One of the most significant aspects of the modern transition is the appearance of the phenomenon of (political) revolution. The Reformation itself is a revolution. Behind the Reformation we see the German Revolution of 1625. The English Civil War essentially initiates modern politics, as its influence become clearly visible in the American and French Revolutions. And then our transition is complete and the era of the very different and disastrous Russian Revolution, which is strangely out of character with the revolutionary episodes of the early modern.

The character of these revolutions is clearly seen through his own lenses by Karl Marx, who codified them, rightly or not, as exemplars of ‘bourgeois revolution’, since the whole period is accompanied by an 'Industrial Revolution'. If ever there were a clear case of our distinction of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’ it is the contrast of the revolutions of the early modern which give birth to the world of liberal democracy and the superficially quite different and theoretically flawed revolutionary adventurism of the Russian revolution, whose net effect, however, with hindsight, is one and the same ‘bourgeois revolution’ that we find in the early modern. These theories of revolution did not correctly analyze the nature of the modern transformation. All in all, the insights of a figure such as Burke as strangely confirmed and discredited at one and the same time. The pre-modern world was not slowly evolving toward anything, thank you very much. But then, as if on schedule, the eonic sequence produces a new order of society in three centuries, and comes to a stop. Constructivist efforts to imitate this phenomenon of nature by taking it one stage further produced disastrous results. And the system, its agents understanding nothing, settles back into its peculiar stage of dynamism and stasis that we see already by the nineteenth century.

The question of revolution can be very confusing due to its later leftist interpretations, which attempt, as if in a partial eonic analysis, to see the essence of historical dynamics in revolutionary terms. In many ways we have resolved this issue and done it right. As we examine the eonic sequence we can see that, while its transitions are certainly revolutionary, they are not the same as revolutions in the political sense. The eonic sequence changes its character in successive phases, and the first phase that we see shows the establishment of states, not revolutions against them. A close look at the Old Testament and the class struggles of the Greek city-states in the Axial period shows already the gestation of the modern phenomenon of revolution. Once again the distinction of our two levels illuminates the question by its immediate generation of a distinction between 'revolution as system action, almost a metaphor for the process of a transition, and 'revolution as free action', the actual incidents of revolutionary episodes, whose outcomes are all too often failures.

Our model thus faithfully reflects the way in which the early modern revolutions succeeded in spite of themselves. The spectacular rebirth of democracy, almost an historical miracle in itself, just at the modern divide is the great enigma to which we have already pointed.  It is as if our eonic system goes just so far and stops, even as the reaction to its central outcome, the capitalist world of modernity, produces a demand for the ‘true democracy’ in the form of socialism/communism. In the light of our eonic analysis there is something completely transparent about all of this, and yet the actual history here has produced a thorough confusion. Part of the ambiguity is that we are immersed in a system whose outcome has not yet achieved a final state, and the terms of our analysis fall into ideological alternatives.

We have constructed our eonic model, we should note, on the classic critiques of revolutionary leftism seen in Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin: the confusions of historical inevitability. But then an illusion of the historical inevitability of capitalism arises in its wake, and this, later matched with Darwinian thinking, produces a misleading picture of what is going on. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of capitalism, even as it is clearly the first born of the modern transition. Part of the problem is that one can be over-exact about the nature of the eonic sequence. A prodigious upsurge of directed change has no precise outcome and frantic efforts to re-revolutionize the outcome in a better form appears in the general chaotification of the dynamic era, soon to become frozen in its new economic mode.

We note that our transitions succeed almost in spite of the revolutions they spawn. And yet over and over these failures are followed in successive generations by the at least partial realization of their aims. These transitions are a far broader integration of cultural renewal than the revolutionary gestures of radical groups. The confusion arises when we try to generalize these particular episodes as 'laws of history' in some sense. This confuses the different levels of our model, and the intractable nature of real social change became evident in the attempts to force the future via political action. This point is clear from the American Revolution whose appearance under frontier conditions at the fringe of our eonic core area allows a more benign version of revolution to actually achieve a result. By comparison the French Revolution collides with an immense inertia and miscomputes itself into chaos.

An additional confusion arises from the failure to distinguish economic processes from the more complex transition to a new culture that we see in the modern transformation. The Industrial Revolution is a creature of the modern transition, and not the other way around. Karl Marx, with his acute insights, almost got it right, and then produced a reductionist economic interpretation of history that proposed a new stage of history considered as socialism/communism. The problem is that we have no real basis for such a prediction. That is, the attempt to mimic the dynamics of the French Revolution to initiate a new stage of culture beyond the outcome of the modern transition itself results in an ill-conceived expectation of what constitutes historical dynamics. This is not a justification of capitalist ideology, which in any case gives only limited definition to what we call 'modernity', but an observation that a 'transition to socialism' would have to operate at the level of the 'eonic sequence' itself, an operation several centuries in length, able to seed philosophy, art, science, religious reformations, and, indeed, revolutions of freedom! And yet the leftist perspective that arose just at the modern divide does indeed express a sense that our modern transition terminated before its full potential was complete, as if it ran out of time to complete its operation. But that, as we have seen, is characteristic of every stage of our eonic history whose dynamics are at once a strange mixture of the exact and the crude. And we are indeed left to complete its action, and yet this requires correct understanding of what is required, a difficult task by any definition. The simple resolution of this is to see that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ arise almost in tandem with the definition of ‘democracy’ and express the nature of its potential, realized or not. The leftist efforts, beyond the ideologies of revolution, to defend the place of labor in the new economic systems were an indispensable contribution to their success.

As examine the modern transition we should consider the central correlation of abolitionism with the eonic sequence. Finally! one should think. Clearly this is no accident. We should keep vividly in the mind the sluggishness of historical development seen in world history, and the dangerous forms of social existence that arise and grow like a pathology of civilization. Only a system on two levels can obviate such dangers, and by the mysteries of emergent freedom in the eonic sequence a false evolutionary development is finally overcome. And there is no teleological innuendo in our eonic model that justifies the exploitations of slavery ‘on the way’ to higher development. All such teleologies disappear in a discrete-continuous analysis of the eonic type. Slavery could as well have been abolished in the age of the Pharaohs, and Gilgamesh. Instead a pathology slowly but surely grows on itself resulting in the terminal conditions of slave societies so visible in the Roman empire. There was no advance from that point. Everything simply collapsed, as if to wait on the passage to a new higher stage of civilization, waiting on abolition.  If it took so long, and occurred only in the wake of the eonic sequence, then we have a judgment of men left to their own devices, and a caution is sounded against those who will arise in the mideonic worlds to take history into their own hands and undo the effects of historical macroevolution. The early exploitations of emergent capitalism give a reminder of the way the system left to itself can realize itself in a manifold of outcomes, and the demands of leftist action arose instantly at the moment of potential false crystallization to preempt the usual dismal outcome of man’s chronic domination by the forms of state and economy.  

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