revolutionary ideas
Paradigm-shifting notions
Revolutionary ideas challenge or overturn established ways of thinking.
The term implies fundamental change rather than incremental improvement: Darwin's revolutionary ideas about evolution, The Enlightenment produced revolutionary ideas about individual rights.
What counts as revolutionary depends on context—a revolutionary idea in one field may be commonplace in another.
- glasnostSoviet transparency reform
- human rightsInalienable personal freedoms
- social justiceFair distribution of opportunities
- abolitionFormal discontinuation of practice
- liberationRelease from constraint
nationalism · modernism · manifesto · Black Power · avant-garde · counterculture · status quo · shake things up · New Left · iconoclast · Cesar Chavez · virtual reality · existentialism · samizdat · heresy · Copernican · ahead of its time · decolonization
- French RevolutionBastille, guillotine, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Jacobins
- political fictiondystopia, utopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1984, dystopian fiction
- LockeJohn Locke, tabula rasa, blank slate, social contract, natural rights
revolutionary ideasmodest proposals
Unassuming ideas put forward
half-measures · tinkering · fine-tuning · evolutionary change · baby steps
revolutionary ideastraditionalism
Adherence to inherited customs
conventional wisdom · preservationism · received wisdom · conservatism · orthodoxy