by Frank McLynn
These four theories, identifiable as the most influential to emerge since the Second World War, are of course just the tip of the theoretical iceberg. There are dozens of other explanations given by scholars for the phenomenon of revolution but these invariably subdivide into the psychological and the structural.44 One stresses the common factor of rejection of tradition and consequent symbolic reconstruction; another says that revolutions are the political equivalent of the human hunger for exploration, that it is the thrill of venturing into the unknown that is salient.45 Yet other psychologically oriented theories stress human irrationality and revolution as pathology: ‘A revolution implies a deep schism within the state. It reveals a pathological condition of the political will which shows by contrast the normal nature of authority.’46 It is a fair comment that all such psychological theories derive ultimately from the pioneering work of Crane Brinton and are vulnerable to the same objections. It will be remembered that Brinton at once likened the dynamics of revolution to the progress of a fever and argued that you can systematise revolutions, identify the causes and provide a convincing fourfold periodisation. But since fevers strike randomly, the analogy does not work, for, according to Brinton, this would have to mean that we can identify in advance the individuals who will be struck by disease – a manifest absurdity. Psychological theories can tell us why men rebel and what the motivations of revolutionaries are, but they cannot identify the objective circumstances surrounding revolutionary outbreaks or explain why they succeed and why they fail. Structural theories, on the other hand, too often look like formulaic presentations of the obvious or are ex post rationalisations. Another structural theory, popular in the 1970s, was that revolutions arose from the failure of states to modernise, that the gap between cutting-edge technology and the culture and institutions of a given society was the ‘open sesame’ to understanding.47 Yet, since a modernising society would presumably, by definition, have solved its peasant problem, the ‘failure to modernise’ thesis looks remarkably like Skocpol’s militant peasantry thesis in different clothes. It would be true to say that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, traditional historians, dedicated to archive-based study of the minute particulars of individual historical events, have gained the high ground, while political scientists and sociologists are in retreat or on the defensive. The main thrust of the straitlaced historians’ case is that it is usually impossible to explain causation satisfactorily even in minute historical events, so that the hopes of providing general explanations of ‘revolution’ are even more chimerical.48 The strongest card traditional historians have to play is the incontrovertible fact that only contingency separates successful from unsuccessful revolutions, which makes retrospective attempts to explain the success of this or that revolution inherently bogus.49
Nevertheless, we cannot dispense with universals like ‘revolution’ since we need them to explain how revolutions differ from rebellions, coups d’état or civil wars. One of the problems is the slapdash way military coups in Latin America are routinely described as ‘revolutions’ when they are no such thing. One wag indeed pilloried this common misconception by dubbing Latin America ‘the land of the long-playing record – 33 revolutions per minute’. The main difference between true revolution and the other violent categories mentioned is that revolution aims to transform socio-economic structures as well as political institutions or, at the very least, to replace one elite with another differing in kind and nature. Some writers distinguish between ‘great revolutions’ which achieve or at least attempt socio-economic transformation, with ‘little revolutions’, which entirely change the orientation, direction, political culture and ideology of a society, as well as the elite membership, while stopping short of root-and-branch change.50 The difference between rebellions, coups, civil wars and revolutions is easier to resolve. In a mere rebellion the dissidents are not strong enough to overthrow the State, in a coup they are, but simply replace one elite figurehead with another, Tweedledum with Tweedledee, while in a revolution the rebels are strong enough to overthrow the State and do so. Civil war marks the situation where there is no single ruling class strong enough to dominate the State, where two or more competing factions process their demands through a central authority or clearing house (a liberal government of compromise, say) which then cracks apart under the strain, leaving the factions to fight it out. Civil war essentially denotes a context of competing interest groups which cannot come to terms through the winnowing process of central government and have enough resources to be able to use force to pursue their aims. As one writer has put it, the most a rebellion can do is modify the system; it cannot displace it as a revolution does: ‘revolution and rebellion differ in results but have like origins … revolution succeeds, rebellion fails and civil wars leave the question open’.51 It should be stressed that the difference between revolution and civil war is often a very fine one. One definition of revolution by a leading theoretician makes it sound remarkably like civil war: ‘A transfer of power over a State through armed struggle in the course of which at least two distinct power blocs make incompatible demands to control the State, and some significant portion of the population subject to the State’s jurisdiction acquiesces in the claims of each bloc’.52 This definition cleverly leaves open the question whether a ‘little revolution’ can be achieved without violence. For some specialists violence is imbricated in the very notion of revolution, though Engels and others have dissented from this view. Certainly the transformation brought about in Spain and Portugal since 1975 fits the criteria for ‘little revolution’ as no violence attended it (though it was threatened in the attempted coup by Antonio Tejero in 1981 – an opéra bouffe event only in the comfort of retrospect).53 Other problems of interpretation arise when we consider the ‘great revolutions’. Skocpol and others have conditioned us to believe that in all such enterprises the peasantry must play a major role, and it is true that this perception is usually accurate: it was the case in the French, Mexican, Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Yet Cuba ranks as a ‘great revolution’ in that Castro and his acolytes were able to achieve a total socio-economic transformation of the country. Although Castro and Che Guevara consistently claimed the Cuban Revolution as a ‘peasant revolution’, so as to fit the tenets of Marxism– Leninism, the truth is that the dramatic events of 1958–9 were largely the work of the middle classes. Suffering from unemployment, underemployment and disguised unemployment, the middle classes used their muscle to throw out the corrupt Batista regime. Yet when Castro converted to Marxism– Leninism in 1961, he rewrote the legend of the Cuban Revolution to make it appear a second China, with the peasantry in the vanguard, making use of the incontestable fact that he had based himself among the peasants of the Sierra Maestra, but omitting to mention that the guerrilla activity there was a mere sideshow.54
The endless debate about revolutions, their causation, their alleged commonality or uniqueness, whether they are triggered primarily by human agency or social structures, whether the ‘objective conditions’ of socio-economic life are most salient or whether pride of place should go to ‘subjective conditions’ (revolutionary voluntarism), how to differentiate them from rebellions and civil wars, all this can to an extent be short-circuited if we concentrate instead on the consequences of revolution. If we judge revolutions by their outcome rather than by the intentions, perceptions, ideologies and neuroses of the actors, it is possible to narrow the range, so to speak, and achieve some kind of lucidity. Just as in tensor theory in higher mathematics, a scalar is a tensor of rank zero, a vector of rank one, and so on, so one can convincingly draw up a typology of revolutions based purely on their consequences and assign them a rank. In rank zero are the alleged revolutions which are really mere transfers of power within a given elite. Revolutions of rank one would roughly correspond with the ‘little revolutions’ identified above. The ‘great revolutions’ would correspond to a narrow definition of revolution and the ‘little revolutions’ to a broad interpretatio
n of the term.55 Revolutions of rank two are in some ways the most interesting of all, for in these cases the revolution begins with a moderate, liberal, reformist or what Marxists used to call a ‘bourgeois’ stage and then proceeds to a struggle for genuine socio-economic transformation; if this is successful the revolution ascends to rank three; if unsuccessful it remains in rank two. Rank three revolutions are rare: only the Russian of 1917, the Chinese of 1949 and the Cuban of 1959, involving root-and-branch socio-economic change can validly be described as Close Encounters of the Third Revolutionary Kind. Classic examples of rank zero revolutions are the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the alleged American Revolution of 1776. These were essentially intra-elite transfers of power.56 Someone once described the events of 1775–83 as one set of nasty capitalists fighting another. Certainly, if we accept the thesis that violence is a necessary condition for revolution, the rather gruesome War for American Independence would qualify. As for 1688, there was minimal violence in England at the time of the Dutch invasion (the horrendous aftermath in Scotland and Ireland is another matter). But further than that the evidence will not go. The Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia, which drew up the US Constitution, explicitly refused any relief to debtors and made a point of stressing that the pre-1775 financial system, shorn of the ‘exactions’ previously demanded by London, had to remain. The hard line taken towards debtors was the principal cause of Shays’s rebellion in 1787.57 Devotees of 1688 and 1776 like to make large claims for their areas of specialisation but these are not really convincing. To take just one example, there was not even a significant change of elite in both cases, as the comfortable transition to the new regime of Benjamin Franklin and Marlborough respectively demonstrates. The ‘Kossuth test’ is a good one as a simple yardstick for revolution. The great Hungarian nationalist and hero of 1848 argued that the real test of revolution is always whether it benefits the majority. In his view, France in 1789–94 experienced a real revolution which liberated seven-eighths of the population, but the revolution of February 1848 was a mere intra-elite transfer of power, which is why France experienced a second (abortive revolution) in July that year.58
Revolutions of rank one, aimed at a significant change of elite personnel and some tinkering with the economic system stopping short of root-and-branch change, would include most of the revolutionary ‘near misses’ described in the following chapters: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Jack Cade rising of 1450, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–7 and the Jacobite Rising of 1745. How the changes demanded by the Chartists would have worked out remains imponderable, but it is worth remembering the quasi-Tocquevillian notion of rising expectations, whereby one demand, once satisfied, generates another, more radical one. The only ‘road not taken’ that might have led further, to rank two at least, was a successful General Strike. That leaves the English Civil War or English Revolution as the only possible candidate for rank two in English history. At this point it would be useful to review those revolutions clearly in this rank. The French Revolution and the Mexican Revolution show an initially reformist revolt against the Ancien Régime (respectively Louis XVI and Porfirio Diaz) developing into a more radical phenomenon: the Jacobin Republic of 1793–4 in the case of France and the Pancho Villa/Emiliano Zapata of 1914–15 in Mexico. In both cases the drive for a radical restructuring of society was arrested by ‘reactionary’ elements: the men of Thermidor in France, and the Carranza/Obregon alliance in Mexico.59 For our purposes it is immaterial whether the liberal revolution transmogrified into the radical one or if both elements were present from the very beginning. Nor is it necessary to become involved in the arguments about the popular ‘double revolution’ model. According to this, all revolutions which have the potential to achieve rank three go through a twofold stage, separated by a chronological gap which can be months or years. Thus, Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War was the first stage, and the Leveller/Digger attempt to push the postwar settlement into genuine revolution was another. However, the radical party in England never constituted the kind of threat in England that Robespierre did in France or Villa and Zapata did in Mexico; pedants might therefore like to characterise the ‘English Revolution’ as a revolution of rank one and a half. In Russia, the Kerensky revolution which overthrew the Romanovs was stage one, and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was stage two. Even in China, stretching a point, one might sustain the argument, by claiming that the overthrow of the Manchus by Sun Yat-sen in 1911 was stage one and then, after nearly forty years of warlordism and the hegemony of Chiang Kai-shek, the Communist Revolution of 1949 was stage two.60 Happy is the country that has no history, runs the old adage. Certainly in Britain’s case, the nation can be thankful that it never had to endure the travails of rank two revolutions. Yet in comforting ourselves that Britain has never experienced a true revolution, we should not fall into the trap of imagining that the country has never trembled on the brink. Here it is necessary to distinguish between revolutionary outcomes and revolutionary situations. As has been well said, ‘Few revolutionary situations have revolutionary outcomes.’61 Whether this was all due to contingency in Britain’s case it has been our task to discover.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
1848 revolutions, 333, 342, 347
Aberavon, 451
Aberdeen, 448
Acciavoli banking house, 57
ACLL see Anti-Corn Law League
Act of Settlement (1701), 275
Adamites, 162
agistement, 127
agriculture: 16th-century crop failures, 129; 19th-century employment stats, 351; Chartist land reform plan, 321–30; feudal, 61–4; yeoman, 66, 127–8, 145
Alberoni, Cardinal, 216
Albert, Prince, 304, 306, 340
Alexander of Sleat, Sir, 255
Algeria, as French colony, 488
Algor, John, 6
alienation, 507
Allen, Sir Robert, 33
Allen, William, 174
Amalgamated Engineering Union, 368
amateur, cult of the, 490–1
American Civil War (1861–5), 158, 345, 482
American War of Independence (1775–83), 271, 277, 487, 509, 517–18
Amery, Leo, 386
Amigo, Peter, Bishop of Southwark, 456
Amish, 161
Amundsen, Roald, 455
Anabaptists, 151, 160–1
anarcho-syndicalism, 360–1, 362–3
Anderson, Sir John, 427
Anne of Cleves, 87
Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL): overview, 317–18; relations with Chartists, 308, 310, 311, 313, 318–21, 326, 330
antinomianism, 161
Appleton, William, 52, 53
Ardshiel see Stewart of Ardshiel
Arendt, Hannah, 507
Argenson, Comte d’, 230
Argenson, Marquis d’, 230
aristocracy of labour, 351, 352
Aristotle, 1, 505
armies: composition of 18th-century English, 254; medieval lack of standing armies, 72–3; militias, 73, 266; standing armies as condition of revolution, 487–8; use in General Strike, 427–8, 445–6, 454; see also New Model Army
Arnold, Richard, 185
art, Protestantism’s impact on, 147
Arundel, Earl of (14th century), 50
Arundel, Earl of (15th century), 74
Ashton-under-Lyne, 301
Aske, Christopher, 102–3, 105, 110, 121
Aske, Robert: attitude to common rebels, 133; background and character, 94–5, 105, 133; and Hallam–Bigod conspiracy, 139–40; and Pilgrimage of Grace, 97–113, 114, 117, 121, 125, 130–3; reasons chosen as leader, 104; relations with Henry VIII, 118–19, 122, 125, 134–6, 138; ultimate fate, 142, 143
Asquith, Herbert, 368, 470–2, 488, 489
Astbury, Mr Justice,
437
Astor, Lord, 443
Atewell, Adam, 16
Atholl, Duke of (18th century), 225, 245
Atkinson, John, 102
Attlee, Clement, 508
Atwood, Thomas, 292
Audley, Chancellor, 126, 131
Austin, J. L., 493
Ayscough, William, Bishop of Salisbury, 68, 70, 75, 76
Babthorpe, William, 103
Bacon, Sir Roger, 44, 46
Bad Parliament (1377), 6
Bagehot, Walter, 306, 491
Bailey, Sir Abe, 438
Baker, Thomas, 11, 13
Baldwin, Stanley: and BBC, 441–2, 443, 444; character, 383–4, 386, 424–6; contingency preparations for General Strike, 388; and General Strike, 430, 432–3, 436, 439, 440, 442, 445, 449, 454, 455, 456, 457–9, 460–3, 475; and General Strike aftermath, 466–9; George V’s attitude to, 409–10; and gold standard, 373; later life, 473; literary representations, 454; and mining industry dispute, 377, 378–9, 381, 382, 384, 391, 392; relations with Lloyd George, 369, 472; and run-up to General Strike, 411, 412, 413–27; and TUC, 410
Balfour, Arthur, 390
Ball, John: background, 17; and Chartists, 288; death, 40; literary representations, 52; and Peasants’ Revolt, 29, 34, 39; views, 17, 24–5
