The emergence of revolution in the early modern, and its climactic moment at the Great Divide can be followed here:

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.