Di nuovo la rivoluzione? Pensare il cambiamento nel XXI secolo

This article examines three books published in 2015, which present revolution as a still-ongoing event of global reach. All the texts describe revolution as a phenomenon involving an extended space (the Atlantic or even the entire world) and an equally wide timespan, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present. The common thread running through these studies is the belief that modern revolution is/was a global phenomenon, encompassing similar events occurring in different times and spaces, which mutually influenced each other, either directly or after years or centuries, through the circulation of texts, ideas, people, and models of action. At the close of the last century, under the blows of revisionist criticism and the ruins of the Communist dream, revolution seemed to have definitively lost its centrality in the political imagination and historical debate as an instrument for thinking and bringing about historical change. In the light of these recent publications, however, the question arises whether such a period has truly come to an end.