Week 8: Social Revolutions

Question 1

What is a revolution?

Answer 1

A mass siege of an established government by its own population with the goals of bringing about regime-change and effecting substantive political or social change

Question 2

What are the goals and purposes of revolutions?

Answer 2

Goals:
1. displacing an incumbent regime
2. bringing about substantive political or social change

Purpose(s):
1. transform the class structure of society
2. transform monarchies into republics
3. achieve independence from foreign rule
4. rid society of the predations of a corrupt and despotic government
5. establish religiously-based political order in a place of secular one
6. overturn a dominant ethnic or racial order

Question 3

What are social revolutions?

Answer 3

Rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures that are accompanied and in part carried through by mass-based revolts from below

Question 4

Who defined social revolutions?

Answer 4

Skocpol

Question 5

What are the first 3 generations of research on revolutions?

Answer 5

1. natural history approach (crowd theory as underlying frame)
2. breakdown theories (focus on social strain and breakdown + frustration-aggression
3. structural theories of revolution

Question 6

What is the structural theory of revolution?

Answer 6

• does not focus on individual choice or on contentious processes, but rather on relatively given factors that determine individual choices and how processes unfold
• causes are not the events of the revolutions themselves, or in what the revolutionary movements do/do not do, but in slow-moving and relatively fixed conditions

Question 7

What are the structures typically identified?

Answer 7

• nature of social structure in the countryside
• whether or when agricultural is commercialized
• the relationship of landowning classes to the state
• the structure of class conflicts and alliances
• foreign pressures or wars
• rapid population growth
• foreign colonization

Question 8

What is Goldstone’s demographic theory of early modern revolutions?

Answer 8

• explains early modern revolutions
• rapid population growth sets in motion processes that create a iris of the state
• rapid population growth leads to social strains in countryside, growth of urban populations
• key process is how population growth creates high rates of inflation in early modern societies: leads to the fiscal crisis of the state, as states pay more to support their growing armies and bureaucracies, and are forced to raise more revenue from society
• focuses on the impact of population growth on prices rather than on causing mass starvation

Question 9

What are some questions about Goldstone’s demographic theory?

Answer 9

• Is population growth a necessary condition for all revolutions or only early modern revolutions?
• How closely connected was population growth to the actual actions that brought about revolutions in the cases he examines? Were individual actions in the revolution merely the playing out of a drama determined long ahead of time by objective conditions on the ground
• limits of the theory: industrialization changes the relationship between population growth and inflation
• is the argument dependent on case selection?

Question 10

Why does Skocpol argue that ‘revolutions are not made, they come”

Answer 10

• social revolutions are the products of objectively conditioned crises that are not made or controlled by the actions of any single group and that cannot be postponed by individual action
• revolutionaries merely act out a drama that was put in place by larger structural forces

Question 11

What is an agrarian-bureaucratic society?

Answer 11

a society in which a centralized government bureaucracy rules with the aid of a locally powerful landed elite, who subsist on the surplus generated by predominantly agricultural economy

Question 12

What are the problems of all agrarian-bureaucratic societies?

Answer 12

1. conflicts develop between the central state and the landlords over division of the surplus generated from the peasants, particularly as needs of state expand
2. peasant populations can come to constitute a vast source of discontent and potential revolt
3. the surplus that supports the government bureaucracy and the landlords comes from agriculture, it cannot be easily increased.

Question 13

What are Skocpol’s key conditions for social revolution?

Answer 13

1. international pressures
2. a lack of autonomy of the government from the landed aristocracy
3. a particular set of social relationships in the countryside that fostered peasant revolt

Question 14

What are some critical questions to raise about Skocpol?

Answer 14

• are the facts chosen to fit the explanation
• was urban revolt entirely incidental to these revolutions?
• are peasant uprisings necessary for social revolution?
• can one ever explain a revolution without ever focusing on the actual actions that occur within a revolution but only on the structural conditions underpinning it?

Question 15

Who are peasants?

Answer 15

A small-holding farmer, sharecropper, or laborer who works the land owned or controlled by a landlord

Question 16

What does Wolf say about the commercialization & disruption of lord/peasant relations?

Answer 16

• commercialization fosters the destruction of the traditional relationship between land and the peasant
• peasant rebellion is fundamentally a defensive enterprise

Question 17

What is the moral economy approach to peasant revolution?

Answer 17

Principle of reciprocity: a gift or service received creates, for the recipient, a reciprocal obligation to return a gift or serve of at lest comparable value.
- right to subsistence (survival)

Question 18

Who authored the moral economy?

Answer 18

Scott (1976)

Question 19

What is the political economy approach to the peasant revolt?

Answer 19

• peasants are individual (or family) utility maximizers
• they act not out of the violation of norms about subsistence, but rather because they seek to raise their own subsistence level through short-term and long-term investments in market and non-market exchange
• there is no relationship between subsistence crises and revolt in peasant societies
• peasant revolt instead is a collective action problem: peasants will not normally revolt unless they provided with credible selective incentives to do so by outside forces

Question 20

Who authored the political economy approach?

Answer 20

Popkin (1979)

Question 21

How does revolutionary potential of peasants erode?

Answer 21

• migration to cities: impact on the demography of the village, increased reliance of the village on urban subsistence
• massive land reform
• communism and colonialism as restricting rural social structures
• democratization and mechanization of agriculture undermined the control of rural elites

Question 22

What are the shifting social forces involved in revolution?

Answer 22

• the decline of peasants and soldiers as revolutionary participants
• the growth of youth and middle-class professionals as revolutionary participants