The Roots of "Revolution"

Where did the word “revolution” come from? My friend Ignoto has been watching John Adams on HBO ; I bluffed an answer and muffed it. But now, turn the mike over to (the late) Martin Malia:

[T]hough the word “revolution is a venerable one, the concept is thoroughly modern … In late antiquity the substantive revolution was formed from the Latin verb revolvere, meaning to roll back or to return to a point of origin. In this sense it was employed to designate circular or repetitive movements in nature, as in the waxing and waning of the moon. Saint Augustine was probably the first to use it in a figurative sense to mean the idea of bodily reincarnation or the repetition of providential patterns in historical time. For centuries … it was of a piece with other backward-looking pre-modern views of change, such as reformation and restoratio in religion, and renascita or rebirth, in arts and letters. For, until the end of the seventeenth century, [Europeans] steadfastly believed that they were reviving the heritage of a golden age in the past, and that all their new departures were in fact restorations.

The most notable example of the pre-modern use of evolution” is given by astronomy, as in Copernicus’ “revolutionary” treatise of 1543, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. It is from this source that the term was first imported into political discourse,on the occasion of the “restoration” of Charles II in 1660, and in more durable fashion to designate the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, a term which at the time meant a return to the realm’s “ancient constitution,” allegedly violated by the king. Then, in the eighteenth century, the political use of “revolution” came increasingly to describe any sudden or abrupt change in government, though without any normative connotation. … In the course of the paired convulsions of 1776 and 1789, revolution, once signifying return, now came to denote overturn and a radical new departure. The Americans began their rebellion by calling it a revolution in the old sense of restoration of their historic liberties as Englishmen. But they ended it as an independent republic …

—Martin Malia, History’s Locomtotives:
Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World 289-90 (Yale UP 2006)

Malia says he is “recall[ing] a well-known story.” Not down my corridor he’s not.