Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
There are at least two reasons which might be cited for undertaking the historical and comparative investigation of revolution. The first is the desire to make a revolution, the second is the desire to prevent it. Perhaps nearly everybody is susceptible to the one reason or the other, but there is yet a third reason that gives the study of revolution an outstanding interest and significance, even though its appeal is doubtless much more limited than the first two. This is that the understanding of revolution is an indispensable condition for the fuller knowledge and understanding of society. Depending on how we define it, revolution may be common or uncommon, frequent or rare. But in the case of societies, nations, and communities that have experienced revolution, we cannot claim to understand them adequately without understanding their revolutions. In a deep and therefore a non-tautological sense, it is true that every people gets the revolution it deserves and equally true that it gets only the revolutions of which it is capable.
This paper is part of a larger study. I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the National Endowment for the Humanities (under Grant H5426) for support in carrying on the research to which it is related.
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22 Woddis, J., New Theories of Revolution (New York: 1972). This work is a defense of the revolutionary record of the communist parties and a critique of the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Regis Débray, and Herbert Marcuse. One of its main arguments is that these theorists either underestimate or have lost faith altogether in the leading role of the working class within the revolutionary process. The debate deals with the strategy and main forces in contemporary and future revolutions, not with the nature of revolution itself.Google Scholar
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33 A well-known example is Brinton, Crane, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: 1938),CrossRefGoogle Scholar a comparative study of the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. The uniformities Brinton finds among these four revolutions strike me as largely extrapolations from the French case, without which it is unlikely that he would have arrived at them. He refers to the French revolution as ‘a kind of pattern revolution,‘ ed. 1957, p. 3.
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36 Various definitions of revolutions are available, but there is no need to review them here. Many seem to me to be too exclusive, although I am aware that the one given above may be accused by critics of being too broad. I have based it on the conception adopted by Johnson, Chalmers, Revolution and the Social System (Stanford: 1964)Google Scholar and Revolutionary Change (Boston: 1966) and on suggestions in a private communication from Ted R. Gurr.Google Scholar
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40 Ibid., p. 8.
41 Cited in Avineri, S., op. cit., p. 138n.Google Scholar
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44 In his famous novel, I promessi sposi, A. Manzoni gives a masterly description of a bread riot in Milan in 1629 which is a representation in fictional form of one of the classic types of disturbance at this period.
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48 Cf. the broad survey by Charles Tilly, ‘Collective violence in European perspective’, in Graham, H. D. and Gurr, T. R., The History of Violence in America (New York: 1969).Google Scholar Among the principal historical studies are those by Rudé, G.; cf. ‘The pre-industrial crowd,’ in Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (New York: 1973),Google Scholar for a general statement of some of his findings. He points out here that the food riot was the main type of disturbance in pre-industrial society, though it occurred more often in villages and market towns than in cities. L. Tilly provides a useful analysis distinguishing several kinds of food riots in ‘The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II, 1 (1971).Google ScholarThompson, E., ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’, Past and Present, 50 (1971),CrossRefGoogle Scholar gives a vivid account stressing, as do other writers, the legitimating moral beliefs such as ‘just price’ or ‘just wage’ that actuated the crowd. Among numerous kinds of riots in early modern Europe besides food and tax riots were xenophobic and iconoclastic riots. The latter, important in relation to such sixteenth-century revolutions as the French civil wars and the Netherlands rebellion, deserves much more study; for a recent account, cf. Davis, N., ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riots in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 59 (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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55 Koenigsberger, H. G., Estates and Revolutions (Ithaca: 1971)Google Scholar, ch. 9. The author does, however, distinguish rebels from revolutionaries in that the former aim only at capturing the existing state machinery, not at radical social change, as do the latter, ibid., p. 250.
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57 For the history of this terminology, cf. the references cited supra, n. 2.
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59 Ellul, J., op. cit., p. 38.Google Scholar In insisting on the difference between revolution and rebellion, Ellul also reveals an affinity with the anti-historicist humanism of Camus's, AlbertThe Rebel (New York: 1956).Google Scholar Rebellion, for Camus, beyond the specific historical content it may contain, expresses man's capacity to pronounce a categorical ‘no’ to oppression and to defy history and its supposed inevitabilities. Ellul in turn can thus contrast the professional modern revolutionary of the Leninist type, who has apotheosized the historical process as the guarantor of his acts, with the rebel, who lacks a futuristic consciousness of the new and represents the principle of rejection and spontaneous resistance. The contrast here in question, though valuable, is more philosophic than historical. The early modern era had its revolutionaries as well as rebels, even if the making of revolution had not yet become a vocation or the mythology of revolution in its historicist form a dominant belief.
60 For the debate concerning the revolt of the Comuneros, cf. Maravall, J. A., Las comunidades de Castilla, 2nd ed. (Madrid: 1970),Google Scholar and Perez, J., La révolution des “Comunidades” de Castille (Bordeaux: 1970). Several other early modern revolutions have been the subject of a similar debate over their conservative or modern character.Google Scholar
61 Hirschman, A. O., A Bias for Hope. Essays on Development and Latin America (New Haven: 1971), pp. 34–36.Google Scholar
62 Cf. Merton, R. K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: 1949),Google Scholar ch. I, for an influential discussion of manifest and latent functions, and the more recent general account by Levy, M. J., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, VI, s.v. ‘Functional analysis’.Google Scholar
63 For the notion of category-mistake, cf. Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London: 1963), pp. 16 ff. I use it to mean the misallocation of something to an inappropriate category.Google Scholar
64 The anthropologist, M. Gluckman, has noticed the teleology of rebellionrevolution which is inherent in Marx's theory of revolution. He declares that to Marx, ‘rebellion was…a step on the road towards total revolutionary classconsciousness and action, and was seen as part of a cumulative process’ (Gluckman, M., op. cit., p. 10). The connection with the mythology of revolution is obvious.Google Scholar
65 Cf. for some of these differences, Zagorin, P., ‘Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography,’ Political Science Quarterly, LXXXVIII, 1 (1973), 31.Google Scholar
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