Gulan: In the history of nations, revolution happens in specific circumstances, usually when there is a great deal of dissatisfaction and disappointment, and when the nation is emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed, and no longer can put up with the current situation, what philosophy will be produced in this highly charged state of affairs?

Gulan: In the history of nations, revolution happens in specific circumstances, usually when there is a great deal of dissatisfaction and disappointment, and when the nation is emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed, and no longer can put up with the current situation, what philosophy will be produced in this highly charged state of affairs?

AV: While it's true that certain conditions make revolutions more likely, it has never been possible to predict revolutions. Not only that, but contexts - local, national, geopolitical, economic, cultural, etc - shape not just the spark of revolution, but also the evolution of revolution, such that even if the conditions that give rise to a revolution seem broadly similar, it is impossible to say what the course of that revolution will be, what current or "philosophy" will emerge from, as you well suggest, a state of affairs that is highly charged. And it's not just that these moments are highly charged, it's also that they are highly contradictory, characterized by competing factions that are made visible in the moments of rupture and aperture that are, ultimately, the only defining features of revolutions. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book "On Revolution" perhaps put it best when she warned that we shouldn't try define revolutions by some specific content or ideology or outcome; instead we should accept that the only features that characterize political events as revolutionary are "freedom" and "novelty," freedom here not in the Jacobnite, French revolutionary sense, but rather as the capacity to think and imagine things previously unthinkable, and then the novelty of understanding that moment as entirely new and different from anything that preceded it. But if we accept "freedom" in this way as the main feature of revolution, then we also have to accept that that freedom will spawn many different expressions and notions about how society should unfold in this moment of complete conceptual aperture, some of them contradictory. That's why we can't speak about revolutions in terms of outcomes, but only in terms processes.

Gulan: The French revolution had a major influence on the world, it is implications didn’t limit to the French nation, but became a revolution for the entire humanity, why the whole world welcomed it, and embraced it?

AV: It's not the case the whole world welcomed the French Revolution. Notably of course political and aristocratic elites in Britain looked with deep concern on the passions unleashed in France, and maneuvered to prevent such events from happening across the channel. Edmund Burke's famous screed on the perils of the French Revolution became the cornerstone of modern conservatism, which suggests that revolution and reaction have a shared, dialectical relationship. This is also true internally, that is, revolutionary passions unleash their own counterrevolutionary passions, as the historian Arno Mayer has written about the French Terror and Soviet purges, as competing currents move to eliminate each other in their quest for post-revolutionary control and hegemony, from which they can then impose an ex post narrative about what gave rise to revolution in the first place. And then there's the way that the French revolution moved to quash even Jacobinite expressions of revolutionary inspiration elsewhere in the world, as in the case of Haiti as CLR James brilliantly wrote about, when slaves rose up in part animated by the claims of the French Revolution only to suffer invasion by Napoleonic forces after they had vanquished their slave masters. Of course, centuries later we might say that the French revolutionary of liberty, equality, and fraternity did indeed - on the main - spur an "Age of Revolution" as per Eric Hobsbawm, as others drew inspiration from those principles even as they applied them in very, very uneven and contradictory fashion (in the US with the maintenance of slavery, in the Americas after independence from Spain with the maintenance of aristocratic rule, etc). But in fact the process was in no way as seamless or as universal as we like to imagine. Only if we understand the French Revolution as a revolution of ideas, and discount what the French Revolution spawned in practice, can we speak of its influence as major.

Gulan: If we look at the American revolution for independence, we see that it started with the renaissance in Europe, it was expected that revolution would occur sooner in Europe, but the declaration of independence was the reflection of the European renaissance, so why the American revolution happened earlier?

AV: Partly because of distance - one thing is to declare independence under the precepts of universal, self-evident, anti-monarchical, anti-aristocratic equality when what you're railing against is an ocean away. Another thing is to call an end to monarchy at the footsteps of the king's palace. That, but also because King George in England proved uniquely hubristic and obtuse about the possibility that the white American colonists would prove victorious, largely because of the strength of the British Army and Navy at the time, and then of course largely because there was no precedent, so he literally couldn't imagine the possibility. That meant he responded by clamping down on what were, in fact, at first, fairly modest demands on the part of the white colonists for representation under British rule. When George proved not only entirely unwilling to bend but violently so, then that helped to unite even otherwise hesitant colonists to the cause of self-government. The other thing to remember is that, despite the documents and allusions to freedom and equality emitted by the colonists, in practice what they were ultimately after was not a complete change in society, just a change in who ruled the society they had created, which was, in essence, a slave society. And they wanted to rule, not a far off king. So like with the French Revolution, it's important not to conflate the ideas and the practice of the American Revolution.

Gulan: After the success of industrial revolution, the principles and the philosophy of revolution closely linked to the growth of capitalism, but the revolution did not materialized in the west, instead it took place in the third world, why working class revolution did not come about in Europe and USA after the industrial revolution?

AV: I'm not quite clear on your time frame. Is what you're saying that industrialization in 19th century Europe did not spawn workers' (socialist) revolutions, but industrialization in 20th century Latin America, Asia, Middle East, Africa, etc did result in workers' revolutions? If so, I'm not sure the causal chain is quite as direct as the question implies. Or rather, perhaps you're conflating revolution, independence, and socialist revolution. You can have a republican revolution (as the French case), a republican, independentist revolution (as in the US and the Americas, and then later in the 20th century, in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa), and then a socialist revolution (as in Russia and then later parts of the global south). But it's important to be clear on what you're referencing. Moreover, in only a few cases has industralization been the catalyst for socialist revolution; more often, the latter has preceded the former, been a catalyst for the former (I'm thinking Guatemala, Cuba, India, many Arab states, and post-colonial Africa, as examples). That said, in some places (like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile in the 1930s-1960s), it is true that industrialization created the conditions for socialist revolution. But the record is spotty and it's difficult to generalize. If your question is why have we seen more popular movements come to power in the global south, then I think the answer is separate from the question of industrialization. It has more to do with the colonial system, and the repression required to sustain it. Then here, certainly, the spillover effect and influence of enlightenment era revolutionary discourse is a powerful catalyst, especially as communication networks improved and grew more sophisticated in the 20th century, allowing for a quicker diffusion and dissemination of news and information about other peoples and parts of the world. The idea of self-rule (the hallmark of the 18th century revolutions) then linked up with the idea of worker-rule (the hallmark of 20th century socialist revolutions), especially in colonial contexts that had been denied the former and, because of the colonial economic logic that relied on deep division and inequality. To the extent this didn't happen in the US or Europe it's because in both places, popular movements to expand the franchise and representation in government pushed political and economic elites to open up gradually, creating escape valves. In the US, for instance, the Jacksonian era reforms of the 1820s and 1830s, then of course the civil war, then the progressive era reforms of the turn of the century, then the New Deal of the 1930s, and then the Great Society of the 1960s. But since then, we haven't seen a movement towards the populace in the same scale as those previous ones. And we may be on the cusp of one. Or if political and economic elites prove recalcitrant, then they will close the pressure valve, and explosion will ensue.

Gulan: Some nations gained national salvation through revolution, and decolonization had been achieved by revolution, also. If a national group denied the freedom and, subjected to subjugation, to what extent there will be a fertile ground for revolution?

AV: This speaks somewhat to what I wrote about in response to the first and second questions. For revolutions to be truly revolutionary they have to hold open the possibility of many different, and contradictory, visions of the post-revolutionary future. Invariably, those contradictions will come to a head, especially if they are bound up in a competition over resources. So the question, at least if history is any guide, isn't *whether* there will be new ground for revolution, but *when*, since all revolutions imply repressing those either who are slated to lose privileges they previously had, or those who disagree with the emerging hegemonic vision of revolution. And of course, the question is somewhat leading: a group denied freedom and subjected to abuse will, of course, create conditions ripe for revolution.
Gulan: There is a sense that the state-system in western world has been incapable to meet the need of it is citizens, don't you think that the current situation necessitates a new revolution in order to make the state more responsive to the people's need?

AV: Certainly we're seeing major cracks in the edifice of western nation-states, anchored as they are in the twin pillars of capitalism and liberal democracy. To the extent liberal democracy has come more and more to be seen as the political appendix of ever concentrating capital interests, rather than as a representative system of government in which people are seen and attended as equals, then certainly, we are witnessing greater pushback on the part of those who are increasingly left out of avenues to express their grievances institutionally - that is, through established channels of liberal democracy. A recent study at Princeton University found that the US today meets all the criteria of an oligarchy, that it can no longer be considered a democracy, with levels of inequality nearing those of the so-called developing world and showing no signs of stopping. In this climate certainly people are questioning whether the "democracies" they're living under are anything of the sort, or have been corrupted to the point that a new founding is necessary. And that new founding, of course, is what we understand by revolution.