Richard Albert (Boston College - Law School) has posted Democratic Revolutions (Denver University Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 2, 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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In this Article, which will appear in the Denver Law Review as the featured piece to which invited scholars will respond, I begin the work of repairing the democratic foundations of revolution theory. My point of departure is an observation: conventional theories of revolution rarely venture beyond the only question that seems to matter in the study of revolution, namely whether the episode occurred suddenly, with violence, and on the strength of a popular movement. This procedural, amoral, and mechanical inquiry frustrates the possibility of cultivating a concept of a democratic revolution precisely because conventional revolution theory invites no judgment about the merits of revolution. Revolution theory, in my view, can do better. To do so, revolution theory must free itself from the shackles of proceduralism—shackles that compel revolution theorists to speak in the same breath of all revolutions as if there were no helpful structural principles to help us distinguish virtuous from vicious ones nor any basis upon which to define a particular episode as a democratic revolution and another as an undemocratic one. There is indeed a way, and articulating it is the task I have given myself in these pages.
Highly recommended.
