The Encyclopaedia of Political Revolutions - What Is It?

A revolution necessarily manifests from outside regular procedures and instead deploys irregular procedures to alocate power in a novel and heretofore illegitimate way. This could be tribal heritage, oligarchic consensus, constitutional law, genetic inheritance or random lottery. It doesn't matter what the system is - it just matters that the system serves as the quo regular procedure of allocating power. A revolution uses irregular procedures to overthrow the old regular procedures and then impose new regular procedures in their place. That existed before must be swept aside and replaced. We need some cross class alliance of dissidents to overthrow an existing regime by extra legal means and then alter the political system in some fundamental way.