The Road Not Taken
Page 78
97. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in Britain’, History Today, 1 (1957), pp. 15–24; cf. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, pp. 23–33.
98. Hill, Sociology of Religion, p. 185.
99. H. Clegg, A. Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unionism (Oxford, 1964), pp. 466–70.
100. Ross McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism’, pp. 297–331.
101. Ibid.
102. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in R. Miliband and J. Savile, eds, The Socialist Register (1965), p. 343.
103. McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism’, pp. 304–6.
104. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics in London, 1870–1900’, Journal of Social History, 7 (1974), pp. 484–6.
105. E. F. Dubin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940), p. 235.
106. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (1909), pp. 142–3.
107. McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism’, pp. 317, 322.
108. D. McLellan, ed., Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Oxford, 1977), pp. 594–5.
109. McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism’, pp. 330–1.
110. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
111. Andrew Thorpe, ‘The Only Effective Bulwark against Reaction and Revolution: Labour and the Frustrations of the Extreme Left’, in Andrew Thorpe, ed., The Failure of Extremism in Interwar Britain (Exeter, 1989), pp. 11–28 (at p. 18).
112. Ibid., pp. 27–8.
113. See Richard Hefferman, New Labour and Thatcherism (2001).
114. E. Estorick, Sir Stafford Cripps: A Biography (1949), p. 122.
115. Arthur Henderson, The Aim of Labour (Manchester, 1918), pp. 67–70.
Appendix
1. Clifton B. Kroeber, ‘Theory and History of Revolution’, Journal of World History, 7 (1996), pp. 21–40.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (NY, 1955), pp. 176–7.
3. Ibid., pp. 195–6.
4. For a brief synopsis of Marx’s theory it is difficult to improve on L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (2005), pp. 150–353.
5. Karl Marx, Capital, Book 1, Ch. 31.
6. Peter Boesche, Tocqueville’s Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution and Despotism (MD, 2006), p. 86. My understanding of Tocqueville and his reflections on the French Revolution has also been enhanced by Robert T. Garnett, Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for the Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 2003), and Cheryl Welch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (Cambridge, 2006).
7. Jack Goldstone, ‘Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation’, World Politics, 32 (1980), pp. 425–533; John Fortan, ‘Theories of Revolution Revisited: Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), pp. 139–87.
8. See G. Lebon, The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution (New Brunswick, 1980).
9. Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (1970), esp. pp. 11, 24–6, 48, 59, 232; Faye Crosby, ‘Relative Deprivation Revisited’, American Political Science Review, 73 (1979), pp. 50–6; Ted Gurr, ‘A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices’, American Political Science Review, 62 (1968), pp. 1105–24.
10. D. C. Schwartz, Anger, Violence and Politics (Chicago, 1973).
11. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (NY, 1963), pp. 18–19. ‘No revolution was ever made in the name of Christianity prior to the modern age.’ Ibid., p. 19.
12. James C. Davies, ‘Circumstances and Causes of Revolution: A Review’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 11 (1987), pp. 247–57; Davies, ‘J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of Revolutions and Rebellions’, in Hugh Davies Graham and Ted R. Gurr, eds, Violence in the Americas: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (NY, 1969), pp. 671–709.
13. Lawrence Stone, ‘Theories of Revolution’, World Politics, 18 (1966), pp. 159–76.
14. See, for example, the contrast in the same volume between Richard Bessel, ‘1933: A Failed Counter-Revolution’, in E. E. Rice, ed., Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 109–29 (at p. 113) and Fred Halliday, ‘The Third World: 1945 and After’, in ibid., pp. 129–52 (at p. 135).
15. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 11–12
16. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (1953), pp. 42–53, 70.
17. Ibid., pp. 38, 54–70.
18. Ibid., pp. 101–3.
19. Ibid., p. 2.
20. See the critique in Torbjohn L. Knutsen and Jennifer L. Bailey, ‘Over the Hill? The Anatomy of Revolution at Fifty’, Journal of Peace Research, 26 (1989), pp. 421–431
21. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, pp. 226–37
22. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in J. C. Nimmo, ed., The Works of the Rt Hon. Edmund Burke, 12 vols (1887), iii, p. 280.
23. Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston, 1966), pp. 69–72.
24. Ibid., pp. 57, 91.
25. Chalmers Johnson, Revolution and the Social System (Stanford, 1964), pp. 34–57
26. Ibid.
27. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 149–57.
28. Ibid., p. 117.
29. Ibid., pp. 155–7, 172–3.
30. Ibid., pp. 89, 99, 128–37.
31. Ibid., pp. 68–74, 78.
32. Ibid., pp. 123–4.
33. Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics and Revolutions: Pressures Towards Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton, 1975), p. 216.
34. See J. Himmelstein and M. S. Kimmel, ‘States and Revolutions: The Implications and Limits of Skocpol’s Structural Model’, American Journal of Sociology, 86 (1981), pp. 1145–54; W. Sewell, ‘Ideology and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), pp. 57–85; cf. also David Parker, ed., Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West (2000).
35. Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, p. 246.
36. Regis Debray, Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation (1994), pp. 61–2.
37. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 805–8.
38. Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991), p. 77.
39. Ibid., pp. 37, 45, and esp. pp. 83–117.
40. Ibid., pp. 250–68.
41. Ibid, p. 477.
42. E. A. Wrigley and R. Schofield, The Population History of England (Harvard, 1980), pp. 534–5.
43. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. xxvi, 459–75.
44. See, for example, A. S. Cohan, Theories of Revolution: An Introduction (NY, 1975); Mark N. Hagopian, The Phenomenon of Revolution (1975); Perez Zagorin, ‘Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography’, Political Science Quarterly, 88 (1973), pp. 23–52.
45. Respectively, S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolutions and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (NY, 1978); Arendt, On Revolution, p. 21.
46. R. M. MacIver, The Modern State (Oxford, 1966), p. 212.
47. Samuel P. Huntingdon, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), pp. 3–5, 32–3, 47–50, 265–76.
48. See the summary in Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984), pp. 3–14.
49. J. C. D. Clark, ‘Revolution in the English Atlantic Empire’, in Rice, ed. Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 27–93 (at p. 28).
50. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford, 1995), p. 16.
51. James C. Davies, ‘J-Curve’, in Graham and Gurr, Violence in the Americas. Nevertheless, even these waters can be muddied. One influential social scientist described the American Civil War as a political revolution (T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1962), p. 93).
52. Charles Tilly, ‘Changing Forms of Revolution’, in Rice, ed
., Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 1–25 (at p. 3).
53. See Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (1981).
54. James Defronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements (Boulder, Co., 1991), pp. 171–6. See also Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (NC, 2006); Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (Oxford, 1998).
55. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 9.
56. For the proposition that the ‘American Revolution’ was not a true revolution see especially M. J. Heale, The American Revolution (1986). Skocpol, rightly in my view, takes it for granted that it was not a real revolution. On the non-revolutionary nature of the ‘American Revolution’ see also Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). For 1688 as an undistinguished epigone to the 1640s see Lawrence Stone, ‘The Results of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century’, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980) pp. 244–62; J. S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993). A valiant defence of 1688 as a true revolution is provided by Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006), pp. 512–17.
57. Martin Kaufman, ed., Shays’s Rebellion: Selected Essays (Westfield, Mass., 1987); Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: the American Revolution’s Final Battle (Pennsylvania, 2002).
58. Eva Haraszti, The Chartists (1978), p. 244. See also C. J. Calhoun, ‘Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848’, Sociological Theory, 7 (1989), pp. 210–25.
59. For theoretical discussions of the Mexican Revolution see W. L. Goldfrank, ‘Theories of Revolution and Revolution Without Theory: The Case of Mexico’, Theory and Society, 7 (1979), pp. 135–65; Dunn, Modern Revolutions, pp. 48–69. Noel Parker, Revolutions and History (2000), characterises the Mexican Revolution as ‘a cross between a late liberal revolution and an early liberation struggle’ (p. 34). For a narrative-based tour d’horizon of the Mexican Revolution see my own Villa and Zapata (2000).
60. See the discussion in Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, p. 303.
61. Tilly, ‘Changing Forms of Revolution’, p. 4.
APPENDIX
Revolution is a concept with an interesting provenance. As used in Aristotle’s classic work Politics, it indicates a mere change of constitution resulting from intra-elite (i.e. not class-based) ‘stasis’ or strife. When employed by scientists such as Copernicus, it denoted a circularity, whereby the wheel (whether celestial or terrestrial) returned to its original location after an orbit. In this sense it is indistinguishable from the circular notion of history found in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and their modern analogues.1 The modern notion of revolution can be dated fairly precisely to the French Revolution of 1789 and its most distinguished theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville. The most famous thesis in his work is that revolutions tend to occur not when social conditions are deteriorating but when they start improving both objectively and in the sense that the government of the day starts to relax oppression.2 Tyrants and despots have often defended their unblinking resistance to all change by citing Tocqueville’s brilliant observation that concessions and liberal reforms are a slippery slope, that they are the start of an inexorable process that cannot be halted. As he put it: ‘Those parts of France in which the improvement of living standards was the most pronounced were the chief centres of the revolutionary movement.’3 Against the Tocquevillian thesis of rising expectations can be set the contrary notion promoted by Karl Marx. It is well known that the core of Marxist theory is historical materialism – the notion that socio-economic structures (and the class systems they engender) are the engine of history. Marx conceded that revolution was not an inevitable or logical entailment of the process whereby one system of production was replaced by another – slavery by feudalism and feudalism by capitalism – but argued that the transition from capitalism to socialism would have to be attended by violent revolution simply because of consciousness: ruling elites knew that their privileges were at stake and would fight to maintain them, which meant that his designated historical agent – the proletariat (not the actual working class but a mythically conceived ‘class for itself’) – would in turn have to use violence. As for the precipitants towards revolution, Marx though these would be the declining rate of profit under capitalism and the consequent increasing immiseration of those who possessed nothing and had only their labour power to sell.4 Some specialists argue that Engels diverged from Marx in thinking that the revolution could be achieved by peaceful means, through parliamentary democracy and the rise of socialist parties, though he did not rule out the change-by-violence scenario. Marx, according to his critics, was more hard line and considered violence and violent revolution to be imbricated in the very process of historical materialism. One of the much-cited aphorisms from Capital is: ‘Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new one. It is itself an economic power.’5 Because Tocqueville took a more broad-based view of revolution – his definition was tripartite, embracing merely political revolutions, violent socio-economic convulsions and the profound changes wrought by, for example, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution (significantly so called), it is Tocqueville who has had more influence on modern thinking about revolution, though it would be foolish to deny Marx the palm when it comes to the practice and motivation of actual revolutionaries.6
The twentieth century saw many attempts by historians and social scientists to refine the concept of revolution. According to one influential typology, theories of revolution came in four waves, roughly emphasising psychological, sociological, political and cultural/ideological perspectives respectively.7 Yet this attempt at hermeneusis via four waves was unsatisfactory. The fourth wave in many respects returned to the first, except that Third World dimensions were emphasised in place of Western ones. In any case, to interpret revolution by psychology meant entering the minefield of academic psychology itself, with everything from crowd theory to psychoanalysis jostling for attention. At least four main theories arose. One suggested, in quasi-Freudian terms, that revolutionaries were guilty of neurotic behaviour, that dissidents threatened the essential business of society, which was to arrest mankind’s perennial impulses towards violence.8 The notion that all societies skated on remarkably thin ice and that it was remarkably easy to fall into an ontological void or chaos world was particularly popular with theorists of a conservative inclination. Another theory took up the Tocquevillian theme that the selfishness of elites was largely responsible for lighting the revolutionary fuse that detonated societies. A very popular idea at one time was that of ‘relative deprivation’, which emphasised the middle-class genesis of many revolutions. In this model the middle class was thrown into revolutionary turmoil by being taxed while the elite classes systematically evaded tax and at the very time the middle class was losing its status vis-à-vis the proletariat and other groups below. Others criticised ‘relative deprivation’ as an empty concept that could be applied in almost any historical situation; as an explanation it was therefore vacuous.9 A fourth psychological theory, influenced by psychoanalysis, stressed the notion of psychological alienation (a very different concept from alienation in the Marxist sense) and emphasised the conflict between an individual’s values and the general values of society.10 Meanwhile, the allegedly sociological wave fractured into several wavelets, as did the third. Moreover, some important insights could not be categorised under any of the four headings. For example, the noted thinker Hannah Arendt proposed the idea that revolution was a category that applied only to secular phenomena and excluded religion, which many had seen as a kind of passepartout to pre-1789 revolutions.11 And notable attempts were made to fuse the Marxist and Tocquevillian perspectives, positing rising expectations that are suddenly thwarted, and thus in effect sidestepping the issues raised in the ‘waves’.12 The political approach via the study of the Sta
te seemed at first sight the most promising avenue, but again there was little agreement even on basic premises. Some saw the State as the key construct or institution in the revolutionary crossover, but Marxists tended to define it as that which will wither away as a result of revolution.13 Even within liberal theory there was a collision between those who asserted that revolution was impossible without the modern State and those who, on the contrary, thought that the power of the modern State ruled out revolution which, in the Western world at least, remained a mere ‘academic pipe dream’.14
Underlying all the contradictions and disagreements was the ineluctable fact of the writers’ political affiliations. Naturally those who welcomed revolution saw it very differently from those who were repelled and horrified by it. Revolution has always had an ambiguous aspect, and one analyst summed up its Janus face as follows: ‘One is an elegant, abstract and humanitarian face, an idyllic face, the dream of revolution, its meaning under the calm distance of eternity. The other is crude, violent and very concrete, rather nightmarish, with the hypnotic power of nightmare and the loss of perspective and breadth of understanding which you might expect to go with this.’15
Rather than work through the myriad interpretations of revolution in general and in its particular manifestations (the French Revolution, the English Revolution, etc), it seems more fruitful to rehearse four of the most influential works that have appeared on the subject. Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution is usually considered the first modern classic on the subject. Brinton’s approach is heavily dependent on taxonomy: he likes to present lists. His schedule of features present in all revolutions includes government deficits, complaints over taxation, governments favouring one set of interests over another, administrative inefficiency, loss of self-confidence in the ruling class, the desertion of intellectuals, loss of self-confidence within the elite, and conversion of significant numbers of the rulers to the perception that their privileges are unjust, blocking of careers open to talents, the separation of economic power from political power and general social prestige. In the case of the intellectuals’ desertion, Brinton uses the example of the French Revolution, instancing the alienation from the Ancien Régime of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Volney, Helvetius, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Bernardin de St Pierre and Beaumarchais.16 Brinton’s ideas – such as that six seventeenth-century ‘revolutions’, in England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Naples all had their origin in protests against taxation – are always interesting, but what he says essentially amounts to the proposition that revolutions occur when relations between rulers and ruled become impossibly brittle.17 Yet is there not something pleonastic or tautological here? By definition, revolutions would not occur unless this had happened. Another criticism of Brinton’s approach is that it is overly psychological. Aping Jung and his psychological types, Brinton attempts a similar typology of revolutionaries. So, for example, there are the gentleman revolutionist, the frustrated intellectual, the contrarian, the transmogrified criminal, the utopian fanatic, the idealist, the demagogue.18 Since this list covers such a wide spectrum of human beings, it is unclear how it advances one’s understanding of revolution. A more serious criticism of Brinton is that he can be naive, and not just in his unintentionally risible (at least to non-American readers) description of Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 government as a ‘socialist revolution’.19 Methodologically, the analogy he constantly draws between revolution and disease is unsound. Diseases have a generally agreed aetiology, diagnosis and prognosis; to assume the same with revolutions is absurd, quite apart from the intrinsic absurdity of imagining that the structure of viruses and social phenomena are homologous. More seriously, Brinton assumes what has to be proved, that the French Revolution really was the template for all true revolutions.20 His over-identification with 1789–94 comes across not just in his generally Tocquevillian analysis of revolutions, but in his assumption that ‘Thermidorean reaction’ is a constant in all of them. He claims (incorrectly) that all revolutions have a life-cycle involving the old order, a moderate regime, a radical regime, and a counter-revolutionary ‘Thermidorean’ phase. Inevitably, perhaps, the 1794 coup in the revolutionary month of Thermidor that ended the rule of Robespierre and the Jacobin Republic is described as a ‘convalescence from the fever’.21 Yet the worst of all Brinton’s many faults is his inability to distinguish revolutions of different types (see below) He lumps together the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American ‘Revolution’ of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 as phenomena of the same kind. In fact they are representatives of three very different violent manifestations. Even Edmund Burke, notable reactionary though he was, was acute and sophisticated enough to see that the American rebellion of 1776 and the post-1789 events in France were very different matters. The first was concerned to return to a (half true, half fantastic) notion of an earlier era of ‘no taxation without representation’. The second was a leap into the unknown, an attempt to reconstruct society from abstract, a priori principles.22