The anatomy of revolution

I. THE NECESSITY FOR A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH, 11. II. THE BARE ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS, 16. III. THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS TO THIS STUDY, 21. IV. LIMITATIONS OF...

Finally, scientific thinking cannot be, except perhaps in suggesting problems, what nowadays most of us know well enough as wishful thinking. The scientist’s own hopes and fears...

The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the res...

Thus we see that certain economic grievances--usually not in the form of economic distress, but rather a feeling on the part of some of the chief enterprising groups that their...

Literature in late eighteenth-century France is overwhelmingly sociological. If you look in the yellowing remains of French eighteenth-century journalism, if you try to reconstr...

Nor is it possible, even for those who find the simple forms of the economic interpretation of history inadequate and misleading, to deny that in three of our societies--England...

The years just preceding the actual outbreak of revolution witness a crescendo of protests against the tyranny of the government, a hail of pamphlets, plays, addresses, an outbu...

It is, however, more important for us to see whether there are not in these four revolutions uniformities which can be grouped together, related to the whole course of the movem...

This striking failure on the part of the rulers to use force successfully is not, however, likely to be an isolated and chance phenomenon. Indeed, it seems intimately bound up w...

Actually the line between Tory and Whig is a very irregular one, depending on much besides economic status, as can be seen from the late J. F. Jameson’s _The American Revolution...

Now it would be useless to deny that among those who come to the top in the troubled times of revolution are many who probably never would have been heard of in normal times. So...

But they do not re-create mankind, nor do they even make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women. In all four of our revolutions, even in the Russia...

The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came f...

The Root-and-Branch Bill originated in a petition with 15,000 signatures presented to the House of Commons late in 1640, asking for the abolition of Episcopacy “with all its roo...

In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At the first elections almost everybody, men...

The October revolution was elaborately prepared, and has been clearly described in Trotsky’s own _History of the Russian Revolution_. We need not here go into details of this pr...

This inefficiency of the governments of the crisis period comes out clearly in their attempts to regulate and control the economic life of the state. This whole matter has proba...

To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at this stage some of the most acute phases...

These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies, their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English revolution was dominated by some of the wil...

Politically the most striking uniformity to be noted in the period of convalescence is the ultimate establishment of a “tyrant” in something like the old Greek sense of the word...

The history of the accepted religious faiths of the old regimes is then one of the very clearest uniformities our study of revolutions affords. One might almost make a graph, in...

Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual...

Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one of the elements that is in its full form l...

This last suggests another conspicuous but not very important tendency in our four revolutions. They took place in societies increasingly influenced by the “Industrial Revolutio...

There is no doubt that Marx and his followers have made great contributions to our understanding of revolutions--contributions almost as great as those they have made to the mak...