The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The next seminal work on revolution was by Chalmers Johnson, a disciple of Talcott Parsons, the Harvard-based sociologist associated with ‘structural-functionalism’. Deeply imbued with the notion of society as a system and with notions of homeostasis and equilibrium, Johnson’s work is often turbid because of the heavy use of sociological jargon, an unfortunate by-product of the quasi-Teutonic approach of the influential Talcott Parsons Harvard school of sociology. Since the key to social stability for Johnson is ‘equilbrium’, revolution is perceived as something pathological and an example of severe ‘disequilibrium’. Revolution was to riot what a hurricane or typhoon was to a gale, not an entirely different phenomenon but a more serious and dangerous one. Revolutions, in short, were merely the most important events in a scale of violence that ran the gamut from riots through rebellions to ‘grave disequilibrium’. Gradual change can be absorbed within a ‘system’, but revolution means ‘multiple dysfunctions’ because of the inability of the system to deal with it. Using his peculiar jargon, Johnson suggested that revolutions occur when two or more of the following occur: exogenous value-changing sources, endogenous value-changing sources, exogenous environment-changing sources and endogenous environment-changing sources.23 To put this in plain English, an example of the first of the four might be the influence that the French and Russian Revolutions had on other nations; an example of the second would be the way Enlightenment thinkers changed people’s attitudes to religion; an example of the third would be the impact of the West on the Third World through military conquest, trade, investment, imported technology, migration or modern medical knowledge; and the fourth would be exemplified by such things as the invention of the wheel or the coming of the railways. All of these drastic changes constitute the necessary conditions for revolution; the sufficient conditions are supplied by what Johnson calls ‘accelerators’. These accelerators typically occur when the political elite can no longer operate the State as the ‘monopolist of violence’ (to use Max Weber’s famous phrase), when the opposition knows this and is thus confident of being able to overthrow it, and when the elite responds incompetently or (more usually) with intransigence.24 The main criticism of all this is that, with the jargon stripped away, Johnson is simply telling us what is blindingly obvious. Many writers have pessimistically concluded that only contingency, mere chance or aleatory circumstance can explain revolution. Clearly if there is subversion of a society’s armed forces, a politically conscious revolutionary class employing the correct strategy for the circumstances (e.g. guerrilla warfare), and an incompetent or intransigent elite, the conditions for revolution are present, and one scarcely needs the entire gallimaufry of ‘systems’, ‘homeostasis’ and ‘disequilibrium’ to buttress the explanation. Chalmers Johnson partly rescues himself from the charge of banality by providing a typology of revolution which, though ultimately unconvincing, is nonetheless stimulating. He proposes six types.25 There is jacquerie, when a government is overthrown by a peasantry with limited aims. There is millenarian revolution (usually occurring in societies subject to external stresses such as industrialisation, colonialism or imperialism), of which good examples would be the Pugachev rising in eighteenth-century Russia and the great Taiping revolt in China in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Anarchistic revolution’ is Johnson’s somewhat eccentric term for revolutions caused by ‘dysfunction’ perceived by an oppressed majority; this is particularly relevant for British history, since both the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (discussed below) fit into this category. Jacobin Communist Revolution is the nomenclature used by Johnson to describe the root-and-branch transformation of society, as in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Then there are two final categories relating to the post-1945 experience of the Third World: the conspiratorial coup d’état, as in Egypt in 1952, and the militarised mass insurrection, as in the Chinese Communist Revolution and the Algerian War of 1945–62.26

  Probably the most influential of all academic work written on the theory of revolutions is that by Theda Skocpol, a political sociologist with a keen sense of the particularities of historical research and thus not given to unthinking broad-brush theorising. Her work is nuanced, reflective, intellectually sophisticated and a clear advance on Brinton and Chalmers Johnson. Aware that any cogent analysis of revolution must be multi-causal on one hand but not just omnium gatherum (as with Chalmers Johnson and Brinton) on the other, she analyses the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions and finds a common tripartite thread: threats against the State by a strong peasantry; a conflict between the State and autonomous elites; and the impact of international relations, specifically economic and military competition from stronger nation-states. In all three societies the peasantry was powerful and could mobilise quickly to attack landlords; this was particularly the case in China.27 In the case of France, the entire wealth of the nation could not be harnessed, and the national treasury was dependent mainly on direct taxes levied on land, which fell on the modest cultivators, not the big landowners. As Skocpol points out: ‘Rentier agrarian systems, where smallholder peasant families possess and work the land on their own, are notoriously susceptible to peasant revolts.’28 The case of the State was more complex. According to Marxist theory, the State was ‘nothing but’ the interests of the ruling class masquerading as the common good, but many studies made it clear that a bureaucracy, put in place to guarantee the interests of a ruling elite, could develop its own interests and ideology which put it in conflict with the ruling class. In Ancien Régime France the entire aristocracy, supposedly committed to Bourbon absolutism, was systematically treacherous to the State of Louis XV and Louis XVI by its systematic tax evasion and demands for special financial perquisites and privileges. Lack of financial muscle makes it extraordinarily difficult for certain states to deal with their international competitors and when they attempt to do so, the domestic problems of a divided elite and a restless peasantry vitiate their efforts.29 In Russia during World War One it proved impossible to extract a sufficient surplus from the peasantry to finance and equip a modern army. When Russian armies were humiliated by Germany in the field, the military in effect threw in the towel and were thus unavailable to deal with domestic revolt. This was a classic instance of the perennial truth that in trying to deal with international threats, a ruling class may leave itself vulnerable to threats from below; in Russia, additionally, the elite had shot itself in the foot by blocking the modernisation of agriculture.30 In China the combination of a backward agrarian society and the impact of Western imperialism had already made the situation perilous when Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang compounded the problem with ‘liberal’ decentralisation, which led to chaos, the dominance of the provincial gentry and finally warlordism – all factors preparing the ground for the eventual communist takeover.31 The strength of Skocpol’s work is the way she dovetails all the complex elements involved in the run-up to revolution. She is particularly good on France, showing how the bread riots of 1788 coincided with elite factionalism, the Tocquevillian factor of rising aspirations, the declining capacity of the regime to use force against internal opposition and the steady decline of the nobility as the urban bourgeoisie and city proletariat made their presences felt.32

  Skocpol displays interdisciplinary sophistication in emphasising that revolutions arise from a number of factors – State crises, popular uprisings, elite actions – all of which have different causes and have to be explained separately. Her work is studded with insights, such as the perception that socialism is most likely to emerge when economic interests are concentrated in a few capital-intensive centres, when mass mobilisation is extensive, and when external pressures from powerful capitalist countries are modest. Her analysis is in line with that of other specialists, for here is a very similar estimate: ‘States crack when they are hit simultaneously by three sorts of crisis: a state financial emergency, elite divisions, and a potential and propensity for popular groups to mobilise.’33 The analytical approach she adop
ts incidentally throws up a convincing narrative, showing the convergence of French, Russian and Chinese experiences. So: the competition between states drives forward centralisation, and bureaucratisation, and strengthens the State in both military and economic ways; but some states fall behind in the international race and consequently try to extract resources beyond the point the society will tolerate; this breaks up the balance of power between the rural nobility and the peasantry, which in turn leads to general crisis; previously marginal urban elites then assume the helm but cannot unite all the fissiparous elements in the society; and the end of the road is the ‘man on horseback’. This is convincing, for the turmoil caused by any revolution that attempts socio-economic transformation seems inevitably to lead to dictatorship, either to arrest such progress or to further it, as the examples of Cromwell, Napoleon, Stalin and Mao clearly show. Yet for all the brilliance of Skocpol’s work, it has been subjected to criticism on a number of fronts, some of it devastating. The objection – made by Sinologists and Kremlinologists – that she is more convincing on the French Revolution than the Russian and Chinese ones is probably valid, but it must be remembered that academic specialists always object to wide-ranging and cross-cultural speculation. More soundly based is the criticism that she neglects the role of ideology in culture in her analysis.34 A variant of this is that her analysis is entirely an ‘objective conditions’ piece of work and that consequently she neglects human agency, ‘subjective conditions’, and, in particular, discounts revolutionary voluntarism as a powerful agent. Her defenders say that her emphasis on the State as a pro-active factor is a necessary corrective to the view of it as simply a target for revolutionaries. But there is no denying that sometimes she seems to edge uneasily towards something like the conservative view of Brinton, who famously asserted that top-down reforms – such as those of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Japan under the Meiji restoration or even General Douglas MacArthur in his proconsular period (1945–51) – invariably achieve more than revolutions.35 Much stronger criticism is that in her work the State sometimes seems to be hypostasised or to attain a Hegelian stature. The ex-revolutionary turned reformist Regis Debray seemed to have had her in mind when he accused certain sociologists of committing the Feuerbachian fallacy. Where Feuerbach had burlesqued Christians for making a subject–predicate mistake – they preached that God made Man whereas the reality was that Man invented God – Debray claimed American sociology often made the same mistake. Revolution, capitalism, democracy and other universals were all assumed to be independent entities, but the truth was that they came to life only when embraced by individuals, classes or nations.36 Finally, it might be observed that Skocpol does not take enough care to dissociate herself from Brinton’s ‘Thermidorean fallacy’ outlined above. It is true that the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions all ended with the man on horseback, but in no sense are they similar in having a Thermidorean stage. There was no Thermidor in Mao’s China and, though Trotsky famously ‘placed’ Stalin as the man of Thermidor, this was inexact. Stalin was very different from Cromwell and Napoleon. They slammed the brakes on, but he took the revolution in a new direction – admittedly a direction that was heresy both according to the doctrine of Marx and of Marxism–Leninism. Stalin took Russia into the unknown territory of ‘socialism in one country’, an experiment doomed to failure in hindsight. Whereas in both classical Marxism and Marxism–Leninism socialism is the system that replaces capitalism as part of an inevitable process of historical change, Stalin postulated a battle of socialism versus capitalism – according to the orthodoxy a solecism as extraordinary as a writer of science fiction having dinosaurs and cavemen living in the same era.37

  The final attempt at a theory of revolution that commands attention is that by Jack Goldstone, like Skocpol a scholar of great erudition and sophistication. His principal innovation was to point to population increase as a principal trigger for revolution. He scores some palpable hits and opens up new dimensions for study. For instance, having established that population in England grew from about 2 million at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace to 5 million at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1640, he points out that this explosion created an army of squatters and landless who were the main causes of riots and disorders; the protests usually involved such displaced groups complaining vociferously about the loss of forest and commons to arable land, creating food scarcity and high prices.38 To an extent one can see him following in the Skocpol tradition but putting icing on the cake. For example, he agrees with her that agrarian/bureaucratic states are particularly vulnerable to revolution but traces this in the main to population increase, which can place intolerable strains on an inflexible regime which relies on traditional systems of taxation, economic organisation and elite recruitment. Population explosions raise real costs and prices of staples simultaneously, crippling regimes like England under the early Stuarts or France under the Ancien Régime. Faced with an army of young men seeking employment and patronage, the government tended to solve the problem by enlarging its armies, thus further increasing its costs and creating a need for fresh revenue.39 Since population increase automatically triggers inflation – with expenses rising faster than revenues, larger armies and mounting expenditure on the relief of indigence and poverty – and this is a phenomenon more noticeable in the cities than the countryside, Goldstone suggests that Skocpol might have overdone the emphasis on peasant revolt as central to revolution. He points out that the periodicity of peasant revolt in France can be correlated with demographic change and that Skocpol’s model does not explain regional differences in the peasantry around the time of the French Revolution.40 There is no question but that Goldstone’s mastery of demography is impressive and he makes the interesting and original point that mortality in revolutions has increased significantly over the centuries. In the English Civil War 100,000 Englishmen died out of a population of 5 million – about one in fifty. In France in the turbulent war years of 1792–1815 he estimates the death tally at 1.3 million (many scholars would put the figure much higher) – one in twenty – while in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20 the fatalities were 2 million out of a population of 17 millions – one in ten.41 Many such sparkling insights cannot disguise a slightly mechanical schema of population growth, inflation, fiscal crisis, elite competition and mass mobilisation (as with Skocpol, revolutionary voluntarism is entirely absent). Nor does Goldstone deal adequately with some obvious objections to this thesis. For example, if demography was king, one would have expected England to have faced its worst revolutionary crisis around 1850, since the population had increased by 92 per cent since 1800.42 Some would say, of course, that Chartist agitation was just such a crisis but, although Chartism certainly denoted a revolutionary moment, it lacked the power to ignite revolution. Goldstone on several occasions asserts that he is not advocating demographic determinism43 but, if he is not, the space given to this factor seems excessive. In any case, if population increase is just one more variable in the revolutionary bouillabaisse, no more potent than any other, why should we accord it any kind of primacy? Goldstone seems to be caught in a fork of his own making: either population increase is a prime determinant in a kind of Marxist base/superstructure sense, in which case he must be committed to demographic determinism, or his entire argument must be circular.