on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents,
the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the
revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had
been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The
fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say
then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go
from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime
to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along
this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows
its base in the country and among the people, since at each important
crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in
another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more
conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition.
Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition
triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution
to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their
time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the
other countries.
Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage
in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous
chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if
somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in
this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct
of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of
events during the rule of the moderates.
_II. Events During the Rule of the Moderates_
With the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642, Royalists
and Parliamentarians stood opposed in arms. By the Battle of Marston
Moor in 1644, and certainly by that of Naseby in 1645, the Royalist
cause had become, in a military sense, hopeless. But almost from the
first clear break with Charles, the Parliamentarians had won their
revolution. The Royalists did but play more effectively the role played
in America by the Tories, in France by the Royalists and clericals in
the provinces, the _émigrés_ abroad, in Russia by the numerous White
Armies which opposed the Bolsheviks until 1921. We are not here so much
interested in the Royalists as in the Parliamentarians. Within these
latter there is from 1642 on an increasingly evident division between
groups which we may call roughly moderates and extremists.
The division is not at first a simple one between two parties. At the
extreme right of the Parliamentarians were a few moderate Episcopalians
just touched with puritan notions, and usually also constitutional
monarchists. Many of this group were on the whole indifferent to
religious questions, felt that church matters would settle themselves
decently if the political difficulties could be adjusted. Between
these men and the moderate Royalists, who somewhat reluctantly chose
to stand with their king, there was actually very little difference.
Next came the great moderate party, Presbyterian in religion, puritan
in ethics, monarchist at heart, but monarchist in what was to become
the Whig tradition of the monarch who reigns but does not govern. The
left wing of the Presbyterians, early disillusioned with the idea of
monarchy by their hatred for Charles, merged easily with the main group
of the extremists. These in the English revolution are called the
Independents, extreme Calvinists who insisted upon the independence of
each separate congregation. Their notions of church government were
substantially those well known in this country as Congregationalism.
With them for most political purposes were other groups that
subsequently made up the English nonconformists or dissenters--notably
the Baptists. The New Model Army, through which these radicals made
themselves an effective force in the revolution, contained individuals
espousing almost every conceivable kind of evangelical religious
belief, and a good many varieties of economic and social beliefs. But
the group did work as a group, and its core was certainly Independent.
To the left were other groups, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy men,
whom we shall consider in a later chapter.
Now the fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents are
in the English revolution respectively conservatives, moderates, and
extremists, is a bit confusing to the modern reader. For the extreme
idealists, these seventeenth-century Englishmen are fighting over
religious matters, fighting for ideals, and he finds it absurd to
equate them with Frenchmen fighting for worldly liberty, equality,
and fraternity, and shocking to compare them with Russians fighting
for crude economic interests. On the other hand, the modern convert
to the economic interpretation of history is likely to regard these
religious differences as mere “ideologies,” or pretexts for a quarrel
which was really a simple economic one. To him, the Presbyterians
were small gentry or bourgeois business men, the Independents petty
bourgeois traders, artisans, and yeomen farmers who quarreled after
they had disposed of the feudal upper classes. Both the idealist and
the materialist are here clearly wrong. Politics, economics, church
government, and theology are inextricably mingled in the minds and
sentiments of seventeenth-century Englishmen. Their conflicts are
conflicts between human beings, not between the abstractions of the
philosopher, the economist, or the sociologist. We must here observe
the ways in which these conflicts worked out. From many points of
view, it is profitable to regard these conflicts as exhibiting the
sequence of domination first by conservatives, then by moderates,
then by extremists. Naturally these conservatives, moderates, and
extremists were not identical with similar groups in later revolutions.
As compared with the men of 1789 or of 1917, they read different books,
disputed over different ideas, just as they wore different clothes. Yet
the course of their revolution does display a striking identity with
our other revolutions in the relation between political organization
and human temperaments. The Presbyterian “compromisers” were pushed
aside by more determined and extreme men, just as were the Feuillants
and Girondins in France and the Kadets and compromisist Socialist
groups in Russia.
Under the leadership of the Westminster Assembly, a Presbyterian synod
which began its meetings in the summer of 1643, that part of England
under parliamentary control was brought under the famed Scottish
Covenant. Crosses, images, crucifixes were torn down, the stained glass
removed from the churches, sermons lengthened, and liturgy simplified.
Parliament became the supreme law of the land. But already there were
signs that the Presbyterian rule was not to go unchallenged. Marston
Moor was not a Presbyterian victory. It was won by Cromwell and his
“Ironsides”; and these men were not good Presbyterians. They were
Independents, and some were Anabaptists, Antinomians, Heaven knows
what! It is said that someone complained to Cromwell because one of his
officers was an Anabaptist, and received the reply, “Admit he be, shall
that render him incapable to serve the public? Take heed of being too
sharp ... against those to whom you can object little but that they
square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.”
When the New Model Army was constructed from the nucleus of
Cromwell’s Ironsides, and had won the Battle of Naseby, army and
Parliament, Independent and Presbyterian, extremists and moderates,
found themselves in opposition on various questions, notably on
religious toleration and on what was to be done about Charles I. The
Presbyterians wanted an established state church, built on their own
notions of church government and theology, with a minimum of toleration
towards papists and prelatists on the right and the sects on the
left. And they most certainly wanted a king, even if that king were
Charles Stuart. The Independents wanted what they called toleration.
They certainly didn’t mean what a nineteenth-century Englishman or an
American meant by religious toleration, and when they got into power
they were very far from practicing toleration, even in the sense in
which they had preached it. But at least while they were in opposition
they agreed that religious belief was a personal matter and that the
state should not seek to impose identical religious practices and
organization on its citizens. As for the King, most of them by 1645
were sure Charles Stuart would never do. Cromwell was probably never a
doctrinaire republican, but a great many of his men certainly were.
No single event marks exactly the transfer of power from the moderates
to the extremists in England. The process had gone pretty far when
Cornet Joyce of the army in June, 1646, seized the King at Holmby
House as he was about to yield to the Parliament and consent for three
years to govern as a Presbyterian king. It was almost completed when
two months later Parliament at the dictation of the army reluctantly
consented to the exclusion of eleven of its own members, conspicuous
leaders of the Presbyterian group. Charles took the occasion of the
quarrel to attempt to further his own interests. His complicated
intrigues ended in nothing better than a brief war between the
Scottish Presbyterians and the Cromwellians, in which for a moment the
moderates could look up hopefully. Cromwell defeated the Scotch at
Preston Pans in August, 1648, and the army was in undisputed control in
Great Britain. After this the formal end of the moderates at Pride’s
Purge in December was unimportant. Colonel Pride and a few soldiers
were stationed at the door of the House of Commons to turn back the
unsuitable members as they came. Ninety-six Presbyterians were thus
excluded, leaving a group of fifty or sixty regular voting members on
whom the extremists could rely. The Long Parliament had become the Rump.
In America the conflict never took quite such clear lines. We may say
that the conservatives were those Tories who never really complained
about the imperial government, the moderates those merchants and
prosperous landowners who in a sense began the whole movement by their
agitation against the Stamp Act, and the radicals that by no means
united group which finally put through the Declaration of Independence.
There was thus a kind of three-way struggle going on among these
groups in the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities with the
British Army. In this struggle the radicals exhibited an extraordinary
technical skill in the practical politics of revolution. As John
Adams later wrote of the organizations which, starting with local
committees of correspondence and committees of safety, worked up to
the continental congresses: “What an engine! France imitated it and
produced a revolution.... And all Europe was inclined to imitate it for
the same revolutionary purpose.”
The radicals really won their decisive victory by organizing as they
did the first Continental Congress in 1774. Professor A. M. Schlesinger
admirably summarizes the work of this Congress: “The radicals had
achieved several important ends. They had reproduced on a national
scale a type of organization and a species of tactics that in many
parts of British America had enabled a determined minority to seize
control of affairs ... they had snatched from the merchant class the
weapons which the latter had fashioned to advance their own selfish
interests in former years, and had now reversed the weapons on them,
in an attempt to secure ends desired solely by the radicals. Finally,
they had defined--nationalized--the issue at stake in such a manner as
to afford prestige to radical groups, wherever they were to be found,
and to weaken the hold of the moderate elements, on the ground that the
latter were at variance with the Continental Congress.”
The taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in France sealed the
defeat of the most conservative group, the true Royalists. The
victorious revolutionists did not long remain in harmony, and the
process of transfer of power to the left began in a few months. In
October of the same year the King and Queen were riotously brought back
to Paris from Versailles in what are known as the October Days. These
events sent into exile the leaders of the moderate conservatives,
men like Mounier who greatly admired the English Constitution, and
wished France to have a bicameral legislature with a House of Lords
and a House of Commons, and a real king. For the next few years a
group of moderates centering about men like Mirabeau, Lafayette and
the Lameths, were opposed by a group of radicals centering around
men--Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, Brissot--soon to be leaders of
the rival republican groups of Gironde and Mountain, but at present
united against the moderates. The moderates succeeded in making the
Constitution, and starting the new regime off. But war between France
and the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia broke out,
certain provisions of the Constitution, notably those concerning
religion and the monarchy, failed to work well, Louis himself was
suspected of treason by many of his subjects, and in the general
political turmoil the active and well-organized radicals overthrew
the monarchy in the famous attack on the Tuileries Palace in Paris on
August 10, 1792.
Avowed monarchists and such mild reformers and liberals as Lafayette
were thus excluded from power, and France became a republic. But the
final and critical defeat of the moderates in France is better placed
on June 2, 1793. In matters of this sort, as in any splitting up of
historical events into periods, there may be legitimate differences of
interpretation. Conservatives, moderates, and radicals and extremists
are not in any of our societies absolutely clear-cut and definite
groups, nor is the transference of power from one to another very often
a single event agreed upon by all to be such. You may feel that no
moderate could have voted the end of the French monarchy. None the less
it would seem that the right wing of the republicans, known to history
as the Girondins, and to their contemporaries as the Brissotins,
were really moderates upon whom circumstances forced actions to
them disagreeably radical and extreme. Notably they did not wish the
death of the King. They were mostly prosperous bourgeois, lawyers and
intellectuals, and after the trial of the King in January, 1793, they
became very sure that the revolution had gone far enough, that it ought
to be stopped. Whatever their past, they had now become moderates. By
the early months of 1793 they had lost control of the Paris Jacobin
Club and with it most of the other revolutionary clubs and the whole
network of organizations which had helped the radicals achieve their
ends in the early days of the revolution. They could not command the
support of the hesitating and more or less neutral mass of deputies in
the Convention who were called the Plain. Their enemies were better
organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous. They were
certainly more successful.
Just as with the Presbyterians in England, there came the demand
that these now moderate leaders be excluded from the Convention and
brought under arrest. In a test of strength in the Convention on June
2, 1793, the extremists took care to surround the meeting-place of
that body with sympathetic Parisian militiamen, back of whom assembled
a large and hostile crowd. The Convention tried to stand on their
representative dignity and to refuse to permit the arrest of the
twenty-two members demanded by the Mountain. Headed by their president,
they solemnly marched out to ensure that their position be respected
as the embodiment of the will of the people. The deputies made the
circuit of the gardens, finding an unyielding row of bayonets at every
gate, and a “people” with a temporary will of its own. They returned
indoors and voted the arrest of the twenty-two Girondins. The radical
Montagnards were now in undisputed command.
Events moved rather faster in Russia, but their sequence is almost
identical with those in England and in France. The first provisional
government headed nominally by Prince Lvov, really by Miliukov, was
made up mostly of Kadets, the left wing of middle-class groups in the
old Duma, but no more than “progressives,” “liberals,” or “democrats”
in Western political terminology. There were several representatives
of more conservative groups, and only one Socialist, Kerensky. After
a life of less than two months, this government broke down over the
question of continuing an “imperialist” war on the side of the allies.
Miliukov was forced out for too great compliance with the imperialism
of the allies, and a number of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries
accepted positions in the new government. In July Kerensky took the
formal leadership after a crisis, and in September the Kadets finally
withdrew altogether, leaving Kerensky at the head of a very shaky
moderate Socialist government.
The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois
governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by
the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost
all the fractions into which this political faith had split in
twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within
Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian
history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the
specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks,
Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope
to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win
the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods
to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the
Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate
with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan
Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their
collaborators to the Left.
The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments.
They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner
or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached
and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to
enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian
revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means
unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together,
and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage
of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a
premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and
reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin
into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent
swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt
of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process
the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following.
Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and
elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control.
Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the
party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a
masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution
committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived
to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the
Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and
almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms
the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October
revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or
June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French
revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the
Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule
of the moderates in Russia was over.
_III. Dual Sovereignty_
The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that
lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power
from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center
to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better,
a process that works through a very similar set of institutions.
Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the
_dvoevlastie_, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing
overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty.
We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.
The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep
hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more,
having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from
these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may
well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group
of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide
questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would
seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes,
quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state
seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting
the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and
identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And
yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of
institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their
conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may
seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may
well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do
not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do
things they do very successfully.
But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided--or
forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the
decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from
agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous
groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a
given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United
States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions
become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.
When another and conflicting chain of institutions provides another
and conflicting set of decisions, then you have a dual sovereignty.
Within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders, and
laws demand obedience, not in one single respect, but in the whole
interwoven series of actions which make up life for the average man.
Thus the nullification of the Prohibition Amendment by many citizens
over large areas of the United States did not in itself mean that there
was in this country a revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty.
Were a similar nullification extended by, let us say, a strengthened
amalgamation of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for
Industrial Organization from the Fourteenth Amendment on through to the
common law of property; were this amalgamation to enforce laws of its
own on workers in factories; were it to take over many of the functions
of local government in relation to markets, sanitation, police, and so
on--we should clearly have dual sovereignty. We should, as a matter
of fact, have a state of affairs something like that in Russia in the
summer of 1917.