ΒΑΔΙΖΟΝΤΑΣ ΠΡΟΣ ΤΗ ΜΑΧΗ ΑΝΑΠΟΔΑ: ΟΙ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΕΣ ΑΝΤΙΛΗΨΕΙΣ ΤΟΥ 1821 ΚΑΙ Η ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΩΝ ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΕΩΝ

Abstract

The article traces the intellectual and political concepts through which individual and collective historical actors sought to give meaning to their actions and aspirations during the Greek Revolution of 1821. Historiography has amply demonstrated the role of the Enlightenment and modern ideas on statehood and national political organisation in revolutionary developments. At the same time, it has by and large emphasised ruptures in its effort to explain historical change. Understandable though this may be given that the modern Greek state emerged out of a revolution, continuities are rarely, if ever, explored. In seeking to understand the historical change effected by the revolution, we turn our attention at longer-term processes and phenomena that have long been dismissed as «traditional» and «backward» (usually the Ottoman side of the equation), and argue for their equally important role and contribution in the Greek transition to modernity. At the same time, we move away from an east/west or Europe/Asia framework that has long dominated the field to explore the transimperial and transnational context in which the Greek revolution developed as part of the age of revolutions. Dynamic and evolving during a period of change, political concepts and practices reveal a great deal about the ways in which the foundations of the modern Greek state were set.