Authors

Discussion

Revolutions are always surprising.  A key reason is the spontaneity that necessarily characterizes the revolutionary rupture and that revolutionary circumstances continue to require.  This paper uses empirical evidence from the revolutions of 1989 in Czechoslovakia and East Germany to advance theoretical arguments about the cultural roots of spontaneity and the structuring role of spontaneity in the revolutionary process.  Spontaneity is an essential aspect of the collective effervescence that facilitates a revolutionary break, but it is itself conditioned by historically encoded, latent possibilities specific to particular cultural milieux.  Which of these possibilities finds expression is highly contingent, but not altogether unpredictable.  The experience of spontaneity in turn contributes to the sense of miracle that inevitably accompanies the birth of a revolutionary community, reflecting a reconfiguration of the sacred foundations of meaningfulness and initiating the dynamic collective process of articulating a new symbolic system that can be represented in new or reimagined institutions.  Reaction to real or potential violence plays a crucial, structuring role in this necessarily emotional socioepistemological process, making it possible to transcend pre-existing patterns of meaning-formation.  The contingency of the process in turn demands spontaneity to navigate quickly changing possibilities effectively; by comparing how Czech, German, and Slovak revolutionaries attempted to do so (with lasting consequences), we can again identify ways in which the process is not entirely unpredictable and suggest how revolutionaries can be "prepared for spontaneity.”