The Role of Revolutionary Waves in Modernization Processes

 Different revolutions and their chains (revolutionary waves), as a rule, are direct or indirect consequences of regional and global modernization processes. Sometimes they strengthen, speed up the modernization trends, but they can also block, strengthen or even launch the opposite trends of counter-modernization (countertrends). Five trends of modernization and the corresponding five counter-trends are considered: 1) bureaucratization and de-bureaucratization (rollback to patrimonial structures and practices); 2) secularization and desecularization (return of religion and church to the center of social, political and cultural life, rise of fundamentalism); 3) capitalist industrialization and de-industrialization (alternatively, suppression of capitalist and market institutions); 4) democratization and authoritarian rollbacks (dissolution or becoming a fiction of parliamentary, independent judicial institutions); 5) the rise of the creative avant-garde in culture or conservatism, the restoration of old styles and forms). Heuristic principles are formulated to analyze the reasons for including different revolutionary waves and revolutions in these trends with the vectors of modernization and counter-modernization.

Keywords: revolutionary waves, modernization, modernization trends, counter-modernization, bureaucratization, neo-patrimonialism, secularization, desecularization, industrialization, de-industrialization, capitalism, democratization, authoritarianism.