Breaking down the question
The phrase to what extent signals an evaluative question: you are asked not simply whether revolution changes society but how far it actually replaces the existing order. The implicit tension is between the popular image of revolution as total rupture and the sociological finding that much of the old order survives beneath the new.
Revolution here means a rapid, fundamental and often violent transformation of a society's political and social structure — distinct from a mere coup or reform. The command discuss invites a balanced weighing of the transformative and the persistent. Grounding is available in the note on protest movements and revolution.
How to approach it
Define revolution briefly, then organise the answer around two sides: what revolution does replace and what it fails to replace. Use concrete cases — the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions — to keep the discussion grounded rather than abstract.
Reach a qualified conclusion: revolution transforms the political and economic order substantially but rarely erases deep cultural, bureaucratic and social continuities. This extent judgement is exactly what the question rewards.
Model answer
A revolution is a rapid and fundamental transformation of a society's political and socio-economic structure, usually accompanied by mass mobilisation and the overthrow of an existing ruling order. Whether it truly replaces that order, however, is a matter of degree rather than absolutes.
Revolution clearly replaces a great deal. It typically destroys the old political regime and its ruling class: the French Revolution swept away monarchy and feudal privilege, the Russian Revolution abolished the Tsarist state and private ownership of the means of production, and the Chinese Revolution overturned the landlord order. For Marx, revolution is the very mechanism by which one mode of production gives way to another, replacing the dominant class and the relations of production with a new order. Property relations, legal systems, symbols of authority and the composition of the elite can all be transformed decisively.
Yet much survives. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the French Revolution preserved and even strengthened the centralised administrative state it claimed to destroy. Theda Skocpol's comparative study showed that revolutions are shaped by pre-existing state structures and often reproduce strong bureaucratic states rather than dissolving them. Cultural values, religious sentiments, kinship patterns, language and everyday social habits usually outlast the political upheaval. A new elite frequently replaces the old one while inequality itself persists — captured in the cynical observation that revolutions change the rulers more than the ruled. Counter-revolution, restoration and the routinisation of revolutionary zeal further limit the transformation.
The extent of replacement therefore varies with the depth of the revolution. Political revolutions that change only the regime replace relatively little; social revolutions that also transform class and property relations replace far more. Even the most thoroughgoing, however, work upon an inherited social fabric that constrains and partly survives them.
Revolution thus replaces the existing order substantially at the level of political power and economic structure, but only partially at the level of culture, administration and deep social relations. It is better understood as a profound restructuring within continuity than as a total erasure of the past.
Examiner's perspective
For a 10-mark answer the examiner wants a clear position on extent, not an undifferentiated account of what revolutions do. The strongest scripts explicitly balance transformation against continuity.
Marks are earned by concrete cases and by naming theorists — Marx on modes of production, Tocqueville and Skocpol on the persistence of the state. Distinguishing political from social revolution shows conceptual precision, and a crisp concluding judgement that revolution restructures within continuity lifts the answer above simple description.