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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix One: Coming Full Circle

Nine years ago, I set out to write a series exploring great revolutions in history. My goal was to synthesize as much information as I could about these revolutions and then craft narratives that laid them out from beginning to middle to end. But here at the end of the end of the series, I want to take a look back and survey all of these narratives and see if we can’t draw some conclusions about the nature, form, and progress of revolutions.

Each revolution was unique unto itself, but many of them seem to have similar characteristics. I think we’ve all noticed little patterns and recurrences that are nested inside of the contingent distinctiveness of each series. Stock characters and groups seem to show up over and over again, and events of striking similarity just keep happening. I mean, how many times did I say “a large crowd gathered in a confined space and someone fired a shot, but we’ll never know who and we’ll never know why.” Now this absolutely is not about drawing out fundamental laws of history — because those don’t exist — but we can recognize that in all the events we’ve talked about on the show, they fall under the category of revolution because they have certain common characteristics. So I wanna spend some time together figuring out what those common characteristics are.

I’d like to start these concluding episodes by returning to the very beginning. When I launched the show, I wrote an introduction, an episode zero to introduce the series. And since I published that introduction way back in September 2013, hand to god, I haven’t listened to it since. I always needed to focus on whatever the topic of the week was, and I knew basically what I had said in the introduction, so there was never any need to go back and listen to it again. And so for the first time, in nine years, I sat down and listened to it again, because I thought that to end the show, it would be worthwhile to return to the beginning. Did I actually do what I set out to do? What can I say now that I couldn’t say then? What did I get right, what did I get wrong? What was I vague and cagey about that I can now, after all these years, state more directly and confidently?

So, what we’re gonna do here in Appendix One is take an annotated look back at the introduction, kind of a director’s commentary track on the things that I said oh so many moons ago. So I started the introduction by saying:

The word revolution is one of those words that you think you know the definition of, until you actually start trying to define it. Then it turns out to be a slippery fish. Because first of all, the word revolution coined by Copernicus in 1543, is supposed to mean completing an orbit, coming full circle.

Okay. So right off the bat, I would rewrite this opening to say something like popularized by Copernicus, not coined by Copernicus. I’m looking at the Oxford English Dictionary right now, and they’ve got the first references to revolution coming out of Latin and old French as early as 1390, with smatterings of additional references in the 1400s and early 1500s, all predating Copernicus.

But then I go on to say:

But the kind of revolution we’re talking about is the opposite of that. It’s a sudden radical change, overthrowing the old regime and replacing it with a new one. It’s not about coming full circle. It’s about boldly setting out on a new path.”

So right away, the word doesn’t even mean what it’s supposed to mean, and it only gets muddier from there.

Now, if we continue to scan down in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find the word revolution as “alteration, change, or mutation” popping up as early as the 1600s, whereupon it would become very specifically linked with the events of Stuart Era Britain. It’s still not clear to me why a word that literally means return to the old came to mean change into something new, but then again, the word literally now has an accepted secondary informal definition of figuratively, so languages gonna language.

So I went on to say:

Because even overlooking the utter absurdity of using the word revolution to describe a fundamental change in political organization, we still have a hard time expressing precisely what we mean by revolution. We know it involves overthrowing the existing regime, but we also know it’s more than a mere coup. We know it involves a conflict between two competing forces within a country, but we also know it’s more than a mere civil war. We know it involves mass mobilization, but we also know it’s more than some half baked peasant revolt. It’s more organized, more directed, more thoughtful. Isn’t it? Well, sometimes yes and sometimes, really, no. As it turns out, distinguishing coups from civil wars, from revolts from revolutions, is a very sticky proposition.

Okay. So now here, I’ll just make a comment on the writing because I’ve gone from this being a slippery fish to a sticky proposition, and if I had to do this all over again, I would’ve picked a lane, I would’ve talked about how it was very slippery or how it was very sticky, not both of them at the same time, but you know, maybe the slippery fish got left out too long, and now it’s a sticky… proposition, which, ew…

So, let’s move on.

I go on to say, ” Indeed, for each of the revolutions we are gonna cover in this series, there is a contingent of revisionist historians or sociologists ready to argue that no revolution in fact took place, that it was just a rebellion masquerading as a revolution, because, look the revolutionary effects were neither as wide or deep as one supposed, or only a narrow band of socioeconomic elites actually participated, or no one at the time actually thought they were engaged in revolution. But the problem is that when we add up all those particular reinterpretations, we’re left with the unsatisfying notion that in all of human history no revolution has in fact ever taken place. And that just seems not right.”

You know, when I wrote that I was deep in the weeds of the English Revolution and looking immediately ahead to the American Revolution, both of which come with very heavy, “it wasn’t actually a revolution” factions within their respective historiographic traditions. But having moved on down the line, I have found that this has broadly held true. In every revolution I’ve covered, with the possible exception of Haiti. I have found people arguing against interpreting this particular historical event as a revolution, often deploying the argument that the end result was so similar to the original conditions that we might have witnessed a civil war or a coup d’état or a chaotic breakdown of the legal order, but if the word revolution applies, it’s only in its original sense: coming full circle, that nothing really changed.

Now, I don’t personally buy most of those arguments, and I think the great invisible pillar of the case is a pedantic special pleading, which is why I’m happy to continue to endorse what I say next, which is, “With that in mind, this series is based on a broad definition of what counts as a revolution.”

So the Revolutions Podcast was always based on that principle, erring on the side of an inclusive definition of revolution rather than a restrictive one. But even still, I then offered some guidelines for how other people have tried to define the definition of revolution. I said, “The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions, dealing with this same problem, casts a wide net by including events that share two characteristics. First, irregular procedures aimed at forcing political change within a society and second, lasting effects on the political system of the society in which they occurred.”

So let’s unpack this a bit more than I did at the time. Any given society, no matter its form, has rules, laws, traditions, governing who holds power, why they hold power, and who power will be transferred to next. This could be tribal heritage, oligarchic consensus, constitutional law, genetic inheritance, or random lottery. It doesn’t matter what the system is. It just matters that the system is. It serves as the regular procedure of allocating power. A revolution necessarily manifests from outside regular procedures and instead deploys irregular procedures to allocate power in a novel and heretofore illegitimate way.

Now this could, of course, also apply to a mere coup d’état, which is why the Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions requires that second condition: lasting effects on the political system of the society in which they occurred. Which is to say, it can’t just be about swapping out political personnel, changing only the answer to the question who holds power. A revolution also changes the system itself. It changes the why and the how of power allocation, as well as the who. A revolution uses irregular procedures to overthrow the old regular procedures and then impose new regular procedures in their place. The tribal heritage, oligarchic consensus, constitutional law, genetic inheritance, random lottery that existed before, must be swept aside and replaced.

So then I go on to say, “But I’d like to get a touch more specific than that. Because it’s not enough to have a cabal of elites force their way into power — that’s a coup — and it’s not enough to have an amorphous blob of angry peasants marching around with clubs and axes — that’s a revolt. Or maybe an insurrection. Sociologist Charles Tilley narrows the definition a little bit further to, ‘A forcible transfer of power over a state, in the course of which at least two distinct blocks of contenders make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population subject to the state’s jurisdiction acquiesces in the claims of each block.’ Which is jumbled well, because he’s a sociologist, but basically, we need some cross-class alliance of dissidents to overthrow an existing regime by extra-legal means and then alter the political system in some fundamental way.”

Now, before I move on, I will say that I don’t actually think that what I said there about, we need some cross-class alliance of dissidents is actually a necessary part of Tilly’s definition, I think that was just me projecting my own beliefs about the mechanics of a successful revolution. I think a revolution needs a cross-class alliance, but that’s not something that logically follows from what Tilly was trying to say about two distinct blocks of contenders.

Anyway, I go on to say, “Where it starts to get messy is when further wrinkles are added. Theda Skocpol, for example, creates a super-class called social revolutions that requires change to the political structure be accompanied and reinforced by deep changes in the social structure. And this is perfectly reasonable, but leaves us grappling with difficult and ultimately subjective questions, like how much change? For how many people? For how long? And how do we even measure it? These are the kinds of questions that academics will be arguing about forever as new evidence is uncovered and old evidence is reexamined, and which I plan to neatly sidestep. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll get into it, but I have no intention of adhering to some strict analytic criteria and then casually tossing away events like the Mexican Revolution because not enough hectares of land were ultimately redistributed to make it a really real revolution. If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution.”

Now, this is the part of the introduction that I personally remember most — well, this and one other part — that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution. I absolutely did not want to get bogged down in semantics. And I still don’t, by the way. I often find the pedantic urge to create perfect definitions to be incredibly tedious. But after nine years and ten seasons, I think maybe I should take a stab at trying to define what a revolution means.

So for me, the first thing we must do is delineate between a political revolution and a social revolution. And okay, here we go.

A political revolution is when the existing structure of political power — that is to say how power is exercised justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure and replaces it with something different.

Okay, we got that?

Meanwhile, a social revolution is when the economic relations and/or cultural hierarchies of a society — their personnel, rationalizations, habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — are rapidly transformed, such that the society is reorganized in a fundamentally different manner.

Now when those two are combined, we get what I can loosely dub a great revolution. A great revolution is the combination of a political revolution and a social revolution. When the revolutionary transformation of the political structure of society unfolds alongside a fundamental reorganization of the society’s economic modes of production and cultural hierarchies.

Now the first thing to say about my stab at creating a definition here is, that, like all definitions, mine are entirely inadequate to the task, and are open to obvious critique and objection. Even as I try to be as precise as possible, all I can come up with is something like “society is organized in a fundamentally different manner.” I mean, what does that even mean? Who gets to define what is the same and what is different? I’ve frankly moved no further than Skocpol. How many hectares of land need to be transferred before you can say that it’s a new mode of production, or that society is now organized in a fundamentally different manner? How many new individuals need to enter the ruling class for it to be counted as a new type of ruling class? I don’t think there’s any combination of words that will so thoroughly and completely define what a revolution is to be beyond objection and beyond subjective interpretation. The reason it’s hard to come up with a definition of revolution is because it’s hard to come up with a definition of revolution.

I do think that it’s important to understand the difference between political revolutions and social revolutions though, that they are talking about different things, and it’s vital to distinguish them. Of the revolutions that we’ve talked about on the podcast, the American Revolution is the easiest one to point to and say, well, was that really a revolution? But clearly distinguishing political and social revolutions makes the answer pretty clear: the social and economic structure of American society largely carried over intact between the Colonial era and the early Republican era, so it’s not a social revolution. But did the Americans use force originating outside the existing political structure to displace that structure and replace it with something different? Yeah, that quite obviously happened. The American Revolution was a political revolution.

And just as a political revolution can occur without a social revolution, a social revolution can also occur without a political revolution. We never talked about these things because the existence of a political revolution was kind of a prerequisite for being included in the podcast, but things like the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution, can and do rapidly transform the economic relations and cultural hierarchies of society without necessarily requiring a political revolution to also occur. The arrival of computers in the internet at the end of the 21st century has pretty massively impacted our social organizations, and also pretty much unfolded without the displacement and replacement of existing political structures.

At least not yet.

The special category of great revolutions comes into play when social and political revolutions are combined, when forces outside the existing political structure overthrow that structure and replace it with something new, and it happens alongside a general reorganization of economic and social relations inside the society resulting in a permanent change to that society.

So, what did we talk about on the show? Did we talk about political revolutions, social revolutions, great revolutions? Well, to apply these definitions, I wanna first turn to what I said next specifically about the English Revolution.

I said:

If there was ever a historical period that highlights this problem of what do we call it, it’s the period we’re going to begin the series with: Britain in the 1640s and 1650s. Something happened. Everyone agrees on that, but was it a revolution? And if it was, was it a religiously driven Puritan revolution or an economically driven bourgeois revolution? Or was it neither, and instead just a civil war that has been anachronistically labeled at revolution? the men and women who lived through the period often referred to it as simply ‘the late troubles,’ and left it at that. So what was it? A revolution, a rebellion, a civil war? In truth, it was all of these things. It started as a conflict over whether the political system should be reformed, descended into civil war, sparking a totally unexpected revolutionary period in the late 1640s and early 1650s that saw the king executed, monarchy abolished, and a written constitution introduced for the first time.

But then the storm passed, and by 1660 the monarchy was restored, and most of the recent innovations swept away. So what do we call it? Every possible label — the Great Rebellion, the English Revolution, the English Civil Wars, the Wars in the Three Kingdoms — fails to capture some essential element of the story. Since I am primarily interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period, I am going to use English Revolution as shorthand. I know that this is problematic, not the least of which, because y’know, Scotland and Ireland, and if you want to yell at me about calling at the English revolution, please email me at revolution podcast@gmail.com.

Uh, side note, you can actually stop emailing me about that.

But just so you, I’m not a Marxist or some unreconstructed Wig, I’m just a guy interested in the revolutionary aspects of the period, who is going to be talking a lot about the English revolutionary aspects of that period.

So this part of the introduction gets at the trouble of naming things, and the inadequacy of naming things, and how hard it is to define things. But given that we’ve now worked up a couple of definitions of our own, let’s see if we can’t apply them to what we’ve talked about in the show.

So, series one about the Late Troubles in Britain in the 1640s and 1650s was very clearly a political revolution. The revisionist take that it was merely a civil war cannot account for the displacement and replacement to the political system that went on. They chopped off the king’s head and they promulgated a new republican constitution. And even though the monarchy came back in the end, that monarchy was fundamentally different as a result of the revolutionary upheavals. The political arrangements of Britain after the Late Troubles was completely different. It was a political revolution.

But that said, even though there were socially revolutionary aspects in the form of the Levelers and the Diggers, these pockets were ultimately pretty limited in scope, duration, and reach. Yes, those people called on property relations and cultural hierarchies to be overthrown, but those relations and hierarchies were not ever actually overthrown.

So, Britain 1640s and 1650s, a political revolution, but not a social revolution.

Now moving on to the American Revolution, we just kind of talked about that, so I think we can move on: it was a political revolution without a social revolution.

Now, the French Revolution on the other hand absolutely entailed a social revolution running alongside its political revolution and so it’s the first of our great revolutions. That said though, the quality and quantity of the social revolutionary aspects can be debated. What really happened to land ownership and commercial relations and social privileges and cultural interactions and linguistic transformations? I mean the French Revolution ultimately destabilized not just the existing absolutist monarchy, but also the social and economic systems that it rested on. But how much, and how far and to what degree these things changed is a matter of ongoing debate. We must also always keep in mind de Tocqueville’s argument that there was at least as much continuity as change between the Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France, but when you look at the leadership of the first French Republic, what they were up to and why, it’s very clear that they believed it was their job to change everything, up to and including the nature of time itself. And from having also studied the Restoration Bourbon period, in some detail, I can also say with confidence that the Restoration Period was not simply a reversion back to pre-revolutionary norms.

Now, many of the revolution’s most ambitious dreams did disappear, but French culture, economics, language, and politics, they were all changed forever. The revolution came, and it touched everything and it left a permanent impression on everything. It was a great revolution.

Then moving on, there’s not really much to say here about the Haitian Revolution. There’s no real confusion or debate. It was probably the single most revolutionary event we talked about on the show, and about which there can be the least argument. The Haitian Revolution was a great revolution, maybe the greatest revolution.

So the series on Spanish American independence then obviously covers many different regions and countries each with their own unique dynamics but in the main, we’re talking here about an anti-colonial revolution that displaced and replaced the systems of political power, so it’s definitely a political revolution. There’s also more social revolutionary rhetoric baked into Spanish America than we saw up in Anglo America. Dismantling the racial Casta system and Bolivar’s turn to abolitionism are the most obvious examples. But we also know that the practical outcomes of the revolutions fell well short of these professed ideals, and the revolutionary mythology in Spanish America — that independence produced racially egalitarian societies — is not actually as true as the myths would have us believe.

So, Spanish American independence is a political revolution for sure. And it was much more of a social revolution than we saw in the American Revolution. But you can only really give that social revolution partial credit, because it unfolded far more in the telling than in the doing.

The French Revolution of 1830, meanwhile, was a pretty straightforward political revolution. And even though critics will say it merely replaced one Bourbon with another, the existing structure of political power was displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of the existing political structure and replaced it with something different. That happened.

And though the July Monarchy is referred to as the bourgeois monarchy, because as Jacques Laffitte said, “Now, the bankers will rule,” the actual impact on social hierarchies and economic relations is pretty muted, and to the extent that things changed in France, it was just part of an ongoing transformation of European society as it moved from the early to the mid 19th century. That transformation unfolded pretty independently of the abrupt political revolution of 1830. There was not a commensurate abrupt social revolution in 1830. So we call the French Revolution of 1830 a political revolution. The same can be said of the Revolutions of 1848, especially given the fact that 1848 was our first failed revolution. Like in 1830, the Revolutionary wave that swept Europe was mostly a political revolution; it was about overthrowing old political regimes and replacing them with more constitutional and democratic governments. And as we saw, the rocks upon which the revolutions of 1848 were dashed was the question of whether the political revolution would advance to a social revolution. This was the rupture between the liberals and the socialists. The liberals wanted to keep it a political revolution, the socialists wanted to advance it to a social revolution, and that rupture is what allowed the conservatives to survive and reassert themselves. The rupture played out most famously in the contrast between February and June 1848 in Paris, but the same kind of thing played out all over Germany and in the Hapsburg realms. The distinction between political revolution and social revolution was never so obvious and clear cut.

Although, that said, the Paris also makes this pretty obvious and clearcut. The events of 1870 and 1871 in France also saw a stark contrast between the successful political revolution that overthrew the autocratic Second Empire and founded a liberal constitutional Third Republic, and the bloody repression of the social revolution that broke out in Paris, which was explicitly aiming to turn the world upside down and completely reorganize the social order. Now, had the Paris Commune succeeded, and spread its model to other cities and departments in France, I mean, yeah, obviously we’re talking about a great revolution. But Adolphe Thiers spent one bloody week making sure that didn’t happen.

Now, the Mexican Revolution is actually a super interesting case, and there’s always gonna be people making the argument that the Mexican Revolution was actually just a bunch of war lords, waging a multi-polar civil war against each other that started with a repressively autocratic presidential republic and ended with a repressively autocratic presidential republic, so this doesn’t even count as a political revolution. And, look, on the one hand, I think it’s kind of true that after the winds that swept Mexico stopped blowing, that the political structure of PRI Mexico was awfully similar to the Porfiriato.

But when you look at the goals and the legacy of the Zapatistas, the goals in the legacies of Villa’s Army of the North, the widely remarked upon changes and the mentality, attitude, and lifestyle of the peasantry between 1910 and 1920, the Mexican Revolution was far more than a clash of war lords. And then, if you push it all the way through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, the nationalization of land and resources? I mean, there were major transformations in the political order and the economic structures of Mexico. I’m hard pressed to not call it a full blown great revolution. A revolutionary transformation of the political structure of society unfolded alongside a fundamental reorganization of the society’s economic modes of production and cultural hierarchies. That’s what happened in Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century, so I’m here to call it a great revolution.

And then finally, we ended with the Russian Revolution, which is at first blush, quite obviously a great revolution. The old structures of political power were displaced and replaced, and nearly every facet of cultural and economic life was altered forever. But people will always say, Hey, look at that, a highly bureaucratized authoritarian police state was replaced by… a highly bureaucratized authoritarian police state. And even if we recognize major continuity between the Witte System of the 1890s and the state industrialization projects of the five year plan, the scale and scope and impact of Soviet industrialization was well beyond revolutionary. And that is to say nothing of collectivization, which was brutal, imposed by raw force and traumatized tens of millions of people, but it’s hard to say the economic relations and cultural hierarchies of Russian society — their personnel, rationalizations habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — weren’t rapidly transformed such that society was organized in a fundamentally different manner.

So attempts to reduce the Russian experience to a mere civil war or coup d’état or to blow it all off and say, ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same, all of that strikes me as too clever by half. The Russian Revolution was a great revolution.

Okay, so we wandered quite a ways away from the introductory text, so let’s return now to what I said.

Finally, let’s talk a little bit about interpretation. In broad terms, historians interested in explaining revolutions tend to break down into two loose camps. One camp argues that revolutions are wrapped when slowly building tensions in the socioeconomic system finally break; the other camp argues that it has far more to do with the calculations and miscalculations of individual historical actors. The former is criticized for erecting very nice looking theoretical models, and then highlighting anything that proves the model and ignoring anything that doesn’t. The latter is criticized for essentially arguing that nothing was amiss until the moment rebellion, civil war, and violent social upheaval spontaneously consumed the entire nation. Neither of these interpretations alone is, at least to me, satisfactory. Long term social forces set the parameters for action, but they do not dictate the results. Individual choices dictate the results, but always within the bounds of those long term social parameters. This is not a bold thesis, but I’m pretty sure it’s how life goes.

Now I still basically hold to this, and this is basically just a restatement of Karl Marx’s line that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing.” Large structural forces are absolutely necessary to explain the onset of any revolution, but contingency and individual decision making are vitally important to explaining the specifics of how and why events unfolded the way they did. I don’t think it’s the case that any revolution can be predicted accurately in advanced by analyzing all those social forces, because it’s always gonna come down to happenstance and luck and accident. But I also think it’s true that happenstance, luck, and accident won’t on their own produce a revolution. Those little X factors need to be operating inside the proper environment or else nothing is going to happen.

So that brings us finally to the other bit that everyone remembers about the introduction, and the part that people like to rip me about the most. It is when I said, “I’ll close with a note on programming. With this show covering a series of distinct time periods that are thematically linked, but otherwise wildly disconnected, when I make the transition from one revolution to the next, I’m going to have to pause and recalibrate. Specifically, I’m gonna have to pause and recalibrate for four weeks. I’ve thought a lot about this and I just don’t see any good way around it. Each revolution will run its allotted 12 to 15 episodes–

Mm-hmm.

— and then I’m gonna go dark for a month while I get ready for the next batch. So 12 weeks on four weeks off. Sound good? Good.

Okay, so obviously the most hilariously glaring thing here is the idea that I was gonna do the series in 12 to 15 episodes a piece, and in case you haven’t heard me talk about this elsewhere, the thing that happened is that, while I was working on the very first series on the English Revolution, I was absolutely being tortured by how much I had to leave out, and how many different things I didn’t feel like I could talk about or explore because of this limit I had put on myself. I mean, there’s easily enough material about the English revolution to fit fifty episodes, it’s incredibly complex. So I did make a good faith effort at keeping that 12 to 15 episode limit going for the American Revolution, but then as I was staring down the barrel of the French Revolution, I realized I just couldn’t do it. And more to the point, I didn’t want to do it. I needed unrestricted time and space to explain things the way that I thought they needed to be explained. And so even though, yes, Russia went beyond self parody, I don’t regret a single episode of it. I’m just never gonna be the guy you come to for the quick summary of anything. I’m the guy you come to for the details.

But there’s actually something else hiding in this paragraph that’s even more important in terms of my own intellectual development, and it’s this bit:

With this show covering a series of distinct time periods that are thematically linked, but otherwise wildly disconnected…

Because look, I no longer believe that. It’s one of the most consequential changes in my historical worldview from when I started the show in 2013 to where I am now here at the end of 2020. Now I knew going into the podcast that there were obviously gonna be links between like the American Revolution and the French Revolution, similar ideas and other connections, crossover characters like Lafayette and Thomas Payne. But once I hit the French Revolution, I realized deep, deep in my bones how much I was not talking about distinct time periods that were wildly disconnected. Quite the opposite. I found everything deeply interconnected, enmeshed and interrelated. I basically lost all faith in discrete national histories being able to even remotely answer the basic historical question, what happened? It probably started when I realized that there was no way to explain the French Revolution without explaining the Polish Partitions, but then as I advanced into Haiti and Spanish America, I became fully consumed by the idea that this whole time I’ve just been describing one single revolutionary event playing out in different theaters, that there isn’t an American Revolution and a French Revolution and a Haitian Revolution, but one single Atlantic Revolution. I simply do not believe that things are wildly disconnected anymore. I have a fundamentally holistic understanding of history now.

But then advancing through the years, as we moved to 1848 and the Paris Commune and Mexico and Russia, the histories and personalities and ideas, they grew, they developed, they shifted and transformed, but there was never a break in continuity. Everything is connected to everything else. There are no histories. There is only history. One single thing that never ends.

So then I wrapped up the introduction by saying,

So with all that out of the way, let’s get into this thing. I apologize in advance if I butcher any pronunciation, it’s bound to happen, email me when it does, don’t just leave me hanging.

And yeah, pronunciation was always a challenge. I used Forvo and Google Translate and dictionaries and videos and direct contact with native speakers, but still, I failed and failed and failed again with only the thin hope that maybe in the future, I would fail better. I know for a fact that I managed to mispronounce a minimum of one word in each of the following languages: English, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, Slovakian, Latin, and Lithuanian. There are probably others I can’t remember at the moment, but you know, for the record, the show is over now, so you can stop emailing me about my pronunciation.

Then the very last thing I said was, the show lives at revolutionspodcast.com. That is as true today as it was when it was written, and it will remain there until civilization collapses.

So, you know, five, maybe like ten years. Haha, just kidding, or am I.

So, I think looking back from this vantage point, coming now full circle and doing a revolution on revolutions, I think we’re off to a pretty good start on wrapping up the show. And over the next several episodes, we’ll walk through the processes and structures of all the revolutions that we’ve talked about, all the beginnings and middles and ends, to see how they relate to each other, how they connect to each other, and kind of come to that good old conclusion that while history never repeats itself, it sure has a habit of rhyming.