This book offers a fresh framework for the historical understanding of revolutions and ideas about revolution.

a Revolutions and History combines the virtues of two very different kinds of study. It is a lucid, concise and reliable guide through the forest of literature on the subject: an ideal introduction for students. It is also a wide--ranging essay full of original ideas on topics as diverse as world--system theory and the effects of what the author describes as a the revolutionary narrativea . I dona t know of any book which so skilfully combines history with theory in a study of revolution.a Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, Cambridge a [Covers] the topic from its beginnings in modern European history up to the present. Parker has more in mind than a mere typology. He wishes also to give a structural--analytic explanation of revolutions, along with a hermeneutically inflected history of their appearance over time.a American Historical Review

Noel Parker is Senior Lecturer in European Politics, in the Department of Linguistic and International Studies at the University of Surrey.

Acknowledgements. ntroduction: Meanings of Revolution in Time and Space. Part I: How Revolutions Happen:. 1. Revolutions in Past History. 2. Why Revolutions have Occurred. 3. The Trend in Revolutions. 4. Revolutions and Modernity in the Twentieth Century. Part II: Why Revolutions Matter: . 5. Revolutions and Historical Change: the a Revolutionary Narrativea . 6. The Revolutionary Narrative in History. 7. The Revolutionary Narrative at the End of the Twentieth Century. Appendix: Revolutions and the Understanding of History. Notes. References. Index.