Understanding Revolutions: Definitions, Causes, and Theories

Vocabulary flashcards defining key concepts, theories, and mechanisms regarding the modern understanding and causes of revolutions based on the lecture text.

Modern Concept of Revolution

A rapid and profound form of social change involving the destruction of existing legal orders, suspension of legal rules, collapse of the state monopoly on violence, and violent replacement of ruling elites.

Verelendungstheorie

Karl Marx's theory stating that the increasing degradation of the industrial working class under capitalism leads to desperation and an inevitable revolution.

Empirical Critique of Verelendungstheorie

Research showing that political upheavals are not initiated by populations living on the edge of misery, because those struggling daily for survival lack the time, energy, and resources for violent resistance.

Causes vs. Triggers of Revolutions

The analytical distinction in revolution research between long-term underlying causes rooted in social equilibrium crises and short-term immediate events that unleash an outbreak.

Perception and Consciousness in Revolutions

The principle that revolutions are primarily driven not by objective hardships, but by the subjective evaluation of economic, social, or political conditions as intolerable or unfair.

Relative Deprivation

The sense of unfairness experienced by social groups that benefit from economic growth but feel deprived because they do not gain greater political weight or social prestige.

Revolutionary Propaganda

The strategic creation of relative enemy images and opposition ideologies to assign blame to existing political structures and legitimize resistance and violence.

Simplification of Ideologies

The reduction of complex revolutionary concepts into basic catchwords (such as 'Human Rights', 'Freedom', 'Equality') and symbols to integrate diverse population groups and mobilize masses.

Economic Context of Russia (1917) and Egypt (1952)

Historical examples demonstrating that revolutions can follow periods of economic consolidation and growth, contrasting with the hopeless economic state crisis of the French Revolution in 1789.