651. Redefining Revolutions: From Ancient Cycles to Modern Movements with Dan Edelstein

Episode notes

Dan Edelstein is a professor of French, history, and political science at Stanford University. He’s also the author of several books on revolution and the Enlightenment, including The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin , Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality , Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions , and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy . Greg and Dan discuss the changing meaning of “revolution” as an idea rather than a catalog of revolts. Dan explains how Greeks distinguished violent upheaval (stasis) from regime change, how “revolution” entered political vocabulary via Polybius’s rediscovered Book VI, and how fears of cyclical instability shaped mixed-constitution thinking from antiquity to the American founders.