The point for us is to stand back and look at the modern transition itself, from the sixteenth century to the Enlightenment as the 'revolutionary' transformation it essentially was, without becoming fixated on the incidents of revolution themselves. If we do this we see that the Marxist analysis tends to miss the larger dynamics of modernism, which encompasses not only a remarkable string of actual revolutions, but an entire transformation of culture that is far larger than the politics of revolution as such. The explosion of the Reformation, its synchronous companion, the German social revolution of 1615, the English Civil War, long precede, yet clearly prophecy what is to come in the American and French Revolutions. 

The point for us is that the sense of a new era in history that so animates Marxist thought, and not only Marxist thought, is confirmed by the evidence given in the spectacle of the rise of modernity itself, at a level deeper than the incidents of actual revolution. This 'revolution of the ages' comprises much more than the confusing and contingent circumstance of the French Revolution, whose dynamics induced a schematism of thought leading to the fallacies of revolutionary adventurism. This schematism resulted in the dubious, if not fallacious, view that the explosive drama of revolution constituted the prima face evidence of historical dynamics, and that therefore the controlled induction of revolutions according to script would constitute a realization of that dynamic. Unfortunately, as the Bolshevik revolution shows, this line of thinking contains somewhere a set of false assumptions. The suddenly appearing ideology of revolution has been the object of multiple critiques, some of them quite cogent, others too ideologically biased to grasp the real issues. But the simplest first conclusion of our differing analysis would be to note that in one way Marx and his fellows got it right, in one way: the modern transition produced a spectrum of bourgeois economic societies, struggling toward democracy, at which point, and here Marxists tend to have gotten it wrong, the transition impetus waned and the system in question lapsed into a strange kind of equilibrium not easily induced to further revolutionary change. The false analysis of Fukuyama and his sausage of Hegel unwittingly gave expression to this view, in another way. This is the stuck in gear 'bourgeois world' of the Marxist critique. The problem here, and prolonged study of the eonic effect might bring the point home, is simple: there is no logical prohibition on revolution, but in practice no such venture can mimic the spectacular scale of the modern transition itself, whose emergentist character is almost mysterious in its depth. It seems so broad that in fact it is a poor description to reduce it to the categorization of 'bourgeois society'. The result of the modern transformation includes religious transformations, the rise of science, a definite set of philosophic innovations, and a broad cultural flowering encompassing all fields, including the artistic. The later left ended thus in a condition of jackknifing exception to the civilization coming into existence, thus condemning itself to bucking the larger momentum of modernity with an ambitious hope to produce an artificial course correction applied to that momentum. Marxists often said as much, in their own language, and their ambivalence toward the outcome of modernity is fairly well recorded in their literature. It is small wonder that the collision proved disastrous in its failure to grapple with the phenomenon it thought it had understood in purely economic terms. This then is the problem with revolutions: it is true that revolutions correlate with modernity, but they don't define it. To construct a new 'new society', a new variant of modernity, just after a new society has just come into existence creates a collision of modernity with itself. And the logistics of social change required to do that are so far beyond the means of a cadre of revolutionaries as to constitute a practical, if not logical, fallacy. That is obvious if we look at the artificiality of Bolshevism: a group of agents who had lost perspective on what they were doing, and had an instant confrontation with a series of 'black boxes', social complexes hard to even describe let alone modify, whose correct grasp is not easy even for hordes of scientifically trained sociologists, what to say of 'movement enthusiasts' too often armed with little more than a set of eclectic cliches of social theory. And yet the mystery remains that the modern transformation does show clear evidence of the sudden (over several centuries, and relative to the scale of world history) transformation over this total spectrum of culture that revolutionaries observed after the fact but couldn't replicate. So, at least, it is not true necessarily that notions of 'revolution' are to be replaced by notions of 'slow evolutionary change'. It is simply that we don't understand and can't replicate what we see as the natural process of history, so far. The simplest resolution of all this would have been (and Marx all too often sensed this point himself) to have ridden the momentum of the bourgeois emergentism with a practical effort to produce a better version of democracy after the fashion of the cascade of such. In fact, a close look shows that this was essentially the real meaning of the whole 'socialist' conception, as this arose as a version of the attempt to define the term 'democracy', so recently reborn, and too swiftly compromised by the complexities of class dynamics, to the point that in the view of leftist hotheads the whole outcome was flawed or inadequate, or dominated by what turned out to be the prodigious momentum of the capitalist sideshow, soon the main event. Here Marx was a victim of his own Hegelian brilliance, with his classic critique of the doctrine of Right. That famous turning  point in the Hegelian aftermath issued a challenge to the fundamentals of democratic constructivism in its experimental phases. But the point was lost that without a system of rights, the first born of the political transformation of modernity, all subsequent experiments in social tinkering were going to be orphans of the democratic emergentism of the whole transition. Here the later left, a la Marx, entered uncharted terrain, with the disastrous results we see in the contemptuous and totally eviscerating versions propounded by Leninists, whereby the great and historic victories of 'right' were discarded in the stages of the socialist parody.

The issue thus is posed: what is the modern transition, and how are we to understand it in larger terms against the backdrop of world history? For that we need to extend our analysis by looking at the whole evolution of civilization as such by moving backwards, there to find the first of a series of 'revolutions of the ages', the so-called Axial Age period. 

None of this is a rejection of the idea of revolution, as such, however perilous such thinking now vitiated by false concepts, and the chronic and somehow terminally confused debate such as we see in the Second Internationale over the question, the Bernsteins vs the Leninists. Lest we lose perspective and take sides too easily in that prolonged fracas, they both seemed right and wrong at once, let us recall that the American Revolution was just that, a revolution, and that its success lay in its ability to reprogram something from scratch after a revolutionary interruption of continuity. How they brought it off remains one of the mysteries of world history, highlighted by its eonic bull's eye timing at the Great Divide, even as the facts are recorded in a transparent chronicle, but one thing is clear: they didn't waste time on theories. Their devices were practical nostrums of constructivist republicanism. What we see later is the concoctions of scientism concocted by cadres suffering Hegelian brain damage resulting in a tragicomedy of agents who had no idea of what they were doing. These tragedies of theory spring from the loss of a sense of universal history and the failure to grapple the idea of freedom in relation to those orphans of science we call (social) theories.  

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