(1) Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (LondonFaber and Faber, 1963)Google Scholar.

(2) Brinton, Crane, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, Vintage Books, 1956), p. 16Google Scholar.

(3) As if the peculiarly human, social adaptation did not consist in the ability of human groups to assume a multitude of diverse forms and as if the very process of continuous innovation (of everything, group goals included) was not the only constant element in societal existence.

(4) Cf. Homans, George C., The Human Group (New York, Harcourt, Brace 1950), particularly p. 109Google Scholar.

(5) Which is the other way of stating, once again, the ‘illegal’ character of revolutionary act.

(6) And so we agree here with Peter Amman's definition of the revolution as “a breakdown, momentary or prolonged, of the state's monopoly of power, usually accompanied by a lessening of the habit of obedience” (Revolution: a redefinition, Political Science Quarterly, LXXVII (1962), 36–53)Google Scholar. But we believe that, in the above statement, a second important part is missing, leaving the definition incomplete and insufficiently sharp.

(7) Strayer, Joseph R., Feudalism in Western Europe, in Rushton Coulborn, (ed.), Feudalism in History (Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1956), p. 16Google Scholar.

(8) Lubash, Heinz, Introduction to the Development of the Modern State (New York, Macmillan, 1964), p. 3Google Scholar. The inside quotation from G. KITSON CLARK, The Modern State and Modern Society, Ibid. p. 91.

(9) Was it not due to a very early (one wants to say ‘premature’) integration of all dimensions of power on the supra-communal level, that the ‘Asiatic’ despotisms were so remarkably immune against any kind of structural change, revolution included.

(10) Arendt, , op. cit. p. 55Google Scholar.

(11) One can ask, as most people do most of the time, just how much this assumed ‘invulnerability’, of the socialist state systems can be attributed to the vigilant neighbourhood of Soviet military power. Unfortunately the matter is not open to experimental checking and thus no entirely convincing proof can be found for either attitude. The revolution in the Eastern European countries having been in some measure imported, it was rather obvious that the ubiquitous Soviet presence was a crucial, if not the decisive, factor in getting the young post-revolutionary regimes over the first awkward corners in their itinerary. It seems however that the more elaborated and better rooted the new self-perpetuating socio-political structure became, the less significant—relatively—became the role of the foreign control factor. It was still very important in 1956, hardly ten years after the open pronouncement of the socialist regime in Poland and Hungary. It seemed to lose its importance thereafter (the Czechoslovak case apart once again, but Czechoslovakia is a case apart in the Eastern European setting). But of course one cannot eliminate it from any analyticalmodel, and one cannot know to just what extent the Soviet presence is material simply through the people's awareness of it. That is why all this part of my argument is very tenuous indeed. But, unfortunately, I do not see any way of eliminating its inherent vagueness. The historic cases I indicate below have certainly no less cogency than the notorious dramas of 1956 and 1968.

As there is no hope that the final proof will be provided in a not-too-distant future, I think it worth while to try to build models which explain the developmental tendencies of the Eastern European socialisms by their own, inherent, and increasingly immanent mechanisms. This seems to me more exciting than the failure to do it.

(12) Social Structure and the Ruling Class, The British Journal of Sociology, I (1950), 1–16, 126–143Google Scholar.

(13) “Almost all”, since the above statement is obviously untrue in the case of Czechoslovakia, and should be significantly modified in the case of East Germany (due to her, initially, ‘demi-societal’ nature). In post-war Czechoslovakia only roughly 14% of the yearly national income was ploughed back in industrial investments, while in Poland it was 35; the national per capita income in Czechoslovakia rose by roughly 20% in the period 1955–1965 while, in Poland, it more than doubled. The social consequences of economic differences were many, and most of them worked towards a stronger tendency to political participation farand greater plausibility of a common language in which intellectuals and workers could eventually communicate. According to an illuminating study by Vera Rollova, , in Machonin, Pavel, Sociálni struktura socialistické spolećnosti (Praha 1966), pp. 405–435Google Scholar, around 80% of the Czechoslovak industrial workers in 1964 were working continuously in industry since the pre-war period (the corresponding figure for Poland was 15%), which means, probably, that, while in Poland the peasant newcomers had no difficulty in setting their own cultural and political standards (diluting what was left of the scant pre-war labour) the well-developed core of industrial labour in Czechoslovakia was able to retain its pre-war structure and to absorb smoothly and gradually the increments coming from culturally alien sources. For Czechoslovak workers the intellectuals' plea for freedom made sense, which it could hardly have for Polish or Rumanian workers. The farand reaching differences in attitudes brought about by the various conditions of primary political socialization remind one again that there is nothing automatic in political ideas arising from the similar (when analysed statistically) socio-economic settings.

(14) From the few available statistical studies of the social composition of student populations in the Soviet Universities one significant conclusion follows: while the vicissitudes of political fortune heavily affect the educational opportunities of the various groups in various periods of Soviet political history, the impressive number of peasants' children in the educational institutions remains remarkably stable. Cf., for instance, the data on Ural secondary schools and colleges, collected by Kosiakov, P.O. in Podium Kulturno-tiechnicheskovo urovnia sovietskovo rabochevo klctssa (Moskva 1961), ch. 1Google Scholar.

(15) Based on evaluations by Antoni Kiewicz, Raj in Adam Sarapata, (ed.), Przemiany spoleczne w Polsce Ludowej (Warszawa 1965), p. 259Google Scholar.

(16) Ibid. p. 233.

(17) Cf. Ryszard Turski, , Miedzy Miastutions tem a Wsia (Warszawa 1965), pp. 228, 233Google Scholar.

(18) Cf. Sklad polskiej klasy robotniczej (Warszawa 1965), pp. 220, 223Google Scholar.

(19) Cf. Bolgusaw Galeski, , Przemiany spoleczne w polsce Ludowej (Warszawa 1966), p. 272Google Scholar.

(20) Sarapata, A., Studia nad uwarstwieniem i ruchlivioscia spoleczna w Ludowej (Warszawa 1965), p. 117Google Scholar.

(21) Max Weber, , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. by Parsons, Talcott (New York 1958)Google Scholar.

(22) Cf. Wilbert Moore, E., Toward a System of Sequences, in John MacKinney, C. and Edward Tiryakian, A. (eds), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and developments (New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970)Google Scholar.

(23) K voprosu o urovnie blagosostojaniarabochevo klassa v pierechodnyj period ot kapitalizma k socjalizmu, 1917–1937, in Istoria rabochevo klassa Leningrada (Leningrad 1962), IGoogle Scholar.

(24) I could not agree more than I do with the Reinhard Bendix's conclusion, that “we should recognize democratization and industrialization as two processes, each distinct from the other however intimately they have been interrelated on occasion.”; The Lower Classes and the “Democratic Revolution”, Industrial Relations (1961), reprinted in Joseph R. GUSFIELD (ed.), Protest, Reform, and Revolt (Chichester, John Wiley, 1970), p. 207.

(25) Rudé, G., The Crowd in History (Chichester, John Wiley, 1964), pp. 214 sqGoogle Scholar.

(26) Cf. Primitive Rebels (New York, Praeger, 1963)Google Scholar.

(27) Cf. Theory of Collective Behaviour (Glencoe, Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

(28) Cf. Zygmunt BAUMAN, Economic Growth, Social Structure, Elite Formation: The Case of Poland, in Reinhard Bendix, and Seymour Martin Lipset, , Class, Status and Power (Glencoe, Free Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

(29) Tables 35, 37, 599 and 602. We wish to stress that the data are indeed a rough approximation of the actual distribution. We should assure however, that, in fact, the position of workers' and peasants' children is even more handicapped, as the census officers and the university administration quite naturally faced the tendency of responses of applicants to lower their social status.

(30) It remains to be ascertained, what role is being played in this otherwise irrational endeavour by the informal pressure (perhaps even subconscious abomination) of those who are interested in leaving intact the present status-conferring capacity of the university education. In a socialist society it is, very nearly, the only way of securing the hereditary character of distributional preference.

(31) The Breakup of the Soviet Camp, Dissent, XII (1965), 213–215Google Scholar; reprinted in Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (Glencoe, Free Press, 1967).

(32) There are of course multiplying indicators of dramatic breaches in the unanimity, with which the central paradigm has so far been respected. The most dramatic breach has been supplied in diverse shades of those who call themselves, with a remarkable deal of historical ignorance, the ‘new left’; the most important departures preached by some consist in rejecting the value of technical improvement, of the accumulation of knowledge, and of intellectual prowess—and in simultaneously by ascribing an authotelic value to violence. The similar lack of a novel, alternative paradigm, coupled with an almost total (vociferously activist by some, passively escapist by others) rejection of the existing one, was typical ofclassical Mediterranean civilization in time of the Great Crisis of the IVth Century, rather than of any branch of the modern Left. It is illuminating to look over the insightful study of Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire by Samuel Dill, (Cleveland, World Publishing Co, 1962)Google Scholar for abundant stories of a drive to a voluntary solitude, escape frommilitary and administrative service, fascination by Oriental mystics and proliferation of weird fanatical sects, sexual laxity etc., all bearing a striking resemblance indeed to what goes now sometimes for the « new left ».

Whether these indicators can be taken for Brinton's “prodromal signs” of an impending revolution and spell the approaching end of the present paradigm—I would not know, and would not wish to say. I do not believe in the heuristic usefulness of the concept of ‘prodromal signs’. Whether an event is indeed a prodromal sign, or a historically insignificant aberration, we can decide conclusively only ex-post-facto. There is no way of predicting revolutions other than the actual showdown of the proand counter-revolutionary forces. It was long ago pointed out by Antonio Gramsci that forecasting a change is in itself a change in the social reality, while self-organizing and acting towards an aim is the only reasonable way of forecasting its achievement.