This article examines the views of Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx on the nature and extent of modern revolution and its restorative logic. I argue that, while all three supported the introduction of changes in society, they differed on how to steer the course of such changes, which resulted in a peculiar meaning of modern revolution. Each of them proposed good and bad versions of modern revolution, offered specific ways of protecting the good versions from producing perverse effects, and warned against (...) the ugly consequences of a failed revolution. Burke’s conservative revolution favored incremental change against radical social transformations. Contra Burke, Tocqueville acclaimed the egalitarian tendency as a preordained path and advocated democratic revolutions insofar as political liberty could be rescued from the ills of social equality. Marx drew the possibilities of a proletarian revolution from the future the history of class conflicts had prepared. Particularly in his later works, Marx rejected Blanqui’s abortive version of conspiratorial revolution and social revolution without democratization. Overall, each of these thinkers—Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx—reconciled political and social revolutions in their own way, acknowledging that in order to prevent social and moral decay, modern revolutions inevitably gravitate to the Christian logic of restoration. (shrink)