The elites of the new states are seeking to a greater extent than ever before to create something new. Their aspirations are cast on a more drastic and more comprehensive scale even than those of the European revolutionaries who have flourished since 1789. They are working to a model, which however vague in its details, is more elaborate and more exogenous than those which guided the formation of the modern state in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States. These were, of course, influenced by models drawn from outside their own territories and their own current culture. The models of the Roman Republic, of the China of the Mandarins, of the British Constitution as portrayed by Montesquieu have played their parts in the formation of modern Western states. They were, however, only fragments accepted in isolation or as parts of a larger program which was constructed largely from elements already existent and accepted in the situation to be reformed. There was moreover very much in their current situation which they were prepared to accept.

The traditional explanations of Italy's post-Renaissance decline are almost too well-known to bear repeating: northern economic competition, the opening of new trade routes bypassing the Mediterranean, the French and Spanish invasions and eventual Spanish domination of much of the peninsula, and so on. There is no doubt they were of significance. But explicit in all of them are “foreign” influences of one sort or another: Italy is pictured as simply an unwilling but helpless victim of the rise of the European nationstates. It is suggested that the northern Italian states also posessed within themselves the seeds of decline. Inherent in their economy, in the structure of their society, and in their political institutions were forces which, together with forces from outside, shaped the character of post-Renaissance Italy. It is suggested further that these forces were discernible in many states by the end of the fifteenth century.

This paper attempts to differentiate the forms of political regime that held sway in the city of Florence over the century following the formation of the Florentine constitution in 1282. It aims to establish certain pragmatic criteria for distinguishing between these Signorie, and to incorporate these into a framework that may be of some value in subsequent comparative study of the politics of the Italian city state in the later Middle Ages. The method employed is inductive. The more conventional deductive approach is rejected because the setting up of definitions at the outset is likely to create the illusion that political forms existed in a pure state. Dictatorship, oligarchy and popular government did not exist in the form of “ideal types” but rather were characterized by frequent changes of form and function. During periods of challenge and struggle their true nature became more clearly discernible than in eras of relative quiescence and this fact in part explains the conflicting interpretations that have arisen.

An attempt at a synopsis of Mr. Becker's and Mr. Hicks' findings requires an enlargement of focus. They have much in common in their approaches: both are sympathetic to reactions in Italian scholarship against a school which had conceived the history of the Italian city-states chiefly in terms of social clashes caused by antagonistic economic class interests. About 1900 that had been the perspective shared by most students. During the late 13th century (it was then argued), the half-chivalric magnati, owners of landed property, were replaced by the capitalistic merchants and industrialists of the arti maggiori; these, in turn, by the middle of the 14th century were followed by the artisans of the arti minori who, for a short revolutionary period in 1378, opened the door for the laborers of the great textile industries, the Ciompi. After class struggle had thus sapped the public spirit, Florence and other cities were ripe for the heavy, but pacifying hand of despotism.

American and British writers have reinterpreted the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, but, since Motley,2 have had little new to say about the Revolt of the Netherlands. My hypothesis is that the Revolt of the Netherlands was indeed a revolution comparable to and deserving a place of priority in the list of great revolutions which have ushered in modern times.

Motley liked to compare the Revolt of the Netherlands with the American Revolution, but what appealed to him in both movements was that they were as he saw them really not very revolutionary. The claims of traditional states' rights were asserted against the innovations of a centralizing monarchy. Neither the Dutch nor the American movement was carried away by a Jacobin zeal for unity. Both were directed against a government which was distant and foreign: the struggle against foreign domination therefore filled the center of the picture of both rebellions, and obscured domestic changes which may have been drastic enough to deserve the term “revolutionary.”

In what follows, I begin by asking a paradigmatic question to clarify some problems of definition (I). Next, Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution is examined as a scientific definition of revolution (II). Its application to the Netherlands revolt concludes the essay (III). Many logical problems are oversimplified and some are ignored altogether. This is done to keep the lid down on several Pandora's boxes, notably those labelled methodology in the social sciences, language philosophy, and historical laws, about which a great deal, some of it relevant here, has been written already. At the same time, I am concerned with the complexity of the problems raised and with suggesting that the ways in which definitions of historical events can be used deserve as much attention as the definitions themselves.

In the last issue Richard A. Easterlin criticized some arguments which I have advanced. Because I think that his main point is at least partially irrelevant, I shall briefly summarize my argument. I suggested that demographic growth in the pre-industrial West was determined primarily by levels of fertility, levels which depended in large part on economic factors, and that mortality has been the major variable in the demographic growth of most less developed countries today mainly because they do not control fertility in the interest of the maintenance of a given standard of living. From this basic difference, I drew a number of consequences. Among them, but by no means the most important, was the one to which Easterlin devoted most attention. It was my statement: “Hence, there is the possibility that improved nutrition and health will increase birth rates fantastically.”1 Easterlin omitted the first six words of the sentence from his quotation.