partly explicable in terms of the pressure of war necessities and
of economic struggles as well as of other variables: but it must
probably also be explained as in part the manifestation of an effort
to achieve intensely religious ends here on earth. The little band of
violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the
Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under
the influence of active religious faith. Independents, Jacobins,
Bolsheviks, all sought to make all human activity here on earth conform
to an ideal pattern, which, like all such patterns, seems deeply rooted
in their sentiments. A striking uniformity in all these patterns is
their asceticism, or if you prefer, their condemnation of what we
may call the minor as well as the major vices. Essentially, however,
these patterns are a good deal alike, and all resemble closely what we
may call conventional Christian ethics. Independents, Jacobins, and
Bolsheviks, at least during the crisis period, really make an effort to
enforce behavior in literal conformity with these codes or patterns.
Such an effort means stern repression of much that many men have been
used to regarding as normal; it means a kind of universal tension in
which the ordinary individual can never feel protected by the humble
routines to which he has been formed: it means that the intricate
network of interactions among individuals--a network which is still
to the few men devoted to its intelligent study almost a complete
mystery--this network is temporarily all torn apart. John Jones, the
man in the street, the ordinary man, is left floundering.
We are almost at the point of being carried away into the belief that
our conceptual scheme is something more than a mere convenience, that
it does somehow describe “reality.” At the crisis, the collective
patient does seem helpless, thrashing his way through a delirium.
But we must try to avoid the emotional, metaphorical appeal, and
concentrate on making clear what seems to be the really important point
here. Most of us are familiar with the favorite old Tory metaphor:
the violent revolutionist tears down the noble edifice society lives
in, or burns it down, and then fails to build up another, and poor
human beings are left naked to the skies. That is not a good metaphor,
save perhaps for purposes of Tory propaganda. Even at the height of a
revolutionary crisis period, more of the old building is left standing
than is destroyed. But the whole metaphor of the building is bad. We
may take instead an analogy from the human nervous system, or think
of an immensely complicated gridwork of electrical communications.
Society then appears as a kind of a network of interactions among
individuals, interactions for the most part fixed by habit, hardened
and perhaps adorned as ritual, dignified into meaning and beauty
by elaborately interwoven strands of interaction we know as law,
theology, metaphysics, and similar noble beliefs. Now sometimes many
of these interwoven strands of noble beliefs can be cut out, and
others inserted. During the crisis period of our revolutions some such
process seems to have taken place; but the whole network itself seems
so far never to have been altered suddenly and radically, and even the
noble beliefs tend to fit into the network in the same places. If you
kill off _all_ the people who live within the network, you don’t so
much change the network of course as destroy it. And in spite of our
prophets of doom, this type of destruction is rare in human history.
Certainly in none of our revolutions was there even a very close
approach to it.
What did happen, under the pressure of class struggle, war, religious
idealism, and a lot more, was that the hidden and obscure courses
which many of the interactions in the network follow were suddenly
exposed, and passage along them made difficult in the unusual
publicity and, so to speak, self-consciousness. The courses of other
interactions were blocked, and the interactions went on with the
greatest of difficulties by all sorts of detours. The courses of
still other interactions were confused, short-circuited, paired off
in strange ways. Finally, the pretensions of the fanatical leaders of
the revolution involved the attempted creation of a vast number of
new interactions. Now though for the most part these new interactions
affected chiefly those strands we have called the noble beliefs--law,
theology, metaphysics, mythology, folklore, high-power abstractions in
general--still some of them did penetrate at an experimental level into
the obscurer and less dignified part of the network of interactions
among human beings and put a further strain on it. Surely it is
no wonder that under these conditions men and women in the crisis
period should behave as they would not normally behave, that in the
crisis period nothing should seem as it used to seem, that, indeed, a
famous passage from Thucydides, written two thousand years before our
revolutions, should seem like a clinical report:
“When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed
carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined
to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of
the enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of
words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by
them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal
courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the
disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing.
Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who
wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence
was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded
in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft
was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the
first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties
and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could
outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who
encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it.... The tie of party was
stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to
dare without asking why.”
With this we may put a quotation from a much humbler source, an obscure
Siberian co-operative leader protesting against Red and White Terror
alike. Mr. Chamberlin quotes:
“And we ask and appeal to society, to the contending political
groups and parties: When will our much-suffering Russia outlive the
nightmare that is throttling it, when will deaths by violence cease?
Doesn’t horror seize you at the sight of the uninterrupted flow of
human blood? Doesn’t horror seize you at the consciousness that the
deepest, most elementary bases of the existence of human society are
perishing: the feeling of humanity, the consciousness of the value
of life, of human personality, the feeling and consciousness of the
necessity of legal order in the state?... Hear our cry and despair:
we return to prehistoric times of the existence of the human race; we
are on the verge of the death of civilization and culture; we destroy
the great cause of human progress, for which many generations of our
worthier ancestors labored.”
Certainly, however, none of our revolutions quite ended in the death
of civilization and culture. The network was stronger than the forces
trying to destroy or alter it, and in all of our societies the crisis
period was followed by a convalescence, by a return to most of the
simpler and more fundamental courses taken by interactions in the
old network. More especially, the religious lust for perfection,
the crusade for the Republic of Virtue, died out, save among a tiny
minority whose actions could not longer take place directly in
politics. An active, proselyting, intolerant, ascetic, chiliastic faith
became fairly rapidly an inactive, indifferent, worldly, ritualistic
faith.
The equilibrium has been restored and the revolution is over. But this
does not mean that nothing has been changed. Some new and useful tracks
or courses in the network of interactions that makes society have been
established, some old and inconvenient ones--you may call them unjust
if you like--have been eliminated. There is something heartless in
saying that it took the French revolution to produce the metric system
and to destroy _lods et ventes_ and similar feudal inconveniences,
or the Russian revolution to bring Russia to use the modern calendar
and to eliminate a few useless letters in the Russian alphabet.
These tangible and useful results look rather petty as measured by
the brotherhood of man and the achievement of justice on this earth.
The blood of the martyrs seems hardly necessary to establish decimal
coinage.
Yet those who feel that revolution is heroic need not despair. The
revolutionary tradition is an heroic one, and the noble beliefs which
seem necessary to all societies are in our Western democracies in part
a product of the revolutions we have been studying. Our revolutions
made tremendous and valuable additions to those strands in the
network of human interactions which can be isolated as law, theology,
metaphysics and, in the abstract sense, ethics. Had these revolutions
never occurred, you and I might still beat our wives or cheat at cards
or avoid walking under ladders, but we might not be able to rejoice in
our possession of certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, or in the comforting assurance that one more push
will bring the classless society.
When one compares the whole course of these revolutions, certain
tentative uniformities suggest themselves. If the Russian revolution at
the end of our series is compared with the English at its beginning,
there seems to be a development of conscious revolutionary technique.
This is of course especially clear since Marx made the history of
revolutionary movements of the past a necessary preparation for
revolutionists of the present. Lenin and his collaborators had a
training in the technique of insurrection which Independents and
Jacobins lacked. Robespierre seems almost a political innocent
when his revolutionary training is compared with that of any good
Bolshevik leader. Sam Adams, it must be admitted, seems a good deal
less innocent. All in all, it is probable that this difference in the
explicitness of self-conscious preparation for revolution, this growth
of a copious literature of revolution, this increasing familiarity of
revolutionary ideas, is not one of the very important uniformities we
have to record. It is a conspicuous uniformity, but not an important
one. Revolutions are still not a form of logical action. The Bolsheviks
do not seem to have guided their actions by the “scientific” study of
revolutions to an appreciably greater degree than the Independents or
the Jacobins. They simply adapted an old technique to the days of the
telegraph and railroad trains.
This last suggests another conspicuous but not very important tendency
in our four revolutions. They took place in societies increasingly
influenced by the “Industrial Revolution,” increasingly subject to
those changes in scale which our modern conquests of time and space
have brought to societies. Thus the Russian revolution directly
affected more people and more square miles of territory than any
previous revolution; its sequence of events compresses into a few
months what in England in the seventeenth century had taken years to
achieve; in its use of the printing press, telegraph, radio, airplanes
and the rest it seems, as compared with our other revolutions,
definitely a streamlined affair. But again we may well doubt whether
such changes of scale are in themselves really important factors. Men’s
desires are the same, whether they ride towards their achievement in
airplanes or on horseback. Revolutions may be bigger nowadays, but
surely not better. The loudspeaker does not change the words.
Finally, at the risk of being tedious, we must come back to some of the
problems of methods in the social sciences which were suggested in our
first chapter. We must admit that the theorems, the uniformities, which
we have been able to put forward in terms of our conceptual scheme, are
vague. They cannot be stated in quantitative terms, cannot be used for
purposes of prediction or control. But at the very outset we warned the
reader not to expect too much. Even such vague theorems as that of the
desertion of the intellectuals, that of the role of force in the first
stages of revolution, that of the part played by “religious” enthusiasm
in the period of crisis, that of the pursuit of pleasure during
Thermidor, are, one hopes, not without value for the study of men in
society. In themselves they amount to little, but they suggest certain
possibilities in further work.
In the first place, by their very inadequacies they point to the
necessity for a more rigorous treatment of the problems involved,
challenging those who find them incomplete and unsatisfactory to do a
better job. In the second place, they will serve the purpose of all
first approximations in scientific work--they will suggest further
study of the facts, especially in those fields where the attempt to
make first approximations has uncovered an insufficient supply of
the necessary facts. Notably here the facts for a study of class
antagonisms are woefully inadequate. So, too, are the facts for a study
of the circulation of the elite in pre-revolutionary societies. But
there are a hundred such holes, some of which can surely be filled.
Our first approximations will then lead the way to another’s second
approximations. No scientist should ask more.
_III. A Paradox of Revolution_
Wider uniformities will, to judge by the past of science, some day
emerge from more complete studies of the sociology of revolutions. Here
we dare not hazard much that we have not already brought out in the
course of our analysis of four specific revolutions. After all, these
are but four revolutions of what seems to be the same type, revolutions
in what may be not too uncritically called the democratic tradition.
So precious a word is “revolution” to many in that tradition, and
especially to Marxists, that they indignantly refuse to apply it to
such movements as the relatively bloodless but certainly violent and
illegal assumption of power by Mussolini or Hitler. These movements,
we are told, were not revolutions because they did not take power from
one class and give it to another. Obviously with a word in some ways
as imprecise as “revolution” you can play all sorts of tricks like
this. But for the scientific study of social change it seems wise to
apply the word revolution to the overthrow of an established and legal
parliamentary government by Fascists. If this is so, then our four
revolutions are but one kind of revolution, and we must not attempt
to make them bear the strain of generalizations meant to apply to all
revolutions.
It is even more tempting to try to fit these revolutions into something
like a philosophy of history. But the philosophy of history is almost
bound to lead into the kind of prophetic activity we have already
firmly forsworn. It may be that mankind is now in the midst of a
universal “time of troubles” from which it will emerge into some
kind of universal authoritarian order. It may be that the democratic
revolutionary tradition is no longer a living and effective one. It
may be that the revolutions we have studied could only have taken
place in societies in which “progress” was made a concrete thing
by opportunities for economic expansion which cannot recur in our
contemporary world, with no more frontiers and no more big families.
It may even be that the Marxists are right, and that imperialistic
capitalism is now digging its own grave, preparing the inevitable
if long-delayed world revolution of the proletariat. There are many
possibilities, as to which it is almost true that one man’s guess is
as good as another’s. Certainly a conscientious effort to study four
great revolutions in the modern world as a scientist might cannot end
in anything as ambitious and as unscientific as social prognosis.
We need not, however, end on a note of blank skepticism. It would
seem that there are, from the study of these revolutions, three major
conclusions to be drawn: first, that, in spite of their undeniable and
dramatic differences, they do present certain simple uniformities of
the kind we have tried to bring together under our conceptual scheme of
the fever; second, that they point sharply to the necessity of studying
men’s deeds and men’s words without assuming that there is always a
logical connection between the two, since throughout their courses,
and especially at their crises, they frequently exhibit men saying one
thing and doing another; third, that they indicate that in general many
things men do, many human habits, sentiments, dispositions, cannot
be changed at all rapidly, that the attempt made by the extremists
to change them by law, terror, and exhortation fails, that the
convalescence brings them back not greatly altered.
As to what the experience of a great revolution does to the society
that experiences it, we cannot conclude here too widely without
trespassing on wider fields of history and sociology. Yet it does seem
that the patient emerges stronger in some respects from the conquered
fever, immunized in this way and that from attacks that might be more
serious. It is an observable fact that in all our societies there was
a certain flourishing, a peak of varied cultural achievements, after
the revolutions. Certainly we may not moralize too much about the
stupidities and cruelties of revolutions, may not lift up our hands in
horror. It is quite possible that wider study would show that feeble
and decadent societies do not undergo revolutions, that revolutions
are, perversely, a sign of strength and youth in societies.
Certainly one quiet person emerges from his study, not indeed untouched
by a good deal of horror and disgust, but moved also with admiration
for a deep and unfathomable strength in men which, because of the
softer connotations of the word, he is reluctant to call spiritual.
Montaigne saw and felt it long ago: “I see not one action, or three,
or a hundred, but a commonly accepted state of morality so unnatural,
especially as regards inhumanity and treachery, which are to me the
worst of all sins, that I have not the heart to think of them without
horror; and they excite my wonder almost as much as my detestation.
_The practice of these egregious villainies has as much the mark of
strength and vigor of soul as of error and disorder._”
Berkman the anarchist, who loathes the Russian revolution, tells a
story which may represent merely his own bias, but which may none the
less serve as a brief symbolical epilogue to this study. Berkman says
he asked a good Bolshevik acquaintance during the period of attempted
complete communization under Lenin why the famous Moscow cabmen, the
izvoschiks, who continued in diminished numbers to flit about Moscow
and to get enormous sums in paper roubles for their services, were not
nationalized like practically everything else. The Bolshevik replied,
“We found that if you don’t feed human beings they continue to live
somehow. But if you don’t feed the horses, the stupid beasts die.
That’s why we don’t nationalize the cabmen.” That is not an altogether
cheerful story, and in some ways one may regret the human capacity
to live without eating. But clearly if we were as stupid--or as
sensible--as horses we should have no revolutions.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
The following bibliography is not intended to be a scholarly one.
It does not even include all the somewhat varied sources which have
gone into this study of revolutions. It is intended solely as a guide
to individuals or groups who may wish to attempt the difficult but
rewarding study of revolutions. As such, it is merely suggestive, but
it is complete enough so that anyone using all the leads these books
and their bibliographies offer would soon find himself very completely
immersed in the subject.
_I. Historical Writing on the Four Revolutions_
The first part of this bibliography aims to introduce the reader to
some of the best-known historical writing about the four revolutions
with which we are here concerned. Some of the later and not yet tested
writing on these periods will also be included. But here least of all
could anything like completeness be attempted. A full bibliography of
French history alone from 1750 to 1815 would list books enough to fill
a library; at a guess, including pamphlets and articles in periodicals,
there would be well over three hundred thousand titles. Writings on
the Russian revolution are already almost as numerous, and even more
varied. The reader will simply find in these books an opportunity to
check the supply of facts from which we have attempted to discover
uniformities in the course of our revolutions.
A. ENGLAND
Eduard Bernstein, _Cromwell and Communism_. London, 1930. A belated
but useful translation of the famous revisionist’s _Sozialismus und
Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution_ which appeared in
German before the war. This is a necessary correction to the purely
political and conventional interests of Gardiner, and even of Firth.
L. F. Brown, _The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth
Monarchy Men in England during the Interregnum_. Washington, 1912.
C. H. Firth, _Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England_.
3rd edition. London, 1924. The great work of our generation on Cromwell.
S. R. Gardiner, _A History of England, 1603-1642_; _A History of
the Great Civil War, 1642-1649_; _A History of the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, 1649-1656_. Various editions and volumes. The whole work
is usually in some 17 volumes. This is the “classic” history of the
period, written in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is a
sound but rather dull political history, but it does not touch at all
on much that would interest us in the fields of economic, social, and
intellectual history.
G. P. Gooch, _English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_. 2nd
edition with notes and appendices by H. J. Laski. Cambridge, England,
1927. Indispensable.
H. J. C. Grierson, _Cross Currents in English Literature of the
Seventeenth Century_. London, 1929. Excellent intellectual history.
T. C. Pease, _The Leveller Movement_. Washington, 1916. A very useful
monograph, especially as a corrective to Bernstein’s socialistic view
of Lilburne and the Levelers.
L. von Ranke, _A History of England principally in the Seventeenth
Century_. English translation, London, 1875. Another classic of
narrative history.
G. M. Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_. New York, 1930. Perhaps
the best of our modern manuals, though distinctly in the traditions
of pleasant British liberalism, which are always a bit shocked by the
facts of revolution. This book has a convenient bibliography.
B. AMERICA
C. W. Alvord, _The Mississippi Valley in British Politics_. 2 vols.
Cleveland, 1917. An important monograph opening up an important field
neglected in earlier studies of the American revolution.
C. M. Andrews, _Colonial Background of the American Revolution_. New
Haven, 1924.
C. L. Becker, _The Eve of the Revolution_ (Vol. 11 of the _Chronicles
of America_). New Haven, 1921. _The Declaration of Independence._ New
York, 1922. Both these books bring to the study of political change a
rare and thorough knowledge of how men think and feel.
G. L. Beer, _British Colonial Policy, 1754-1756_. New York, 1907. The
last volume of a thorough monographic treatment of the old British
Empire, especially with respect to matters of trade and taxation.
B. Faÿ, _The Revolutionary Spirit in France and in the United States_.
English translation, New York, 1927. Extremely valuable for the study
of ideas.
J. F. Jameson, _The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement_. Princeton, 1926. Suggestive, and in many ways a pioneer
essay. But a long and thorough monograph with the same title would be
useful. Recent Marxist attempts to do something of the sort have not
amounted to much.
J. C. Miller, _Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda_. Boston, 1936. One of
the best studies of revolutionary propaganda and technique available
for any revolution.
A. M. Schlesinger, _Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution_.
New York, 1918. This monograph brought the realistic study of the
American revolution a tremendous leap forward.