Revolutions

A Worldwide Introduction to Political and Social Change

Stephen K. Sanderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594517051
• eBook ISBN: 9781317264569
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This expanded, updated edition of Revolutions offers a new chapter on terrorism and on social movements, including jihadism. Revolutions and state breakdowns are the primary focus as Sanderson presents prominent theories and describes the process of revolutions. The book covers famous revolutions from history (France, Russia, China) and several social and political revolutions in the Third World (Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and the Philippines). Given the frequency of revolutionary movements, a key question addressed by the book is 'Why are actual revolutions so rare?' Sanderson also assesses the state breakdowns in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after 1989, the typical outcomes of revolutions, and the future of revolutions. An appendix presents biographical and autobiographical sketches of several of the most prominent scholars of revolutions.

Chapter One

Understanding Revolutions

The Nature of Revolutions

What is a revolution? Wilbert Moore (1963), a well-known student of social change, thinks of revolutions as a form of change that involves violence, that engages a large portion of the population, and that produces a transformation of the overall structure of government. John Dunn (1972) sees revolutions as a form of change that is massive, violent, and rapid. Samuel Huntington (1968:264), in a definition that has been favorably endorsed by many, conceives of a revolution as a “rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activity and policies.”

A. S. Cohan (1975) lists six characteristics that revolutions are typically thought to have:

1. Alteration of the basic values and myths of a society.

2. Alteration of the social structure.

3. Alteration of social institutions.

4. Changes in the structure of leadership, in terms of either the personnel of the elite or its class composition.

5. Nonlegal or illegal transfer of power.

6. Presence or dominance of violence in the actions leading a regime to collapse.

Cohan suggests that most definitions of revolution will include several of these attributes, and it is certainly possible for a definition to include them all. Cohan himself prefers to see the attributes “violence” and “value change” as least essential. His own definition of revolution (1975:31) identifies it as “that process by which a radical alteration of a particular society occurs over a given time span. Such alteration would include (a) a change in the class composition of elites, (b) the elimination of previous political institutions and their replacement by others (or by none), or an alteration of the functions of these institutions, and (c) changes in the social structure which would be reflected in the class arrangements and/or the redistribution of resources and income.” This is certainly an all-encompassing definition, but it may be too restrictive to apply to every single event that some social analyst somewhere wants to call by the name revolution.

Theda Skocpol, one of the foremost students of revolutions today, has formulated a widely popular definition that draws a distinction between social revolutions, political revolutions, and rebellions. Social revolutions, she tells us, are (1979:4) “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.” Political revolutions, by contrast, involve the transformation of state structures without any corresponding transformation of class or social structures. Rebellions occur when subordinate social classes revolt but no fundamental structural change in society or politics occurs.

Jack Goldstone (1991) has used the alternative concept of state breakdown. For him, a state breakdown occurs when a society’s government undergoes a crisis so severe that its capacity to govern is severely crippled. Only some state breakdowns become actual revolutions, which involve dramatic transformations of social and political institutions. Many state breakdowns lead to only limited social and political changes, changes that are not dramatic enough to warrant the label of revolution. Indeed, Goldstone uses the concept of state breakdown in preference to that of revolution because his interest in political crisis and change is broader than that indicated by the term revolution.

Another prominent scholar of the overall subject, Charles Tilly (1978, 1986, 1993), is even more general than Goldstone. He uses the term collective action to identify a wide range of forms of sociopolitical conflict. These include not only revolutions and rebellions but also strikes, revolts, civil wars, and the like. At the level of explanation, Tilly has formulated an overall theory, quite abstract by design, that is intended to apply to all of these conflictive phenomena.

In this book I neither formulate nor rely on any single definition of revolution conceived as superior to all others. The definitions presented above seem to do a reasonable job of addressing the most critical elements of revolutions. Moreover, avoiding any single definition at the outset helps us avoid boxing ourselves into a corner, for when we look at theories of revolution we will see that the explanations of revolutions offered by individual theorists pertain to revolutions (or state breakdowns, collective action, etc.) as they are conceived by each theorist. Although these theorists are broadly addressing the same basic issue, there are sufficient differences in the focus of each to warrant maintaining conceptual flexibility.

What, then, are some of history’s more prominent and interesting examples of revolutions and other sociopolitically conflictive phenomena? At one end we have the so-called Great Revolutions. These are the French Revolution of 1789, said by many to be a “bourgeois revolution,” or one that ushered in the basic economic, social, and political structure of modern capitalism; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (also known as the Russian Revolution), which transformed Russia into the Soviet Union; and the Chinese Revolution that began in 1911 and culminated in 1949 with a transfer of power and major social and economic changes. These are full-scale social revolutions in Skocpol’s sense of the term. To these may be added social revolutions in the Third World, such as the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the Nicaraguan Revolution of the same year. Then there are the less dramatic political revolutions. In Europe and Asia these have included the English Revolution of the 1640s and the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868. Third World political revolutions have occurred in Mexico in 1911 and, much more recently, in the Philippines in 1986 when Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from power and replaced by a new government.

Revolutions are distinctly modern phenomena, limited at most to the last 500 years. They are a product of the modern world specifically because of the enormous changes wrought by the rise of modern capitalism and the growth of the modern state. As Tilly (1993:33) notes, with the beginnings of the modern world, states “began exerting much more extensive controls over populations, resources and activities—taxing, conscripting, commandeering, regulating, policing, erecting systems of surveillance. With the growth of massive national armed forces and the attendant growth of state budgets, almost all states erected wider, deeper, more direct systems of control. Central control extended, obviously, to property, production and political activity.” As a result of these changes, “the residents of a national territory fell increasingly under the obligation to yield labour, goods, money and loyalty to the state, but also acquired rights of redress, voice and compensation. That process broadened popular politics” (1993:34).

Describing these social and political revolutions is the goal of the next two chapters. First, however, we need to consider some intellectual background.

Concepts for Understanding Revolutions

Modes of Production

A good understanding of some basic sociological and historical concepts should prove very useful in understanding revolutionary phenomena. A good starting point is the concept of mode of production. This is a concept that derives from the thinking of the social theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883) and is still basic to the Marxian tradition of social thinking. A mode of production is a large-scale structure of economic production characteristic of whole societies, regions within societies, or large regional or even global configurations or systems of societies. Every mode of production contains both forces of production and relations of production. Forces of production are primarily technological; they are the tools, techniques, and methods that people most commonly use in a given time and place in producing a living. The features of the natural environment may also be counted among the productive forces. Relations of production, on the other hand, refer to the modes of property ownership that characterize a mode of production. Productive relations are a matter of who owns the means of production, how they put them to use, and how they seek to use the labor of those individuals and groups excluded from productive ownership.

In his original thinking, Marx distinguished four major modes of production throughout human history, which he described as stages in the evolution of social life: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. The last of these, capitalism, would eventually be replaced by a fifth—a universal socialist stage. Primitive communism was the oldest and earliest stage of human society. Here humans lived by hunting, gathering, simple forms of agriculture, animal herding, or some combination of these. The productive forces were little developed, which made life difficult; on the other hand, social life was not characterized by any form of private ownership of the means of production, and so people were essentially equal; no one oppressed or exploited anyone else. Because of the privations imposed by this rather primitive form of society, people were motivated to develop and expand their tools and technological methods. As they eventually accomplished this, however, communal relations of production were replaced by private ownership, and the slave mode of production (sometimes called the ancient mode) emerged. Here a small fraction of the population owned not only large tracts of land but also human subjects, which they used to produce enormous quantities of wealth. Marx thought that the slave or ancient mode extended all the way back in time to the earliest civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but he considered ancient Rome and Greece to be the quintessential examples of this stage of social life. As is widely known, Roman society was the successor to Greek civilization, and Rome evolved from a small republic into a large empire. It blossomed for hundreds of years, conquering many lands and capturing from them the many workers it needed for the large-scale slave system that was essential to the maintenance of its social and economic order.

By the end of the second century C.E., however, Rome was in a state of decline, and in the late fifth century it suffered a final collapse. This once-great civilization had disintegrated and was now overrun by barbarian invaders from various parts of Europe. They created a new mode of production, feudalism. Feudalism differed in several important ways from the old ancient mode. For one thing, it did not have an imperial political or military structure, being highly decentralized politically. In addition, slavery as a labor method gradually disappeared and was replaced with serfdom, a mode of labor organization in which unfree peasants become the primary labor force. Unfree peasants—more accurately, serfs—are not owned o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• A Note to Students and Professors
• Chapter 1 Understanding Revolutions
• Chapter 2 The Great Historical Revolutions
• Chapter 3 Revolutions in the Third World
• Chapter 4 The Causes of Revolutions: I
• Chapter 5 The Causes of Revolutions: II
• Chapter 6 Revolutions from Above in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
• Chapter 7 The Outcomes of Revolutions
• Chapter 8 Terrorism and Terrorist Movements
• Epilogue: The Future of Revolutions and Terrorist Movements
• Appendix: Ten Leading Students of Revolutions
• Suggested Readings
• References
• Index
• About the Author