In Search of Revolution_Charles Tilly

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In Search of RevolutionAuthor(s): Charles TillySource: Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Dec., 1994), pp. 799-803Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657977Accessed: 29/04/2010 22:02

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In search of revolution

CHARLES TILLYNew School for Social Research

In a prophetic essay published three years after his Social Origins ofDictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore Jr. assayed the current

prospectsor revolution n America.1 He wrote in

1969,a time of

manycalls for liberation by means of revolution, and not a few for revolutionby means of liberation. Moore reviewed classic ideas about the con-ditions for revolution disaffection among ntellectuals, harp divisionwithin the ruling classes, loss of unified control over the instruments fviolence, emergence of mass popular rebellion, and so on - then con-sidered skeptically he likelihood that such conditions would convergein the United States. He insisted on change and variability n essentialconditions for revolution, but also pleaded for the value of soberthought on the subject:

One task of human thought is to try to perceive what the range of possibili-ties may be in a future that always carries on its back the burden of the pre-sent and the past. Though that is not the only task of the intellectual, it is a

very important and very difficult one. No one can do it with complete suc-cess. Only those with a religious conviction of the infallibility of their ownbeliefs can take seriously notions of inevitable catastrophe and inevitable

utopia. To give up such consolations is to become really serious about a very

deadlyand

veryserious world.2

A quarter-century ater, far fewer analysts and advocates than in 1969are envisaging an imminent collapse of the American state or a forcefulseizure of its power; the dispersion of old mobilizations over civilrights, American military policy, and related ssues has encouraged heheirs of 1960s activists to consider their government tougher andwilier than most of its opponents said at the time when Moore waswriting. American sociologies of revolution (many of them written byMoore's students or Moore's students' students) have registered thatrising skepticism about the ease of revolution n rich capitalist coun-tries.

Theory and Society 23: 799-803, 1994.? 1994 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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Except for references to fiscal crises and military means, Moore paid

little attention to the organization of states. What is more, he deliber-ately discounted shared understandings and their objectifications -that is, culture - as independent causes of revolution. Although firmlyopposed to socialist authoritarianism, he Moore of 1969 remained athoroughgoing materialist. So then did many other analysts of revolu-tion.

Times have changed. As Jeff Goodwin reports, Moore's successorshave

pouredmuch of their

energyinto

analysesof states and culture.

Goodwin studied with Theda Skocpol, who had studied with (but sooncriticized) Barrington Moore. Goodwin himself has investigated theimpact of state structure and cultural orms on revolutionary rocessesin Latin America and Southeast Asia. In his thoughtful survey of

important works in the field, Goodwin starts precisely from that con-cern: how, and how well, have recent analysts ntegrated tates and cul-ture nto explanations f revolutions?

Reviewing Goodwin's essay made me aware of my complicity in thevisible vices he denounces so vigorously. Among the authors hereviews, I have either taught, reviewed, counseled, or collaborated with

every single one. Goodwin and I have recently co-directed a seminaron states and collective action, in which revolution and rebellion oftencame under discussion. n the last two years, I have written a number of

papers, not to mention a book, commenting on much the same litera-ture with which Goodwin's review contends; my published critiques ofGoldstone, Gurr, and Moshiri, for example, coincide almost exactlywith Goodwin's, right down to quoting the same passages from the

doughty trio's book.3 (I hasten to insist that Goodwin had not seenthose critiques when he wrote his essay.) And Barrington Moore co-directed my doctoral dissertation, which concerned the French Revolu-tion! I must therefore resist two mighty temptations: 1) to play referee

among the contributors, declaring who scores and who fouls out; 2) tofunnel all these diverse contributions nto an explication and justifica-tion of my own ideas on revolution. Let me instead follow Goodwin bypointing out how this symposium advances our discussion of states andculture n revolutions.

The symposium's irst claim to distinction is tacit but crucial: Ourauthors have all eschewed the time-honored search for a single, in-variant model of revolution applicable across wide expanses of timeand space. As recently as 1986, after all, Jack Goldstone's very dissatis-


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faction with existing heories rested on the presumption hat revolutionwas a sui

generis,recurrent

phenomenonwhose

regularities analystswere still trying o discern:

Yet the study of revolutions remains much like the study of earthquakes.When one occurs, scholars ry to make sense of the data they have collectedand to build theories to account for the next one. Gradually, we gain a fullerunderstanding f revolutions and of the conditions behind them. And yet thenext one still surprises us. Our knowledge of revolutions, like that ofearthquakes, s still limited. We can detail the patterns n those that haveoccurred, and we can list some of the conditions conducive to them; but a

better and more exact understanding f precisely when they are likely tooccur still lies in the future.4

The analogy tells us plenty, since students of seismology have them-selves turned away from the effort to construct invariant models ofearthquakes n favor of seeing them as variable by-products of shiftsamong tectonic plates.5 As Goodwin shows in his essay, Goldstonehimself s now moving away from seismic to tectonic models of revolu-tion. Even Farideh Farhi, whose States and Urban-Based Revolutionsfollowed the classic mode of applying Theda Skocpol's ramework rit-ically to the revolutions of Iran and Nicaragua, here shifts her attentionto variation n revolutionary rocesses, with particular attention o thecontinuous nterplay of state and culture.

The replies vary more in their approaches o states and culture n revo-lution, ranging rom Rod Aya's determined reatment of both as con-text rather han content to Timothy McDaniel's embedding of explana-tion deep in the political and cultural histories of his case. As Goodwincomplains, however, most recent efforts to incorporate states and cul-ture into models of revolution have a tacked-on quality - further"levels" or "variables" or addition to the catalog of conditions pro-ducing conflict or discontent, but not fully-theorized components ofrevolutionary rocesses. Goodwin rightly argues that theorists of revo-lution need at least to examine how state and popular politics (he usesthe more troublesome term "civil society") nteract and how culture

enters nto the very constitution of political nstitutions.

Goodwin's critiques nevertheless eave us with two pressing questionsabout what he wants analysts of revolution o do. First, what is this cul-ture he urges us to take more seriously, and how can we learn about itindependently of the action we are trying to explain? How will weknow it when we see it? The essay's closing passages suggest that wewill recognize it chiefly as articulated beliefs, but leave quite unclear


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how Goodwin's adjacent analysis of vulnerability n personalist dic-

tatorshipsakes articulated beliefs into account. I

readily agreethat we

need better analyses of culture in revolution, but suspect that thoseanalyses should emphasize rival and shared understandings oncern-ing:

a) rights and obligations of the chief actors within he local polity,b) the previous history of citizen-state elations n that polity,c) the likely outcomes of different available orms of collective action,d) the relative desirability f those outcomes.

Such understandings change continuously and cumulatively n thecourse of revolutionary processes; as they struggle and see the out-comes of their struggle, ordinary people, revolutionary ctivists, theirenemies, and powerholders all learn, innovate, create shared memo-ries, alter their relations with each other, change the structure f power,and shift their strategies. Thus culture, state, and revolutionary ctioninteract ncessantly. Goodwin's essay doesn't tell us how to capture andunderstand hat nteraction.

Second question: how do we accomplish he recommended ntegrationof state and culture nto our analyses hat Goodwin urges as superior otheir invocation n the guise of supplementary ariables after the fact?Having acknowledged hat culture permeates state practices and statepractices shape political practices, how are we supposed to integratethat recognition nto explanations of revolution? It sounds as thoughwe must either:

a) abandon he search or general explanations of revolution n favor of cul-turally-informed ausal accounts of particular evolutions r

b) break revolutions nto components each of which is ontologically, andtherefore theoretically, oherent, then construct separate theories of thosecomponents.

I favor alternative b), with the proviso that the theories should concern

not invariance but variation. Despite fierce disagreements hat signalthe discussion's high stakes, this symposium offers hope for advancesin just such an intellectual program.


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Notes

1. Barrington Moore, Jr., "Revolution n America?" New York Review January 30,1969: 6-12; Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966).

2. "Revolution n America?" 12.3. See Charles Tilly, review of Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri,

editors, Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, and Tim McDaniel, Autocracy,Modernization, and Revolution in Russia, in American Political Science Review, 86

(1992), 1084-1085; review of Farideh Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions inInternational Review of Social History 37 (1992), 105-107; "Singular Models ofRevolution: Impossible but Fruitful," Working Paper 138, Center for Studies of

Social Change, New School for Social Research CSSC], une 1992; "The BourgeoisGentilshommes of Revolutionary Theory," Contention 2 (1993), 153-158; "State-Incited Violence, 1900-1999," CSSC Working Paper 177, December 1993; "ToExplain Political Processes," CSSC Working Paper 168, February 1994; EuropeanRevolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). To compound the felony, I haveadapted some passages in this essay from a symposium on an earlier version ofGoodwin's review-essay held at the Center for Studies of Social Change, NewSchool for Social Research.

4. Jack A. Goldstone, "Introduction" o Jack A. Goldstone, editor, Revolutions, Theo-retical, Comparative, and Historical Studies (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1986), 17.

5. See, for example, G. D. Acton and R. G. Gordon, "Paleomagnetic ests of PacificPlate Reconstructions and Implications or Motion Between Hotspots," Science 4March 1994, 1246-1254 and R. W. Girdler and D. A. McConnell, "The 1990 to1991 Sudan Earthquake equence and the Extent of the East African Rift System,"Science 1 April 1994, 67-70.

Documents

In Search of Revolution_Charles Tilly