revolution

If I'm not mistaken, the application of the term 'revoloution' to political upheavals is borrowed from the title of Copernicus's ground-shifting treatise 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres', which caused such an upheaval in thinking that it leant its name to all future upheavals - they were called 'revolutions' not in the sense of containing circular or cyclical motions but rather in the sense that their impact was akin to that of Copernicus's book.

But the notion of cycles of history is very much inscribed within political/historical thinking. Marx famously writes in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon' that history repeats itself - first time round as tragedy, second as farce. Nietzche has his 'ewige wiederkehr' or 'eternal return'. Most interesting for me is Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century philosopher whose thought anticipates so much of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida etc. He had a notion of 'ricorso': events happen first as 'corso' or 'flow', then as 'ricorso', a term that doesn't really have a proper translation. It means less 'repetition' than 'replay', with an almost legalistic sense of 'retrial' or 'appeal'.

Joyce was hugely influenced by Vico (he picked it up from Yeats, whose 'gyres' of history owe a lot to Vico's 'ricorso'); 'Finnegans Wake' is conceived completely Viconianly, with an obscure ur-event being replayed in increasingly self-conscious and self-reflective modes (as theatre, film, trial and so on). And Beckett picks up this cyclical pattern from Joyce. So in the second half of 'Waiting for Godot' Vladimir and Estragon re-enact the scene of cruelty they witnessed between Pozzo and Lucky in the first half. Or in 'Happy Days' Winnie replays the same gestures (taking stuff from her handbag) every day, while commenting on how she's replaying it - which means it's not straight repetition but a kind of historiographical archiving, or auto-archiving.