Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION
[Illustration]
* * * * *
_BOOKS BY CRANE BRINTON_
THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION
THE LIVES OF TALLEYRAND
THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION
_BY CRANE BRINTON_
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_ · _New York_
* * * * *
Copyright, 1938, by
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
70 Fifth Avenue, New York
_First Edition_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* * * * *
TO ALDEN AND HELEN HOAG,
WHO LISTENED TO IT ALL
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 9
_Chapter_ I. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS 11
I. THE NECESSITY FOR A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH, 11.
II. THE BARE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS, 16.
III. THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS TO THIS
STUDY, 21. IV. LIMITATIONS OF THE SUBJECT, 31.
_Chapter_ II. THE OLD REGIMES 38
I. THE DIAGNOSIS OF PRELIMINARY SIGNS, 38.
II. STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES, ECONOMIC AND
POLITICAL, 39. III. THE DESERTION OF THE
INTELLECTUALS, 52. IV. CLASSES AND CLASS
ANTAGONISMS, 63. V. SUMMARY, 79.
_Chapter_ III. FIRST STAGES OF REVOLUTION 82
I. THE ETERNAL FIGARO, 82. II. THE EVENTS OF THE
FIRST STAGES, 85. III. SPONTANEITY OR PLANNING? 94.
IV. THE ROLE OF FORCE, 105. V. THE HONEYMOON, 111.
_Chapter_ IV. TYPES OF REVOLUTIONISTS 113
I. THE CLICHÉS, 113. II. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POSITION:
RANK AND FILE, 117. III. ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL
POSITION: LEADERS, 123. IV. CHARACTER AND DISPOSITION,
129. V. SUMMARY, 145.
_Chapter_ V. THE RULE OF THE MODERATES 148
I. THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERATES, 148. II. EVENTS
DURING THE RULE OF THE MODERATES, 151. III. DUAL
SOVEREIGNTY, 161. IV. WEAKNESSES OF THE MODERATES,
166. V. THE FAILURE OF THE MODERATES, 176.
_Chapter_ VI. THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS 179
I. THE COUP D’ÉTAT, 179. II. ORGANIZATION OF THE
EXTREMISTS, 181. III. FITNESS OF THE EXTREMISTS,
193. IV. THE MACHINERY OF DICTATORSHIP, 206.
_Chapter_ VII. REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE 212
I. PERVASIVENESS OF THE TERROR, 212. II. THE TERROR
AND THE OUTSIDER, 214. III. THE TERROR AND THE
INSIDER: THE RELIGIOUS PARALLEL, 220. IV. WHAT MAKES
THE TERROR? 236.
_Chapter_ VIII. THERMIDOR 244
I. UNIVERSALITY OF THE THERMIDOREAN REACTION,
244. II. AMNESTY AND REPRESSION, 247. III. RETURN
OF THE CHURCH, 255. IV. THE SEARCH FOR PLEASURE,
261. V. SUMMARY, 270.
_Chapter_ IX. A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS 272
I. CHANGES IN INSTITUTIONS AND IDEAS, 272. II. SOME
TENTATIVE UNIFORMITIES, 286. III. A PARADOX OF
REVOLUTION, 299.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 303
I. HISTORICAL WRITING ON THE FOUR REVOLUTIONS,
303. II. THE WISDOM OF THE AGES, 310. III. THE
MARXISTS, 312. IV. THE SOCIOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONS,
315.
INDEX 321
FOREWORD
This book is a modified and expanded form of lectures delivered in
Boston in February and March, 1938, on the foundation of the Lowell
Institute. I wish here to thank the officers of the Lowell Institute
for giving me the opportunity to initiate this study, and my audience
for the co-operation an audience--perhaps without knowing it--always
gives. I wish also to thank those of my friends and colleagues with
whom I have discussed the subject of this book for the last two
years, and especially Professor L. J. Henderson, the effects of whose
care, taste and judgment ought to be evident everywhere in a work
he has gone over with great thoroughness; Professor W. S. Ferguson,
who first called to my attention the inadequacy of important parts
of my uniformities when applied to Athenian history; Professor R.
B. Merriman, who very kindly placed the manuscript of his study of
seventeenth-century revolutions at my disposal, and discussed it with
me to the great profit of the present work; Professors Frederick Merk
and A. M. Schlesinger and Dr. Richard Leopold, Americanists most gentle
with me and helpful in my invasion of a field not my own; Dr. George
Pettee; and Professor Penfield Roberts and Dr. O. H. Taylor who, if
there is anything in the adage that _solvitur ambulando_, have had a
large part in this book. Finally, I am very grateful to my research
assistant, Miss Bernice Hempel, for patient and discerning help alike
in the gathering and in the organizing of my materials.
CRANE BRINTON
PEACHAM, VERMONT.
July 2, 1938.
_Chapter_ ONE THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS
_I. The Necessity for a Scientific Approach_
We are today very much aware of revolution. The bare word itself is
likely to set stirring a whole set of sentiments and associations in
the mind of any modern man or woman. For some, perhaps for most in the
older democracies of the West, these sentiments are not far from fear
and dislike. For others, revolution is still a word of good promise,
a beginning of better things, a necessary part of the progress of the
race. Once, indeed, and not so very long ago, hopeful liberals could
believe that certain favored countries--England, the United States,
Germany, the good little countries of Europe like Switzerland and
Holland, possibly even the classic land of revolution, France--had
outgrown this kind of political instability. Freedom in the long run
might slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent everywhere,
even in South and Central America. All this seems, like so many other
Victorian hopes, very distant to us now.
For our postwar world has produced a series of revolutions by no means
limited to lands in general political disrepute. Russia in 1917,
Central Europe in 1918-19, Italy in 1923, Spain in 1931, Germany again
in 1933, all underwent violent changes of government to which the name
revolution is usually attached. Some of these revolutionary movements
were, indeed, not strictly in the nineteenth-century pattern: they were
put through, not in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, but
in the name of authority, discipline, power. They were, if you like,
authoritarian, conservative, reactionary. Hitler and Mussolini did not
talk the language of Hampden, Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, Mazzini, nor
even that of Marx and Engels.
The older democracies, as yet apparently stable politically, have
undergone a series of economic strains which certainly appear more
serious than similar strains they survived successfully enough in
the nineteenth century. The breakdown of the Versailles settlement,
the return of international anarchy, the difficulties of government
finances, contributed further to a sense of insecurity in these
democracies. Recent events in Russia have, to put it mildly, bewildered
and discouraged those outside that country who in one degree or another
looked hopefully on the Russian revolution. The whole tone of writing
on politics has changed, especially in countries like England, France,
and the United States. Prophets of doom are now almost as common as
prophets of progress used to be in the good old days when we could
blandly rejoice in clichés like “Evolution, not Revolution.”
Even in the United States, where pleasant memories of 1776 are
incorporated into such unrevolutionary bodies as the Daughters of the
American Revolution, the great crash of 1929 set all sorts of people
to worrying about, or hoping for, a catastrophic overturn. Sober
people in conservative circles began to discuss whether a little farm
in Vermont wouldn’t give them subsistence and reasonable safety from
the wandering robber-bands of the coming Reign of Terror. Hopeful
radicals, too well read in Marx, began to discuss whether economic
privation might not make a majority of American workers realize that
they are a proletariat, and not a group of potential capitalists. Down
through Hollywood and the columnists there ran the naïvely cynical
catch phrase, “Comes the revolution....”
It is, then, almost impossible for us in these days to be indifferent
toward revolutions. Yet we shall not go far towards understanding them
unless we can maintain toward them, if not indifference, at least
detachment. This last word, one may hope, is not just a favorable
way of saying what “indifference” says unfavorably. A physician may
feel far from indifferent towards his patient, but he will not be a
good physician unless he is detached in his observation and treatment
of his patient’s malady. We may dodge here a whole lurking set of
philosophical difficulties, and say simply that what we commonly call
modern science has as one of its basic elements the detachment of the
scientist. The scientist, _as a private person_, may love and hate,
hope and fear; _as a scientist_, he must try to leave all this behind
when he enters his laboratory or his study.
To attempt to maintain in the analysis of human affairs the detachment
of the physicist or the chemist is very difficult, and to a great many
upright and intelligent people seems unprofitable, even treasonous. You
should, they feel, hate Hitler all the time, before, while, and after
you start explaining him; otherwise your explanation may edge into
extenuation.
But to understand all is by no means to pardon all. At any rate, the
scientific understanding of the place of the mosquito in yellow fever
has not led us to tolerance of, or indifference to, that particular
type of mosquito. Quite the contrary. We cannot, of course, expect such
immediate and apparently spectacular results as were obtained with
yellow fever from the study of man in society, from what are a bit
optimistically called the social sciences--anthropology, economics,
political science, history, sociology, and the like. But we may well
consider the possibility of approaching the study of revolutions in
something of the spirit the natural scientist carries to his work.
Our aim in the following study is the modest one of attempting to
establish, as the scientist might, certain first approximations of
uniformities to be noted in the course of four successful revolutions
in modern states; the English revolution of the 1640’s, the American
revolution, the great French revolution, and the recent--or
present--revolution in Russia. We must make clear at the start some of
the limitations of our study: this is not the only, nor necessarily the
best, way of studying revolutions; this study does not pretend to be
a complete sociology of revolutions; it deliberately limits its field
to four relatively well-studied revolutions; its conclusions are to be
taken to refer to these four revolutions, and any extension of such
conclusions to other revolutions, or to revolutions in general, is to
be undertaken with caution and humility.
Were we attempting to find an ideal type for revolution, were we
seeking a kind of Platonic idea of revolution, we might be fairly
reproached with picking four nice neat revolutions which made almost
too good a case, too perfect a pattern. But we are making no such
attempt. It should be very clear that not all revolutions, past,
present, and future, will conform to the pattern here drawn. Our four
revolutions are not necessarily even “typical” in the sense the word
“typical” has for literary critics or moralists. They are simply four
important revolutions with which we have chosen to begin a work of
systematization still in its infancy. Subtler systematizations will
come later, from other and more advanced workers. Above all, we do
not here claim any prophetic wisdom. We do not expect to be able to
predict from this study just when and where the next revolution will
break out on this earth.
At this point it may be objected that the social sciences have been
aping the natural sciences for several centuries, and got no further
forward, that they ought therefore to try and stand on their own
feet, that they ought to work out their own methods without bothering
about what has been done in the natural sciences. There is a kernel
of truth in this objection. Certainly writers like Fourier or Herbert
Spencer, who have proclaimed themselves literally the Newtons or the
Darwins of social science, appear to have gone wrong from the start.
A prophetic soul drawing upon philosophy and the arts--a Spengler,
for instance--will probably make at least as much sense out of the
study of men in society as will the social scientist who tries to take
over _unaltered_ the methods and materials of physics or biology. Yet
one hesitates to turn the study of men in society wholly over to the
Spenglers. The long tradition of what may be called rationalism has
in our society made conquests not to be lightly abandoned even in
this postwar world. That tradition makes it imperative to attempt to
continue, and extend, the kind of work we call scientific.
There has, indeed, been a great deal of nonsense written under the
protecting name of science. It is easy to sympathize with Mr. Max
Lerner’s outburst: “I am frankly skeptical when people working on the
study of societies begin arming themselves with scalpels, slide-rules
and test-tubes. For they are promising more than they can possibly
fulfill. The protestations of complete objectivity that we have been
hearing from students of society in the past quarter century take on a
religious note: it is as if they were washing themselves in the blood
of the scientific lamb.” Some of Mr. Lerner’s objections to the appeal
to science and to scientific detachment are probably those of the
romantic lover of his fellow-men, and are almost wholly irreducible by
logic or experience; but some are those of the skeptic and critic, and
such objections can be shown to rest in good part on a misunderstanding
of scientific method not by any means limited to Mr. Lerner. So common
is this misunderstanding that we must attempt here to put the matter
as clearly as possible in a very few words. This will be in no sense a
detour; it will be an essential approach to our subject.
_II. The Bare Elements of Scientific Methods_
First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are
exact in the sense of “absolute” or “infallible.” Their firmest laws
or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at
any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be
tampered with unless they prove unreliable _in relation to observed
facts_. A few mystics, inhibited in our crass society from the delights
of navel-gazing, have made too much of the contemporary revolution in
physics. Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle
of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equally
good at the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far
as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded
that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject
to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as
based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of
things, or on reality.
This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt
to study or describe reality--certainly not ultimate reality. Science
is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for
theologians, for most philosophers, and for a good many other people.
The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a _Ding an sich_,
seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that
this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant element
in human society. Only, scientists _as scientists_ can have no part in
such a search. This by no means need be taken as indicating that the
search is silly, and ought to be stopped. Some scientists have lately
been, _as private persons_, very active in the search, and indeed,
after the manner of such searches, successful. Faith has long since
found God in unlikelier places than the atom. But such discoveries are
not the discoveries of science. That discipline is based, not on faith,
but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over
its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely,
undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly
skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.
Third, the scientist by no means confines himself to “the facts and
nothing but the facts.” Dangerous metaphysical depths yawn at this
point, but we shall have to try and go ahead in spite of them. The
popularization of Baconian ideas on induction is probably the chief
source of the erroneous notion that the scientist does nothing to
the facts he laboriously and virtuously digs up, except to let them
fall neatly into a place they have made for themselves. Actually the
scientist cannot work without a conceptual scheme; and though the
relation between facts and conceptual schemes is not by any means
clear it is at least clear that a conceptual scheme involves something
besides facts.
Let no one be frightened of the technical term “conceptual scheme.”
It is really very simple: thunder and lightning impinge on our senses
of hearing and sight--probably the mere differentiating of this
sound and this flash from other sounds and flashes means that we are
employing a conceptual scheme; certainly when we think of Jupiter
with his bolts, Thor with his hammer, or the electrical discharge of
modern physics, we have clearly arranged our sense-perceptions in
accordance with definite conceptual schemes. We possess, indeed, the
basic elements of three different theories of thunder and lightning,
three different uniformities in these phenomena. But the only important
reasons why we should prefer our electrical discharge to Jupiter or
Thor _as a conceptual scheme_ is that it is more useful, and that we
can by using it get on better also with other conceptual schemes we use
for similar purposes. But in the sense which the word _true_ has for
the theologian, and most moralists and philosophers, our electrical
discharge is not a bit _truer_ than the old notions about Jupiter and
Thor.
We may even use two contradictory conceptual schemes, choosing one or
the other at convenience, or from habit. We are all of us educated out
of the old Ptolemaic conceptual scheme, which saw the sun moving about
a stationary earth, into the Copernican conceptual scheme, which sees
the earth moving about a stationary sun. Einstein, of course, used a
conceptual scheme different from both of these, but most of us are not
yet up to Einstein; in daily life we all, however, contentedly say
“the sun rises,” and should be very pedantic indeed if we insisted on
saying in Copernican terms “the earth has revolved into sight of the
sun.” More important is the present situation in respect to conceptual
schemes in modern physics. We learn, as far as laymen can learn in
such matters, that physicists find it convenient in the study of
certain problems to regard the electron as a particle, or at least a
point, and in the study of other problems to regard it as a wave. Some
physicists, many of them of very great distinction indeed, are troubled
by this contradiction, and have sought to work out a single conceptual
scheme which will make the electron a nice logical unity again. One
suspects, however, that these physicists have left in them a little of
the philosopher, and that it is their philosophical selves that demand
unity in the electron. For other physicists get on admirably with this
logically impossible electron, wave when they want it to be a wave,
particle when they want it to be a particle. As scientists, they are
quite content to solve their problems, which deal wholly with this
world and can be solved in this world, though no doubt not in the next,
without regard for ultimate truth.
The scientist, then, goes to work roughly in some such fashion as
this: he starts with a conceptual scheme of some sort, and questions,
or even hypotheses, he frames in terms of that scheme; he then hunts
for a suitable supply of facts--and a fact in the natural sciences we
define with Professor L. J. Henderson as “an empirically verifiable
statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme”; these
facts he seeks to arrange in uniformities or theories which will
answer his questions, and perhaps suggest other questions; he then
immerses himself again in the hunt for facts, and emerges with new
or modified uniformities. The scientist is not interested in where
his conceptual scheme came from, or whether it preceded or followed
on facts, or whether it is “subjective” and the facts “objective.”
These questions he leaves to the philosophers, who have not settled
them yet after two thousand years of debate. But the scientist does,
by his recognition that a conceptual scheme is as essential to his
activity as are observed facts, emancipate himself completely from
self-styled “scientific” materialists, positivists, empiricists, who
naively assert that our sense-perceptions are somehow in themselves
an orderly and sole reality, or a “reflection” of such a reality.
For, note particularly, the facts with which the scientist deals
are not phenomena, sense-perceptions, the “external world,” those
dear absolutes of innocent positivists, but merely statements about
phenomena. A properly verifiable statement about Cromwell is then as
much a fact as the reading of a thermometer in a laboratory.
Fourth, though the scientist is very careful indeed about matters of
definition, and is as disdainful of sloppiness and bad thinking as
any logician can be, he distrusts rigidity and attempts at perfection
here as elsewhere. He is interested less in beauty and neatness of
definition than in having his definitions fit not his sentiments and
aspirations, but the facts. Above all, he does not dispute over words.
He is less interested in the accurate theoretical distinction between a
mountain and a hill than he is in making sure that he is dealing with
concrete elevations on this earth. He does not expect class-terms to
be perfect, mutually exclusive; when he distinguishes between a plant
and an animal, he is not at all offended if you call his attention to
a living thing that seems to belong to both his classes at once. He
sets to work studying the living thing and will, if necessary, modify
his class-terms. But he is quite willing also, if it proves more
convenient, to set up a new class-term of borderline plant-animals.
This simple willingness to be guided by convenience is of course one of
the amazing things about the scientist and one of the most difficult
for us who have not had a scientific training to adapt ourselves to.
Most of us are early trained to prefer our opinions to our convenience.
Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting
problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful
thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears, his own standards of
what he would like to have prevail on this earth, must be kept as far
as possible out of his work, and especially out of his observations of,
or dealings with, facts. How far such hopes and fears and standards
enter into his choice of conceptual schemes, how far they influence
the kind of questions he asks, are difficult problems we may perhaps
be permitted to dodge. Sufficient that the techniques of most of the
established sciences provide a very effective check on the cruder forms
of wishful thinking. History--because it has been so long an art and
a craft perhaps the most respectable of the social sciences--provides
in the technical training undergone by most professional historians
a surprisingly effective and not wholly dissimilar check on the more
violent forms of partisan writing and thinking.
All in all, there is no reason why we should feel that the natural
scientist uses methods, sets standards, forever quite unattainable by
the social scientist. Natural science as the more innocent materialists
of the last century saw it--exact, infallible, a cosmos built on
induction--must seem remote to a struggling economist or sociologist.
But natural science as it has always been understood by its ablest
practitioners and is now widely understood--natural science as
expounded methodologically by a Poincaré--is no such thin substitute
for Divine Providence, no such metaphysical abstraction. Only God is
exact, infallible, omniscient, unchanging, and modern science has been
content to leave the search for God to disciplines fitted by long
success for such a search.
_III. The Application of Scientific Methods to This Study_
Of the bare elements of scientific thinking--conceptual scheme, facts,
logical operations, uniformities--the social sciences in general come
out well on the score of facts. Even in the field of history, where
neither laboratory nor questionnaire methods of research are available,
our existing supply of facts is surprisingly good. You cannot draw
Cromwell back to life, but neither can you call the dinosaurs back to
life. What we know about Cromwell is in many ways as reliable as what
we know about dinosaurs. To say that history is a fable agreed upon,
or a set of tricks played upon the dead, is to slander, or at least
to misjudge, the great body of industrious and sober workers who have
carried on the study of history. Notably the last century or so has
seen the formation of a body of research workers in history who, with
all their faults, maintain standards comparable in some ways to those
maintained by similar groups in the natural sciences. These research
workers do not indeed uncover the simple raw material of facts. The
humblest antiquarian arranges the facts he digs out of his documents
into some kind of pattern. Such a process of arrangement, however, is
not the conscious theorizing of the physical scientist. It was never
even learned as the scientist learns the theoretical scaffolding of
his science, but was acquired almost as the manual worker acquires a
craft. It is this craftsman’s technique for the gathering, winnowing,
and assaying of facts about the behavior of men in the past that is
the great strength of the professional historian. If you asked such a
historian what a fact is, he would probably be greatly puzzled at the
question, and usually quite unable to answer in adequate general terms.
Any good philosopher could convict him of complete epistemological
_naïveté_. But in his daily work the historian shows a very keen
appreciation of the difference between a fact and a theory, and a real
ability to manipulate and arrange facts.
We shall, then, rely on the historians to supply us with the necessary
facts. For the English, American, and even for the French, revolutions,
the body of reputable and reasonably detached historical writing is
very large indeed. Passions still run high over the French revolution,
but they are being cooled slowly in an increasing flood of printer’s
ink; the chief trouble, indeed, is to choose from among this enormous
mass of material. The Russian revolution is still too near us to be
regarded by professional historians as capable of the kind of treatment
the guild likes to give. Its source material is scattered about, and
much of it is still withheld from scholars. Language is a barrier only
gradually being overcome here in the West. Yet our supply of facts
about the Russian revolution is by no means so slight, or so poor in
quality, as to hinder our enterprise. Twenty years is a long time, and
the early stages of the Russian revolution have been surveyed, if not
_sine ira et studio_, at least with relative detachment. And then both
lovers and haters of the present regime in Russia are almost equally
articulate, and can be balanced off one against the other by anyone who
cares to take the trouble.
Our conceptual scheme will give us a great deal more difficulty than
will our supply of facts. In the social sciences, at least, the
distinction between a conceptual scheme and a metaphor is still an
uncertain one, and there is no great harm in looking at our present
problem as a search for a framework of not too-literary metaphor to
hold together the details of our revolutions. Yet one of the most
obvious of such metaphors, that of a storm, has several faults. One can
outline it readily: at first there are the distant rumblings, the dark
clouds, the ominous calm before the outbreak, all this corresponding
to what our textbooks used confidently to list as “causes” of the
revolution; then comes the sudden onset of wind and rain, clearly the
beginnings of the revolution itself; the fearful climax follows, with
the full violence of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, even more
clearly the Reign of Terror; at last comes the gradual subsidence,
the brightening skies, sunshine again, as in the orderly days of the
Restoration. But all this is too literary and too dramatic for our
purposes, too close altogether to the metaphor as used by prophets
and preachers. Insofar as it can be brought into use as a conceptual
scheme it rests on a science, that of meteorology, which has little
direct help to offer the social scientist.
At almost the opposite side there is the conceptual scheme of a social
system in equilibrium, as best developed in Pareto’s _The Mind and
Society_. The tender-minded are often annoyed by the term equilibrium,
which has for them mechanistic overtones damaging to the dignity of
man. In modern science, however, the term has proved useful in fields
such as chemistry and physiology, well outside that of the mechanics
in which it had its origin. Furthermore, the word as the practicing
scientist uses it has no metaphysical connotations whatever. The
concepts of a physico-chemical system in equilibrium, a social system
in equilibrium, John Jones’s body in equilibrium, do not in the least
prejudice the immortality of anyone’s soul, nor the ultimate victory
of Vitalists over Mechanists. The concept of equilibrium helps us to
understand, and sometimes to use or to control, specific machines,
chemicals, and even medicines. It may some day help us to understand,
and within limits to mold, men in society.
Its use in the study of revolutions is in principle clear. A society
in perfect equilibrium might be--purely theoretically--defined as a
society every member of which had at a given moment all that he could
possibly desire and was in a state of absolute contentment. Obviously
any real society can be in but an imperfect equilibrium, a condition in
which the varying and conflicting desires and habits of individuals and
groups of individuals are in complex mutual adjustment, an adjustment
so complex that no mathematical treatment of it seems possible at
present. As new desires arise, or as old desires grow stronger
in various groups, or as environmental conditions change, and as
institutions fail to change, a relative disequilibrium may arise, and
what we call a revolution breaks out. We know that in the human body,
for instance, the disequilibrium we call disease is accompanied by
certain definite reactions which tend to restore the body to something
like what it was before the onset of the disease. It seems quite likely
that in a social system in disequilibrium there is something of the
same kind of reaction towards the old conditions, and that this helps
explain why revolutions do not turn out entirely as revolutionists
want them to. The old adjustments tend to re-establish themselves, and
produce what in history is known as the reaction or the restoration.
In social systems, as in the human organism, a kind of natural healing
force, a _vis medicatrix naturae_ tends almost automatically to balance
one kind of change with another and restorative change.
This conceptual scheme of the social equilibrium is probably in the
long run the most useful for the sociologist of revolutions. It is
for our purposes, however, a bit too ambitious. It needs for full
success a more accurate grasp of more numerous variables than we can at
present manage. Though it need not necessarily be formulated in precise
mathematical terms, it ought to be formulated in terms more close to
those of mathematics than we can honestly employ. In other words, it is
better suited to a complete sociology of revolutions, or a “dynamics of
revolution,” than to our modest study of the anatomy of four specific
revolutions. We are here attempting merely a preliminary analysis,
attempting to classify and systematize at a relatively low level of
complexity.
Though it has one very grave defect, the best conceptual scheme for
our purposes would seem to be one borrowed from pathology. We shall
regard revolutions--wholly, be it understood, for convenience, and
with no implications of eternal and absolute validity, and with no
moral overtones--as a kind of fever. The outlines of our fever chart
work out readily enough. In the society during the generation or so
before the outbreak of revolution, in the old regime, there will be
found signs of the coming disturbance. Rigorously, these signs are not
quite symptoms, since when the symptoms are fully enough developed
the disease is already present. They are perhaps better described as
_prodromal_ signs, indications to the very keen diagnostician that a
disease is on its way, but not yet sufficiently developed to be the
disease. Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves,
and when we can say the fever of revolution has begun. This works up,
not regularly but with advances and retreats, to a crisis, frequently
accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists,
the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence,
usually marked by a relapse or two. Finally the fever is over, and
the patient is himself again, perhaps in some respects actually
strengthened by the experience, immunized at least for a while from a
similar attack, but certainly not wholly made over into a new man. The
parallel goes through to the end, for societies which undergo the full
cycle of revolution are perhaps in some respects the stronger for it;
but they by no means emerge entirely remade.
This conceptual scheme may be used without committing its users in any
sense to an organic theory of society. The organic theory, the motion
of a “body politic,” is a metaphor developed by political philosophers
into a kind of metaphysics. A good German idealist can find almost
anything he wants in the organic theory, from the categorical
imperative to a justification of anti-Semitism and a condemnation of
parliamentary democracy. The word “society” is used in this study as a
convenient way of designating the observed behavior of men in groups,
their interactions, and that is all. We find it convenient to apply
to certain observed changes in given societies a conceptual scheme
borrowed from medicine. We should find it inconvenient and misleading
to extend that conceptual scheme and talk of a body politic, with a
soul, a general will, heart, nerves, and so on. When, for instance,
we apply terms like “prodrome,” “fever,” “crisis,” to the French
revolution, we are very definitely _not_ thinking of a personified
France which suffers all these. To some this distinction may seem only
a verbal one, and unimportant. It is, however, based on one of the
most important distinctions in human thinking--the distinction between
metaphysics and science.
The really grave defect of this fever chart lies deeper, in the
apparently unalterable fact that our ordinary language, to which words
like “fever,” “disease,” and “crisis” clearly belong, is only in small
part logical. The intellectuals of our generation are rather inclined
to worry over the non-logical overtones of words, which is perhaps a
good sign for the social sciences. Mathematicians, most scientists,
and even symbolic logicians, manage to say what they mean, and can
communicate exactly with one another. When, however, a given act by a
given person, John Doe, is referred to by five separate reporters as
persevering, firm, determined, obstinate, and pig-headed, you obviously
learn as much about the feelings of the reporters towards John Doe as
about John Doe himself. The reporters are trying to spread abroad their
own feelings, not to describe John Doe. Many people from Thucydides
through Bacon and Machiavelli to Pareto have understood this use of
words. It has been noted even by people like Jeremy Bentham and Mr.
Stuart Chase, who cannot perhaps be said to have fully understood it.
In our own day a dozen disciplines, from psychology and philology to
political theory, have made us keenly aware that propaganda lurks in
every syllable, in every accent. This awareness seems not to have
resulted in any appreciable drying-up of propaganda.
Now nobody wants to have a fever. The very word is full of unpleasant
suggestions. Our use of terms borrowed from medicine is likely, at the
very least, to arouse in many readers sentiments which bar further
understanding. We seem to be damning revolutions by comparing them with
a disease. To those of liberal sympathies and hopes we shall seem to be
condemning in advance such great efforts of the free human spirit as
the French revolution. To the Marxists our whole inquiry has probably
been suspect from the moment we wrote doubtingly about the American
proletariat, and our conceptual scheme will appear to them simply the
expected bourgeois dishonesty. Yet it seems too bad to offend even
the Marxists unnecessarily. Protestations of good intent are probably
useless, but we may none the less record that consciously at least
we are aware of no feelings of dislike for revolutions in general.
We do indeed dislike cruelty whether in revolutions or in stable
societies. But the thought of revolutions sets up in us no train of
unhappy associations. Unconsciously and subconsciously we may well feel
horror of revolution to our thoroughly bourgeois marrow, but without
benefit of Freud we dare not commit ourselves about our unconscious. Of
more persuasive force with the distrustful is perhaps the fact that,
biologically, fever in itself is a good thing rather than a bad thing
for the organism that survives it. To use a figure of speech, the fever
burns up the wicked germs, as the revolution destroys wicked people
and harmful and useless institutions. On close and fair inspection our
conceptual scheme may even seem to have overtones of implication too
favorable, rather than too unfavorable, to revolutions in general.
Facts and conceptual scheme being thus disposed of, it remains to
consider the possibility of finding some kind of uniformities in
the way in which our facts fit into our conceptual scheme. Most of
us would assume that on the rough level of common sense some kind
of uniformities can be discerned in history. But at least among
professional historians there is a tendency to deny that these
uniformities are real and important, and we must therefore give the
matter brief attention. In a recent review of Professor W. C. Abbott’s
magisterial edition of Cromwell’s speeches and writings, a learned
and conventional English historian wrote that “it is unfortunate that
Professor Abbott has thought to elucidate the English revolution by
comparing it with the American and French revolutions. Revolutionary
technique undoubtedly interests a world familiar with the writings of
Marx and Trotsky and the method of Lenin, but comparisons in history
as elsewhere are odious and revolutions are more remarkable for their
particular differences than for their common elements.” This is
undoubtedly an extreme view, and the English have for the last century
and more been insistent that their revolution was unique--so unique as
to have been practically no revolution at all.
A full consideration of the problem of historical uniformities would
be very long, and might well end in the cloudland of metaphysics. We
shall have to be content with the crude assertion that the doctrine of
the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense. History
is essentially an account of the behavior of men, and if the behavior
of men is not subject to any kind of systematizing, this world is even
more cock-eyed than the seers would have it. But you have only to look
at a page of Theophrastus or of Chaucer to realize that Greeks of more
than two thousand years ago and Englishmen of six centuries ago seem
extraordinarily like Americans of today. Even Mr. Christopher Morley’s
jazz version of _The Trojan Horse_ does not seem unreal. Comparisons
may be odious, but they form the basis of literature as well as of
science, and provide a good deal of the staple of everyday conversation.
As we have seen, an essential element in any attempt to work
scientifically is the detachment of the scientist. In the historian,
this is the ability to keep his observations of what has happened
uninfluenced by what he would like to have happened, or to happen.
We have already encountered this difficulty in our discussion of a
conceptual scheme, where to think of a revolution as a fever seems at
first sight a way of condemning the revolution, of giving it a bad
name. It must be repeated that in all the social sciences genuine
scientific detachment is difficult to attain, and in any “absolute” or
“pure” sense impossible of attainment. Even in the natural sciences,
desire to prove an hypothesis or a theory of one’s own may bring to
the distortion of facts some of the most powerful sentiments in human
beings. But the natural scientist does not want to improve a molecule
or an amoeba--at least, not “morally.” Upon the social scientist,
however, there pours the full force of those sentiments we call moral
as well as those we call selfish. He can hardly avoid wanting to change
what he is studying: not to change it as the chemist changes elements
he compounds, but to change it as the missionary changes the man he
converts. Yet this is just what the social scientist must try to avoid
as a better man would avoid the devil. One of the hardest things on
this earth to do is to describe men or institutions without wanting to
change them, a thing so hard that most people are not even aware that
the two processes are separable. Yet separated they must be if we are
to get anywhere with the social sciences.
In this study we shall make this attempt to describe without
evaluating. It will not be a complete success, for here on this earth
completion is rare. Absolute detachment is a polar region, unfit for
human life; but one might well make an effort to get out of the
steaming jungles, and come a bit closer to the pole. In less figurative
language: it is impossible to study revolutions without having
sentiments about them, but it is quite possible to keep your sentiments
relatively more out of your study than in. And an inch gained here is
worth several ells on less fertile frontiers of the mind.
_IV. Limitations of the Subject_
This willingness to put up with, indeed this expectation of, partial
and incomplete results is one of the distinguishing marks of science.
It would be possible to start out with the intention of discovering
uniformities in all recorded revolutions. To begin with, the hardest
conceivable task is, however, rather the privilege of the philosopher
than that of the scientist. At any rate, it seems now scientifically
unprofitable and therefore unwise to ask the question: What have all
known revolutions in common? The very question shows the logical
limitations of the subject: we can never know _all_ revolutions. Any
answer would have to make up in scope and assurance what it would lack
in concreteness. You might ask: What have all known men in common?
The systematist in biology could indeed list certain uniformities
under _homo sapiens_. But the commoner kind of answer would be that
men all have souls, or that they are all created equal, or even, as
Cicero discovered, that “Nihil est enim unum uni tam simile, tam par,
quam omnes inter nosmet ipsos sumus.” (For no one thing is as like,
as equal, to another one as we human beings are like and equal one to
another.) These answers are all very important, but they are not quite
the sort of thing we are after.
We shall, then, study four revolutions which on the surface seem to
have certain resemblances, and deliberately avoid certain other
types of revolution. Our four took place in the post-medieval Western
world, were “popular” revolutions carried out in the name of “freedom”
for a majority against a privileged minority, and were successful;
that is, they resulted in the revolutionists’ becoming the legal
government. Anything like a complete sociology of revolutions would
have to take account of other kinds of revolution, and notably of
two, the revolution initiated by authoritarians or oligarchies, or
conservatives, that is, the “Rightist” revolution; and the abortive
revolution.
No doubt there are sentimental distortions involved in distinguishing
our four revolutions as “popular,” but even words heavily encrusted
with sentiments have reference to concrete things; and the English,
French, American, and Russian revolutions were attempts to ensure a
different kind of life from that aimed at in the Fascist revolution in
Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany. If, however,
these Fascist revolutions seem too recent to be judged, or even to be
catalogued, fairly, we may find in the time of troubles in Athens at
the end of the fifth century B.C. less controversial evidence. Here the
revolution of 411 B.C. was the work of the conservative or oligarchic
group, and was directed against the old democratic constitution under
which Athens had been ruled since Cleisthenes, if not since Solon. In
the Council of Four Hundred set up by the successful revolutionists,
the extreme oligarchs split with the moderates. After the assassination
of the extremist Phrynicus, and the arrival of bad news from the
front, the moderate Theramenes was able to take over power and set up
a “mixed” constitution, seeking to combine the best of democracy and
oligarchy. Then the fleet, in general strongly democratic, won the
battle of Cyzicus, and paved the way to a fairly complete restoration
of democracy in 410.
The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary
cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the
Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the restoration of democratic
forms. In these movements, the sequence--to use perhaps misleading
modern political analogies--is from Right to Center to Left, or from
Extremists to Moderates to the Old Gang, a sequence clearly quite
different from that we shall encounter in England, France, and Russia.
Those devoted to the concept of social equilibrium will note that
in these Athenian revolutions the tendency seems to be toward the
restoration of old habits and old institutions; and there is much
here--the role of political clubs, for instance, and the varied uses
of violence--familiar to any student of modern revolutions. Yet the
sequence of power, the time-scale, and much else in these Athenian
revolutions mark them off from those we have chosen to study, and
suggest that they belong at least to a different sub-class.