Theory Flashcards
(123 cards)
5 elements that create an “unstable social equilibrium”
VSI: Revolutions [Goldstone]
1) National economic or fiscal strain
2) Alienation and opposition
3) Widespread popular anger at injustice
4) Persuasive shared narrative of resistance
5) Favourable international relations
3 elements that make revolutions distinct from other kinds of disorder
VSI: Revolutions [Goldstone]
1) Mass mobilisation
2) Pursuit of a vision of social justice
3) Creation of new political institutions
3 factors that combine to make revolutions
VSI: Revolutions [Goldstone]
1) Rulers become weak and isolated
2) Elites begin to attack the government rather than defend it
3) People believe themselves to be part of a numerous, united, righteous group that create change.
3 factors that historians disagree on when talking about revolutions
VSI Revolutions [Goldstone]
1) Speed (example: Mao, 20+ years fighting and mobilising before taking power)
2) Violence (example: Orange Revolution in Ukraine, rapid but non violent)
3) Class (example: anti-colonial revolutions like America, all classes again a colonial power)
Hannah Arendt on freedom.
On Revolution (1965 p41)
Freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstance of the powers that be, and that more civil liberties exist even in countries where the revolution was defeated than in those where revolutions have been victorious.
Marx on the failure of the French Revolution.
According to Marx, the French Revolution failed because it could not reconcile the notions of individual rights with the espousal of universal values. Failure to reconcile these factors resulted in psychological and cultural disorientation, as the revolutionaries found that their principles, purposes, and understandings were not enough to both form and bind a new society. The resulting social, cultural, and moral disorientations resulted in the Terror.
Definition of social revolutions.
Skopal: State and Social Revolutions [1979]
Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structure.
They are accompanied by class-based revolts from below.
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history”
Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850.
According to Skopal, what is unique about social revolutions?
State and Social Revolution [1979]
Basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion, and that these changes occur through intense socio-political conflicts in which class struggles play a key role.
In the lecture notes, what are the 4 areas of generalization for revolutions?
1) Redistribution of political power.
2) Involve popular mobilization.
3) Are done in the service of a progressive ideology.
4) Have an international context- don’t take place in isolation.
“We the old people perhaps won’t survive until the decisive battles of this forthcoming revolution”.
Lenin, Zurich 1917 - Revolutions are unpredictable.
Hobsbawm and the concept of ‘dual revolution’.
The Age of Revolution [1969]
1789: political and ideological changes of the French Revolution fused with and reinforced the technological and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution.
“The web of history cannot be unraveled into separate threads”.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution” - consider political and other revolutions as separate but interconnected processes (ie. industrial and political in French Rev).
“The history of all society up to now is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in short, oppressor and oppressed, stood in continual conflict with one another conducting an unbroken, now hidden, now open struggle, a struggle that finished each time with a revolutionary transformation of society as a whole, or with the common ruin of the contending classes.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
“At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production….From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.”
Marx’s Preface to “A Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy” 1859
Marxist approach to Revolution [short]
Marx sees revolutions as emerging out of class-divided modes of production and transforming one mode of production into another through class conflict.
Aggregate-Psychological Theories for Revolution [Short]
Ted Gurr- Why Men Rebel
Revolutions are explained as being due to the occurrence in a society of widespread, intense and multifaceted relative deprivation that touches both masses and elite aspirants
Political-Conflict Theories [Short]
Tilly “From Mobilization to Revolution”
Revolution is a special case of collective action in which the contenders fight or ultimate political sovereignty over a population, and in which challengers succeed at least to some degree in displacing existing power holders.
Systems/Value consensus theory [Johnson “Revolutionary Change”]
Explain revolutions as violent responses of ideological movements to severe disequilibrium in social systems
Skopal’s method of structural analysis
To explain social revolutions then, we need to
1) Find the problematic emergence of a revolutionary situation within an old regime
2) Identify the objectively conditioned and complex intermeshing of the various actions of the diversely situate groups that shapes the revolutionary process
3) Focus both on the institutionally determined situations and relations of groups within society, and upon the interrelations of societies within world-historically developing international structures.
Benedict Anderson: Revolutions and Time
America
Took the Declaration of Independence’s omission of Columbus, Roanoke or the Pilgrims Fathers’ seriously:
“A profound feeling that a radical break with the past was occurring- the blasting open of the continuum of history- spread rapidly.”
Benedict Anderson: Revolutions and Time
France
The French Revolution inaugurated a new era with Year One, and the creation of the new French Republic on the 22nd September 1729 mean a new calendar replaced the Gregorian.
Benedict Anderson: Revolutions and Time
Russia
Bolsheviks moulded the Gregorian calendar into one that facilitated production. Traditional ‘off’ days normally used for religious purposes, were so upset that whole communities either had to work around the Soviet system or buy into it.
Charles Kurzman: Anti-Explanation Theory
“Anti-explanation means abandoning the project of retroactive prediction in favour of recognising and reconstructing the lived experience of the moment. T
Understand the experience of revolution in all its anomalous diversity and confusion, and abandon the mirage of retroactive predictability. - a variety of responses
Incorporates the unpredictability of revolution. Allows for the individual stories that cannot be reduced to sweeping statements about entire populations.
Recaptures the experience of confusion in a regime- social scientists will never be able to predict revolutions since the revolutionaries themselves don’t know what is going to happen.