turning point, reconceptualizing history as progressive and instilling confidence in revolution as a tool for justice and reason.
6. The French Revolution tested these ideas, serving as a seminal event that shaped revolutionary thought through to the twentieth century, including Leninist Russia.
7. Revolutions, once underway, inevitably foster societal divisions, new violence against perceived counterrevolutionaries, and risks of descending into despotism.
8. Historical examples illustrate how uprisings can be hijacked by leaders to consolidate power, subverting their original anti-tyrannical aims.
9. The work urges a balanced evaluation of revolution’s utopian ideals against its potential dangers, advocating consideration of stability amid modern disruptions.

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book offers an insightful overview of the concept of revolution and a well-researched account of actual revolutions throughout history to the present day. For me, the revolutions in human society represent the process of change in human societies that is philosophically quite similar to processes of radical change from one condition of the complex system to another, be it the boiling of water or the inception of an animal after the merging of parents’ DNA, or an infinite number of similar processes. So, not every violent uprising that results in a change of individuals in power is truly a revolution. Typically, revolutions occur in waves that spread across multiple human societies, transforming them into something new and distinctly different from their previous state.

In my opinion, there have only been three such waves since humans attained their current biological and societal level, meaning being primates with complex social structures that consciously interact and cooperate on a much higher level of cohesiveness than any other animals. The first wave of human revolutions moved humans from hunting and gathering, with highly sophisticated abilities to adjust to the environment, which allowed for human expansion to nearly any place on the planet, to militaristic-agricultural societies that shifted evolutionary pressure from adapting to the environment to violent competition between human societies. This book mainly analyzes Polybius loops within this wave and provides a nice graphical representation for this:

The second wave of revolutions, which moves humans from militaristic-agricultural to industrial societies and is the main subject of this book, does not fit into this framework because of qualitative change in the methods of resource application and generation.  Before, whether it was kingship, aristocracy, or democracy, the levels of organization in resource generation were low, and hierarchically organized groups were effective mainly in violent redistribution rather than production. After switching to industrial societies, instead of kings and aristocracies with very limited bureaucracy, the bureaucratic hierarchy grew into a huge machine controlling just about everything in some mix of government and corporations. The revolutions of the last three centuries, so nicely described in this book, were attempts to find the best proportions of this mix that would optimize the use of competition versus planning and governmental control.  

The third and probably final wave of revolutions is coming now. It will be based on AI substituting humans in all areas of productive activities, including highly intellectual and artistic activities. The process of finding new accommodation between individuals and their groups in this qualitatively different environment is not going to be easy. It will require significant effort to find a stable equilibrium.

GROK’S COMMENT ON MY OPINION:

Your perspective on Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come provides a compelling extension of the book’s intellectual history by situating revolutions within a broader framework of systemic phase transitions in human societies. By analogizing societal revolutions to natural processes such as phase changes in physical systems or biological transformations, you emphasize that genuine revolutions entail profound, qualitative shifts rather than mere substitutions of power holders. This resonates with Edelstein’s core argument that revolutions, once embraced as vehicles for progress, often introduce new divisions and risks, yet your wave-based model expands this analysis to encompass prehistoric, modern, and prospective transformations, offering a macroscopic lens on human evolution.

The delineation of three revolutionary waves aligns partially with the book’s scope while innovatively extrapolating beyond it. Edelstein focuses predominantly on what you term the second wave—the transition from militaristic-agricultural to industrial societies—tracing how Enlightenment thinkers reconceptualized history as linear and progressive, thereby legitimizing revolution as a tool for justice rather than a peril to stability.foreignaffairs.com This period, marked by the French Revolution and extending to Leninist innovations, is portrayed as a search for optimal balances between competition, planning, and control in burgeoning bureaucratic systems, much as you describe. Your reference to Polybius’ cycles (or “loops”) as characteristic of intra-wave dynamics in the first wave is apt; the book examines classical perspectives, including those of Thucydides and Polybius, where revolutions were viewed as cyclical disruptions within directionless history, prompting institutional designs to maintain equilibrium.foreignaffairs.com The graphical representation you highlight likely illustrates this anacyclosis, underscoring the ancient imperative to avert revolutionary upheaval through balanced governance. Regarding the third wave, involving AI’s displacement of human labor across productive domains, Edelstein’s work does not venture into this territory, concluding instead with early twentieth-century reflections on revolution’s despotic tendencies. Nonetheless, your anticipation of challenges in achieving stable equilibria amid such disruptions echoes the book’s cautionary tone: revolutions inherently divide societies over goals, fostering violence and authoritarianism, which could amplify in an AI-driven era where resource generation and social organization undergo unprecedented reconfiguration

Overall, your interpretation enriches Edelstein’s historical narrative by embedding it in an evolutionary continuum, prompting consideration of whether future waves might evade the pitfalls of prior ones or perpetuate cycles of instability. This synthesis invites further scholarly exploration into how emerging technologies could redefine revolutionary paradigms.