Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

* * * * *

THE _Anatomy of_ REVOLUTION

* * * * *

_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.

Of abortive revolutions we have numerous examples. Needless to say, abortiveness is not measured by the failure of revolutionary movements to live up to the ideals professed by their leaders. We mean by abortive simply the failure of organized groups in revolt. Thus the American Civil War is really an almost classical example of an abortive revolution. So too is the Paris Commune of 1871. The European revolutions of 1848 were on the surface mostly abortive, though in many countries they helped bring about important and comparatively permanent administrative and constitutional changes. An abortive revolution may, of course, mold the defeated revolutionary group to an even more heroic determination, and pave the way to continued underground resistance, plotting, propaganda. The blood of martyrs has built council halls and presidential palaces as well as churches. The abortive revolution is especially important in the welding together of oppressed nationalities, which after a few heroic uprisings attain a pitch of exalted patriotism and self-pity that makes them almost unbeatable. Contemporary Ireland and Poland were born of a long series of revolutions that failed, and in their final emergence as independent nations they bear the clear and unlovely scars of these great moral victories. Indeed, in a complete study of revolutions, there would have to be a special sub-class for revolutions in which a territorial or “national” group rises against another and dominating territorial or national group.

Three of our four revolutions--the English, French, and Russian, have courses in general surprisingly similar. All have a social or class rather than a territorial or nationalistic basis, though Oxford and Lancashire, the Vendée, and the Ukraine, suggest that one cannot wholly neglect these latter factors. All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship--Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin. The American revolution does not quite follow this pattern, and is therefore especially useful to us as a kind of control.

Our revolution was, perhaps predominantly, a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated throughout by patriotic American hatred for the British. On the other hand, it was also in part a social and class movement, and as time went on its social character came out more and more strongly. It never quite went through a reign of terror, though it had many terroristic aspects, usually soft-pedaled in school and popular histories. All in all, the American revolution presents a number of interesting problems, and the attempt to integrate some of its aspects with our other three revolutions promises to extend, without unduly stretching, the limits of this study. But we must always remember that the American revolution was in a sense an incomplete one, that it does not fit perfectly our conceptual scheme, that it does not show the victory of the extremists over the moderates. We must be even more cautious than with the other revolutions when we attempt to discern uniformities in the anatomy of the American revolution.

We choose then, deliberately, to isolate four revolutions for analysis, quite aware that there are many other revolutions on record. This procedure has another distinct advantage, that it enables us to dodge a good deal of unprofitable debate over the definition of “revolution.” Pages have been spent on the question as to whether to speak of an “Industrial Revolution” (which began about 1760 and is in a sense still going on) is or is not an abuse of the word “revolution.” Writers on politics have worried over the differences between political and social revolution, between a _coup d’état_, a _putsch_, and a revolution. We propose to avoid this tangle by the simple, if metaphysically somewhat disingenuous, device of declaring that since the movements with which we are concerned are commonly called revolutions, they may be so called once more.

The difference between a revolution and other kinds of changes in societies is, to judge from many past uses of the term, logically nearer to that between a mountain and a hill than to that, say, between the freezing point and the boiling point of a given substance. The physicist can measure boiling points exactly; the social scientist cannot measure change by any such exact thermometer, and say exactly when ordinary change boils over into revolutionary change. One might flirt with the notion of a “revolt point” for different social systems; England’s being at, say, 200° in some conventional scale, France’s at 150°, Japan’s at 400°, and so on. But this would be nonsense of the type altogether too common in the social sciences, which have long been in the habit of putting up mathematical false fronts. In actual practice, we let use distinguish for us between a hill and a mountain, and there is no harm in accepting the decision of use as to what to call a revolution. The important element in scientific definition is that the definition should be based on facts, and enable us to handle facts better; precision and neatness come definitely second, and are defects if they are achieved by the neglect or distortion of facts. Obviously in present usage the word revolution is a class-term covering quite a number of concrete phenomena, from the introduction of the spinning-mule to the ejection of Porfirio Diaz, and the job of the systematist is to cling to the general term and devise useful sub-classifications within it.

To such simple truths are we reduced even before we enter fully into the study of actual revolutions. Yet the really obvious, the really commonplace, does not often find its way into print. What gets there much more often is the literary commonplace, the cliché and the stereotype, the beliefs men have about things and beings they never deal with directly. The world of the pulp magazines is a world of literary commonplaces. Many an intellectual in the world usually rated above the pulps is driven by a no doubt commendable horror of the literary commonplace into an equal horror of the obvious. The scientist can afford no such indulgence. The first job of the scientist is to be obvious, for only on a firm foundation in the obvious can he build securely the more complex fabric of a developed science. He may even have to be a bit insistent and repetitive about the obvious; for in this modern world of ours, where so much of our experience is the vicarious experience of sermons, books, pictures, plays, even the simple souls who love commonplaces have literary commonplaces fobbed off on them instead of the real thing.