مقدمه‌ای بسیار کوتاه بر انقلاب‌ها

Very Short Introductions #381

by Jack A. Goldstone, عباس حاتمی (Translator)

کتاب مقدمه ای بسیار کوتاه بر انقلاب ها یکی از 400 عنوان کتاب از مجموعه ای است که انتشارات آکسفورد تحت عنوان مقدمه ای بسیار کوتاه بر...» از سال 1995 در موضوعات گوناگون چاپ کرده است.کتاب های این مجموعه از سوی بهترین متخصصین هر حوزه نوشته شده است و تا سال 2016 بیش از 6 میلیون جلد از آن به فروش رسیده است. از میان این مجموعه، مقدمه ای بسیار کوتاه بر انقلاب ها از چندین ویژگی شاید کم نظیر برخوردار است. کتاب اولا به صورت مختصر و مفید مباحث گوناگون نظری در باب انقلاب را به بحث می گذارد. ثانیا با کندو کاو در تاریخ انقلاب ها،به بررسی بیش از 20 انقلاب عمده جهان می پردازد که در یک طیف زمانی گسترده یعنی از 600 سال قبل از میلاد تا سال 2011 پس از میلاد حادث شدند.نهایتا کتاب در عین حالی که به صورت مختصر نوشته شده است،قادر است در کی فراگیر و جامع از انقلاب ها به دست دهد. این ویژگی باعث شده تا کتاب مزبور به همان میزان که برای دانشجویان جذاب است،برای عموم خوانندگان نیز مفید واقع شود.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, World History, Historical, Economics

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2012

About the author

Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist and political scientist, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, and international politics. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 140 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the “California school” in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.

Goldstone is currently the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.

His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.

Reviews

[Maziar MHK · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب از انتشارات آکسفورد و با ترجمه ای از نویسنده ای خوش ترجمه بتوسط انتشارات کویر، منتشر شده
از تعریف انقلاب شروع شده و تعاریف متفاوت با نظر نویسنده ، مقبول و غیرمقبول، به بحث گذاشته میشه، بهد به علل و پیامدهای انقلاب ها میرسه یعنی که چی انقلابو میسازه و انقلاب چیو میسازه یا خراب میکنه و بعد به مصادیق میرسه که از زمان فراعنه شروع میشه، بهد یونان،بعد پسارونسانس و بعد انقلاب های چپ و ایران و بعد مخملیا و آخرشم بهار عربی.
کتاب مختصره اما دقیق

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m prepping for a new unit with my Year 12s on revolutions in History and this text predictably communicated lots of great content, concisely and at an accessible level for my kids. This series is a super reliable starting point for me. This particular text offers a great mix of analysis of common features of revolutions and the conditions they arise in, as well as thematically grouped summaries of significant revolutions. It’s exactly what I wanted.

[Sabrina Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good introduction to some of the most well-known revolutions in human history. Goldstone gives a brief overview of specific revolutions and walks the reader through the highlights. One criticism is that Goldstone writes through a Eurocentric and conservative revisionist lense. It's not a huge problem, since there isn't a ton of information to be gained nor theory to be contemplated in this short reader. Read this book as, well, an introduction. Then, invest in a more comprehensive book on specific revolutions to determine:
1. the real causes and outcomes of revolution,
2. the real players vying for power,
3. the objectives of revolution, and
4. ultimately, were citizens better after the revolution?

[Ali Di · Rating 3 out of 5]

★★★½☆

[Reid tries to read · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is and is not a revolution

Proponents of revolutions tend to portray them as “heroic” struggles where oppressed masses raise up leaders from their ranks to overthrow their oppressors. Conservative opponents of revolutions portray them as distillations of pure chaos that, no matter their intent, upset the stability of society to such a degree that they cause more harm than good (including causing more harm to the revolutionary leaders themselves). Revolutions can broadly be defined as violent or forcible changes in governments and institutions that involve the participation of a large section of the population. They are almost always driven by ideologies or narratives which promote some form of ‘social justice’.

Revolutions are rare because it is hard to coordinate enough people together to overthrow their oppressors. There needs to be a confident, coordinated, and large body of people who believe they can successfully overthrow the current regime; the oppressive rulers must be weak and isolated enough to succumb to the forces of revolution, which often requires a certain cadre of elites to peel off and attack the oppressive regime rather than defend it; and finally people must believe change is actually possible and preferable to the status quo.

Smaller events such as food riots, strikes, coups, civil wars, reform movements, and such often make up component parts of a revolution, and often they can be a spark which lights the engulfing flame of a widespread revolution, but they in themselves are not a revolution. Food riots and peasant revolts for land redistribution tend to seek help from the government rather than explicitly attempt to overthrow it for a more socially just one. Strikes are led by wage workers who tend to seek better conditions/pay from employers rather than explicitly attempt to expropriate and overthrow their employers. They are usually localized to a particular job site or industry. If workers across industries over large territories coordinate their strikes into a single ‘general strike’, this becomes much closer to a revolution. Social and reform movements mobilize around specific issues, groups, or causes. They commonly focus on discrimination (the civil rights movement) or specific political issues (anti-war movements). Again, these movements tend to attempt to change state policies or laws rather than completely overthrow and replace existing state institutions with more socially just ones. Social movements tend to use non-violent tactics to achieve their goals (ex: boycotts, marches, sit ins). Reform and social justice movements often only become revolutionary when the state resists change and violently lashes out at them. Violence causes movements to stop asking the state for things and to start attempting to overthrow the state altogether.

Coups occur when a small group of elites seizes power from the government without any large scale mass mobilization. Coups produce new institutions, but these are often self-serving institutions rather than institutions predicated on performing some type of ‘social justice’. The coup plotters usually surround themselves with narratives of restoring order, stamping out corruption, or fixing the economy rather than with narratives of ending oppression. Finally there are genuine radical social movements that, from the outset, seek to overthrow the state rather than just bargain with existing institutions. However, until these radical movements can generate a mass base of support, they remain nothing more than radical sects. Small sects that cannot gain support of the masses tend to gravitate towards acts of terrorism that can be disruptive but not revolutionary in the sense that they will lead to an actual overthrow of the state.

When do revolutions start?

Revolutions can occur only when significant portions of the elites and military defect or stand aside. It is often thought that revolutions occur when conditions (especially economic conditions) get so bad that people can think of no other recourse than to violently fight for their own self-interests and, often, their own survival. The worst poverty often arises after crop failures and famines starve large sections of the population, yet this does not often lead to successful revolution. Like the Great Irish Potato Famine, most famines don’t lead to revolutions because poor peasants and workers have little chance to overthrow the government when they are battling better equipped, better trained, and better fed professional military forces. The American and French revolutions occurred in countries where the bulk of the population was relatively well off compared to contemporaries in places like England or Russia. But unlike in England or Russia of the late 1700s, sections of the elites in the American colonies and in France actively mobilized the population to overthrow the state.

Being faced with stark, daily examples of inequality can just as often lead to resignation and disparity as it can to revolution, because deep inequality often leaves the masses without the resources necessary to fight a revolution. This either prevents a revolution from ever getting off the ground because people think it is impossible or, once a revolution does begin, the revolutionaries find themselves hopelessly outmatched and defeated. More often than not, ideological and religious justifications for deep inequality lead to the phenomenon being tolerated and accepted by large swaths of the population as “just the way things are”.

What turns poverty and inequality into revolution is the widespread acceptance of the fact that these factors are not natural or inevitable, but that they are issues inherent to the status quo, which is being upheld by the state and its respective institutions, and therefore can be changed. When elites and popular groups both blame the regime for inequality and material deficiencies, revolutions are more likely to occur.

A debunked cause of revolution is ‘modernization’, broadly defined as the ideological, technological, and economic changes brought about by the spread of free markets and capitalism. The thinking goes that, once modernization takes hold, inequality rises while the religious and traditional justifications for such inequality lose control of the narrative to new ideas. As traditional modes of existence break down, people demand new more representative and responsive regimes and use force to try and bring these new regimes into existence. However, modernization develops and spreads unevenly and in non-uniform ways. In some countries modernization did exactly as the aforementioned narrative predicted, but in just as many others it had the opposite effect of strengthening rulers. Saudi Arabia today and Bismarckian Germany are examples of regimes that used modernization to bolster and reinforce themselves; in others, modernization brought a relatively smooth transition to bourgeois democracy such as Canada or the Scandinavian countries; in a select few, such as 1860s Japan, late-Tsardom Russia, or 1900s China, revolutions occurred just as modernization was starting to take hold. In the fall of the communist-bloc of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, revolutions occurred generations after modernization took place. The modernization theory of revolution therefore has no substantive predictive power.

Idealistic theories of revolution contend that the spread of new ideologies and ideas are the real determinants of revolution. However, these theories struggle to explain why new ideas arise and gain popularity at certain times. In societies the state and its rulers/functionaries provide services, defense, and ideological justifications for this laid down in law in return for taxes. Elites provide support for rulers and the state (often going into and out of service for the state) in return for social prestige and material rewards/wealth. As long as the state can keep rewarding elites, elites will keep backing up the state. The people below the elites and subordinated to the state will accept the current state of affairs (to various begrudging degrees) as long as they remain responsibly content and more focused on managing their own lives within the structure of society, rather than focused on changing the structure of society to better benefit their own lives. When elites and the state reinforce each other, and the social groups that people group themselves into passively accept these conditions, societies can remain stable. Stability rests upon the ability for most people to be able to generate income (whether it be from peasant farming, wage labor, capitalist exploitation, etc) to support their families and maintain a culturally satisfactory standard of living. If the majority can do this, they can pay the rent and taxes that support the elites and the government. As long as the state can reward elites, elites will produce ideological institutions that justify the state and train future generations of elites to do the same. If the rulers cannot support the elites, or if they cannot protect their populace from invasions, banditry, economic downturns, or other disruptions to their daily lives, their families, or their culturally acceptable standards of living, issues emerge. People stop funding the state, the state stops rewarding elites, and elites stop supporting the state. Then, stability breaks down and a revolution can break out. Elites will be split on their support for the state, and if some large portion of the elites break off and form alliances with large social groups, a revolution will begin.

Elements of instability

Revolutions are like earthquakes; we can analyze certain ‘fault lines’ to predict where they might break out, but we don’t know when or to what magnitude they will occur. 5 elements tend to create instabilities in a society that revolutions can then arise from:

One element of instability is economic strains which disrupt the feedback loop of taxes going to the state, rents/profits/state-funded privileges going to elites, and stable incomes going to the general population. Economic strains cause the state to either increase taxes or borrowing, often in ways which appear ‘unjust’ or ‘illegitimate ’ to many people, or to not increase taxes and therefore reduce pay to key supporters like elites, bureaucratic functionaries, armed forces, or key social welfare institutions. Both options undermine the legitimacy and stability of the state.

A second element of instability is growing frustration among the elites. When elite groups feel like their loyalty to the state or ruler will not be rewarded sufficiently and that the existing state of affairs will always disadvantage them, they attempt to undermine the current order rather than improve their position within it.

A third element is widespread anger at some injustice. Examples of this include peasants angry that their lands are being confiscated, workers angry about being unemployed or prices inflating more than their wages, or students angry about diminished life opportunities post-graduation. What matters with popular anger over injustice is that people feel as if they are losing their proper place in society for reasons outside of their control.

A fourth element is the development of a shared ideology of resistance that bridges the gaps and unites different social groups, as well as some members from the elite with members of subordinated classes. This can take the form of a religious movement (ex: early English religious protestant movements, the radical Islamic movements that helped unite desperate groups in the Iranian revolution). It could also be a secular narrative of resistance, such as the civil rights movement in the United States and anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Similarly, the narrative could take the form of a nationalist anticolonial struggle, or it could even take the form of socialism. Whatever the form of this resistance ideology, it must create a sense of common bonds that unite different people together to fight against shared injustice.

Finally, a fifth element of instability can be the balance of international relations. Many revolutions have depended on foreign aid in order to get off the ground. For example, the American Revolution depended on supplies, military equipment, and direct training from the French empire. Most of the national liberation movements after WW2 depended on some form of aid from the USSR or China.

What creates these 5 elements of instability?

What types of events produce most or all of the following 5 elements of instability: economic decline, elite resentment, widespread anger at ‘injustices’, the popularization and spread of ‘resistance’ narratives and ideologies, and international support for revolution/abstention from supporting counterrevolution? There are long-term, overdetermined ‘structural’ causes that can lead to the five elements of instability, as well as somewhat random ‘contingent’ events.

Structural causes

One structural cause of instability is demographic change. When populations grow rapidly, elites can overproduce, leading to thinly spread inherence and a lack of career paths/life chances for would-be future elites as the population overshoots available elite job opportunities. Long-term population booms tend to mean that larger percentages of the population will be made up of youths (known as a ‘youth bulge ’). Youths tend to skew more radical, and too many youths without good life/economic opportunities will inevitably radicalize them.

A second structural cause can be ruptures in international relations such as wars or the intensification of economic competition. Revolutions occurred in Europe in waves following the thirty years war, the napoleonic wars, WW1, and WW2, while the American Revolution and French Revolution followed in the wake of the Seven Years War. Wars create instability in many states at the same time, and if this instability triggers revolution in one state, it can spread to the others.

A third structural cause is uneven economic development. If economic growth benefits certain sectors of society at the expense of many others, these developments will be resented and portrayed as “unjust”.

Transient/contingent causes

Transient events tend to cause a sudden spike in instability which can push a country out from a ‘business as usual’ environment and into chaos and instability. Such events tend to be inflationary spikes, war defeats, and riots/demonstrations/strikes which damage state authority (especially if the state’s response has the opposite effect of its intention and triggers wider protests). When the popular narrative surrounding protests shifts from them being ‘isolated extremists’ to ‘ordinary members of society’, repression begins to create more protests instead of diminishing them.

Start of a revolution

A revolution begins when the government loses control of some of its territory and population to people demanding a change of government due to injustices. It is often not how these revolutions begin which determines their outcomes; rather, it is the entire process of the revolutionary struggle itself which determines the outcome of the revolution. Most revolutions are swiftly crushed or face years of brutal fighting for minimal gains as the state learns to cope with and subvert the movement. However, if a state is already weak and the conditions are already unstable, it is very likely that a revolution will spread and intensify.

State breakdown, where the state loses control of ever larger proportions of territory or society, is the first phase of a revolution. If the state is really weak, the army will refuse orders en masse to crush the revolt, leaving the leaders defenseless and ready to implode. Usually most people, especially the state’s actors, do not realize the state is in such a weakened state until their rule is crumbling right in front of them. Examples of this include the French and Russian revolutions, the overthrow of the communists in the USSR and eastern bloc, and the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by the Taliban after U.S forces pulled out. If the state is not very weak, the process of state collapse can take much longer.

Revolutionaries can take over peripheral territory, like guerrillas did in the mountains of China or the jungles of Cuba, while slowly constricting and challenging the centers of state power and territory. In this scenario, if the peripheral revolutionaries remain intact and avoid total stagnation, they will either build up their forces into military units capable of fighting civil war, they will use less violent means of strikes and demonstrations through allied social groups closer to centers of power until the regime abdicates or negotiates favorable terms, or they will use a combination of the two. Other nations and groups will often arm and organize peripheral revolutionaries as well. Examples include the American, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions.

Finally, sometimes desperate governments will give revolutionary groups access to legal means of power in parliaments, dumas, or legislatures. If the revolutionary group is popular enough, they will quickly dominate these processes and take a somewhat ‘negotiated route to power’. Examples include the ANC in South Africa and Solidarity in Poland.

Second phase of a revolution

Seizing state power is the end of the first phase of a revolutionary process. During the next phase, the revolutionaries often break into infighting since their common enemy that united them together has been defeated. The new government must either abide by the old set of laws or, as is usually the case, decide on how to formulate a new constitution. Finally, the issues/conditions that originally led to the revolution must be dealt with in some fashion.
These power struggles can be exacerbated by counterrevolutionaries of the old regime, as well as the international support these counterrevolutionaries receive. All these problems make the second phase of revolution, where the revolutionaries have now seized state power, even more fraught than the first phase of seizing state power.

As the ‘moderate’ revolutionary factions (those more willing to allow continuity between the old regime/society and the new one) struggle with more radical factions, new traditions, rituals, ceremonies, terminologies (ex: ‘citizen, ‘comrade’), art, culture, fashion, etc. proliferate. If the new revolutionary state isn’t defeated by external forces or cannibalizes itself through infighting, it must then set about the arduous task of restoring some semblance of ‘order’ and, more importantly, getting people back to work and reintegrating all the institutions and networks necessary to keep a society functional. A ‘new normal’ must be established, which new institutions, cultures, language, and arts all help promote. Likewise, it must seek a stable place in the international order so that it isn’t overrun or undermined by more powerful states or international institutions.

Only after this process, which can take years, can the ‘revolution’ subside into a ‘new status quo’. After a decade/generation, the new order often has cracks in its legitimacy as it inevitably fails to live up to the ideals of the revolution for some section of the population. This can create new upheavals or unrest at various degrees of magnitude and seriousness which must be dealt with. After this phase of renewed energy, the revolution can finally stabilize (Examples include Stalin’s collectivization campaign and Mao’s cultural Revolution).

[Mohammad Moradi · Rating 4 out of 5]

برای داشتن یه دید کلی نسبت به انقلاب کتاب جالب و خوبیه. نویسنده بصورت کلی در مورد مفهومی مثل انقلاب و اینکه انقلابا چطور ممکن رخ بدن صحبت کرده و تو فصلای مختلف و کوتاه به بررسی انقلابای مختلف پرداخته‌(انقلاب ایران هم جزوش هست). ترجمه روان و خوبی داره(البته یه سری جاها غلط املایی وجود داره) و احساس میکنم مترجم یه جاهایی رو خیلی کم سانسور کرده.

[Arman Behrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب با ترجمه ي فارسي تحت عنوان "ديباچه اي بر انقلاب ها" توسط انتشارات انديشه احسان چاپ شده.
به همه ي موارد مي پردازد اما صرفاً به صورت فهرست وار.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

As advertised, very short for a very complicated subject. Goldstone offers a theoretical framework for understanding revolutions and what makes them different from say, a peasant rebellion or a civil war. He then examines and categorizes revolutions across the globe both ancient and modern. When and why do they happen, and when do they fizzle out? What features do they have in common, and what makes some different than others? Some of the examples discussed are to be expected, like the America and French, while some are less well known (at least to me!), like the Meiji Restoration, the People Power Revolution of the Philippines, the failed Green Revolution of Iran, or the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Few words wasted, as one might expect. Good stuff.

[Viktor Sidorov · Rating 4 out of 5]

First three theoretical chapters are good, the last empirical chapters are too short and boring... I suppose, that "Revolutions" could be a very good introduction book for undergraduate students!

[Naomi Rapier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revolutions: A Brief Introduction is a pithy summary of revolutions and their patterns, starting from the beginning of record keeping (and some inference drawn from battered palaces wounded in the BCs). I frankly found the first three chapters to be as dull as bricks, but Goldstone does his setup for the rest of the book in those chapters, so they’re worth skimming to get the main ideas. If you are very interested in the mechanisms by which revolutions occur, the first three chapters are for you. The following seven chapters cover revolutions grouped by ideology (communist, democratic, etc.), world region, or revolutionary strategy (i.e.: nonviolent protests have their own chapter).
I found it insightful that the revolutionary spirit only returned to Europe after the Protestant reformation. I have always wondered why European serfs put up with the Medieval oppression for so long. Goldstone’s explanation of the decadence of public belief in the “divine right of Kings” following the Protestant reformation goes a long way to elucidate the strange 1,000-year absence of European revolutions.
What impressed me the most about this book was the description of the nonviolent revolutions of recent years. I had no idea these had occurred! Goldstone paints a masterful picture of the front lines of the Philippine Yellow Revolution: “Marcos sent a tank battalion to crush the revolt. But the soldiers found a well-organized, cheerful crowd, trained and disciplined to remain nonviolent. In the front line, nuns kneeled with rosaries in front of the tanks, while pregnant women, grandmothers, and children offered food and water to the soldiers… the soldiers refused to kill unarmed, peaceful citizens” (Goldstone 108). It strikes me as mildly humorous and very wise that no men were actively involved in interacting with the soldiers.
In many ways, I find my young self identifying with the revolutionary spirit; my primary instinct from a very early age has been to push back against unjust (or unwanted) authority and totally disregard any rule that didn’t make sense to me. I am a law-abiding citizen, but I do walk up the wrong side of the stairs on a regular basis. I feel thankful that I haven’t had to participate in a revolution to gain my freedom.
I agree with previous reviews that this book is a bit Eurocentric. However, it’s still a great starting place.

[Diego · Rating 3 out of 5]

As other short introductions, you should not expect much depth. however, the first half is very good at introducing the core tenets of the structural demographic theory and the general theory of how revolutions and their leaderships work.

The second half is the problematic one, it attempts to summarise many revolutions, and does a poor job in some, like the Mexican and Russian. The chapters devoted to the more contemporary revolutions like the ones in the Arab world feel more like a briefing of newspaper articles without any good analysis.

I recommend the book, but it let me down a little.

[Aurelia Behaeghel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting read. I really liked the chapter about ancient revolutions, and the changing perception of revolutions throughout history was also something new to me. The ending of the book also had a very hopeful message, one that I would love for it to become true.

[Gav Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found for 99¢ at a thrift store so I figured why not and was pleasantly surprised. Goldstone gives a fair shake to the leftist revolutions of the 20th century, and perhaps is even too fair to some (specifically Nicaragua). Solid introduction and rather enjoyable.

[Jake Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good historical summary of what a revolution is and isn’t as well as many that have occurred or are even still occurring. It is a good read to remind myself that despite the state of the US today other countries are actively combatting more oppressive and corrupt regimes with protesting often meaning putting your life on the line.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, but does a good job of hitting the important points.

For further reading, see Goldstone's article "Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West' and the Industrial Revolution," _Journal of World History,_ 13(2), 323-389 (September 2002). As Goldstone notes, humans around the world were creating many ingenious inventions (technological, social, and political) long before the Industrial Revolution began. Those innovations sometimes led to periods of economic growth that were later remembered as "golden" ages. But such spurts of growth generally faded after a few decades as societies reached the limits of their technologies' ability to generate the energy needed to sustain productivity growth.

Because before the Industrial Revolution, the main sources of energy available were human and animal muscle power, augmented in some places by water and windmills. But there was a problem with relying on humans and animals for power: You have to feed them. And in the ages before modern agriculture, farm yields were low, which limited the number of people and animals that could be sustained.

Then in the 18th century, inventors in England hit upon the one invention that changed everything: Steam engines that could "eat" the energy stored in fossil fuels. Finding a way to release this energy productively finally set the world on the path to self-sustaining economic growth.

So why were steam engines invented in England and not, for instance, in China (which was much richer at the time and which had a history of high-quality goods production)? Goldstone cites the peculiar set of cultural circumstances that characterized England at this time, including an interest in empirical and pragmatic science (it helped that the Anglican church celebrated Isaac Newton's discoveries, allowing him to become something of a cultural icon) and a fairly large number of artisans and entrepreneurs who understood mechanical principles well enough to apply them to useful work. (Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the first workable steam engine, was an ironmonger.)

So asking why the Industrial Revolution began in England is a bit like asking why Joe won the lottery. The right combination just happened to come up.

[Christopher Fuchs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great summary of the varied roots and consequences of revolutions, and how the nature of revolutions themselves have evolved. At a human level, the author shows the critical importance of revolutionary leaders of two types: visionary leaders (Robespierre, Gandhi), organizational leaders (Washington, Napoleon), and leaders that embody both types (Ataturk, Deng Xiaoping). At a strategic level, the author identifies common trends among revolutions, such as what makes them succeed or fail, whether they are relatively short or long-lived, and many other attributes. He also dives into case studies to demonstrate these findings. Ultimately, his conclusion that revolutions have increasingly led to freer societies overall (though not without great cost) and that authoritarian governments will gradually become extinct is very persuasive for such a small book. So good I listened to it twice.

[Derek Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a survey of the history of revolutions, this is fine. But Goldstone’s conservatism begins to be a problem when discussing the USSR, and runs him into a mess when he talks about “the Arab” revolutions.

Why does he think that liberal democracies will be resistant to revolution?

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok. There was a lot of revolutions I did not know about. The problem is it appeared just to ramble on I had a hard time getting into it.

[sander · Rating 3 out of 5]

hoge informatiedichtheid en informatief, jammer dat de schrijver een lib is

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

the most interesting Amazon review
by Keith A. Comess

Things Go Better with Koch

What exactly is a "revolution"? Jack Goldstone defines the term this way: "Revolution is the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization...in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions. It is "...the process by which visionary leaders draw on the power of the masses to forcibly bring into existence a new political order." Revolution includes, "...all the elements of forcible overthrow of the government, mass mobilization, the pursuit of a vision of social justice, and the creation of new political institutions."

The author defines 5 coincident and crucial elements for a revolution to occur. These are:

1) National economic or fiscal strains, which disrupts the flow of rents and taxes to rulers and elites
2) Growing alienation (meaning perceived exclusion from favor) and opposition among the elites (competition, rivalries, factionalism)
3) Increasingly widespread popular anger at injustice
4) Bridging popular and elite grievances (requires an ideology)
5) Favorable international relations (external support or at least non-interference by foreign powers).

Goldstone uses this framework to great success throughout the book, with reference to specific events, ancient and modern. His insights and generalizations are interesting and informative.

Goldstone notes that ancient philosophers (Plato and Aristotle) believed that the cause of revolution is social injustice. Obviously, that is neither necessary nor is it sufficient to provoke revolutionary change. Not until various elements in the pre-revolutionary society realize that an alternative is possible (i.e., there is another alternative to the miserable status quo), does the potential for change become evident: put otherwise, simple misery doesn't suffice. That point is both implicit and explicit in Goldstone's summary.

"Revolutions" becomes more of a superficial survey beginning in chapter 7 ("Communist Revolutions"). This remains is an issue through chapter 10 ("The Arab Revolutions"). While these sections are useful overviews, they suffer in comparison to the introductory sections (which deal with definition, cause, processes, leaders, outcomes, respectively) and the sections on revolutions in the ancient world, the Renaissance, Reformation and "Constitutional Revolutions (US, France, Europe).

The book stumbles and falls in the concluding chapter ("The Future of Revolutions"). Goldstone waxes nostalgic on his student years (circa 1979) and digresses into vacuous platitudes and bromides.

For instance, he asserts that, "Someday, all countries in the world will have stable, resilient, inclusive and just regimes". Is that so? If it is, where is the evidence for that assertion?

How does the author neglect to deal with the recognized and rapidly conjoining factors of ecosystem collapse coupled with massive "Third World" (mostly Arab countries) population growth? This is something that Thomas Malthus anticipated in the Eighteenth Century. Omitting this aspect of social ferment seems derelict, even in a "very short introduction". How about underperforming economies? What about growing economic disparities between and within "First" and Third World countries? How about the baleful (and objectively obvious) destabilizing effects of climate change, which even the Pentagon has characterized as a major threat to social, political and economic stability, this looming on the near-term horizon?

As a "very short introduction", Goldstone's book suffices. As for the concluding patter, especially when juxtaposed to the insightful introductory chapters, one might speculate on Goldstone's potential conflict of interest. Why?

In 2006, The Washington Post published an investigation of Goldstone's academic perch, The Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

In it, columnist Al Kamen described Mercatus as a "staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries Inc. Maybe that explains the glaring omission of the implications of climate change and the breezy, Pollyanna dismissal of the potential for future revolutions spoiled this otherwise interesting book. Maybe Goldstone is just an optimist.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very short book that I enjoyed greatly. If I were to shorten it even further, I would say that 90% of the benefit lies in the first three chapters - what a revolution is, what causes revolutions, and what the processes of revolution are. The rest are just examples and historical context.

The author defines a revolution as a process by which a visionary leadership draws upon the power of wider forces to seek to forcibly bring into existence a new political order. He uses this definition to draw a contrast between a revolution and a revolt (no real change), a riot (no real change), a strike (no new political order), a social movement (no visionary leadership), a coup (no real change), and a civil war (no real change). Of course, all of these can lead to revolutions, and may act as a revolutionary trigger, but are not revolutions of themselves.

The author lays out the five elements of the revolutionary process:
1. National economic and fiscal strains that disrupt the flows of finance and taxes. These lead to unjust responses by the rulers.
2. Growing alienation amongst the elites, who are competing for positions of power and influence. The elites need to be unstable and antagonistic.
3. Revolutionary mobilisation draws upon an increasingly widespread feeling of injustice and wrong that results in popular anger.
4. An ideology that bridges popular discontent and elite grievances, and allows diverse interests to coalesce around a popular cause to produce a shared narrative of resistance.
5. The revolution requires favourable external conditions, either in the form of foreign support, or the absence of foreign sponsored resistance.
With these five elements, the normal social relations to reconcile conflict fail to work adequately, forcing the society into an unstable equilibrium.

With all of these elements mixed together, the unstable equilibrium can be used to trigger the revolutionary process. Normally, some form of small leadership is needed to act as the midwife to the revolution, but once it has started, it will often take on a life of its own. This makes it rather difficult to foresee the path of a revolution once it has started.

I found this analysis to be quite useful. It can be applied to many settings over a wide range of time periods. It also provides a lens through which we can observe current affairs to test the claims of how revolutionary various issues might turn out to be. As an analytical tool, it has a lot to recommend it.

[Marc ZEIMET · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice find of a book introducing the complex issue of ‘revolutions’. The author endeavors to first give an introduction to the theory, then attempting to define (true) revolutions, further going on to sort the types and then components of revolutions, while also presenting a list of events or incidents of socio-political nature which are not to be rated revolutions in the sense of the definition provided.
What triggers a revolution? This is indeed the core question of interest. Can a revolution be predicted, its onset, its intensity, the ultimate outcome? The theoretical elements of this (research) question are presented, almost in the form of a recipe or an equation with a few core (key) components. In a second part of the book examples and case studies are presented and discussed while chronological recounts of major, key events in recent revolutions are assessed to show that the Theory of Revolutions can be more or less applied to further the understanding of underlying mechanisms and outcomes that ensued.
The volume is presented as a scientific research work, certainly a short introduction, while providing many insights into the mechanisms and workings of revolutionary phenomena. Clearly written, logical in its presentation, delivering on its promise. A lot of food for thought is indeed packed in this publication. The references list is helpful to find literature for a search of in-depth knowledge on selected facets of the (intellectually) exciting topic of the ‘Revolution’ phenomenon.

[Walter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Interesting Analysis of Revolutions


The author analyzes a large number of revolutions from history to draw some conclusions as to the causes and outcomes. Succinctly, these two passages state those:

"What is the likely future of revolutions? They will continue to occur where regimes exhibit the five conditions that lead to state breakdown—an economic or fiscal crisis; elites that are divided and alienated from the regime; a coalition among popular groups with diverse grievances; the emergence of a persuasive narrative of resistance; and an international environment favorable to revolutionary change.

...

A further lesson from history is that we should not expect most revolutions to suddenly create stable democracies. Revolutions create new dilemmas and unleash new struggles for power. Most revolutions, including even the American Revolution of 1776, went through more than one constitution, discriminated against minorities, and veered toward weak government or back toward authoritarian tendencies before achieving steady progress toward democracy."

The book is very readable and interesting.

[Jacob Lines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now here is an interesting question: why do revolutions happen? It turns out that people familiar with them can give good answers. But then there is the more interesting question: when and where will revolutions happen? Experts can’t answer that question with any certainty. This book explains in general why revolutions happen – they are due to a combination of factors, including economic strains, alienation among the elite, anger over injustice, supportive ideology, and international support. But those factors don’t always cause revolution – they may lead to gradual reform or to new repressions. Revolutions are easier to explain after the fact than to predict.

Happily, most of this book is not about theory but history. Goldstone does a wonderful job of detailing revolutions throughout history, from ancient times to the 2000s. As he explains them, he does a very good job of drawing helpful comparisons and contrasts between them.

In sum, this book may not help you predict the next revolution, but it will help you to understand them when they happen. And it’s just plain interesting.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hoped this book would be more theoretical. The theory discussed is interesting, and is suitable as a primer for what revolutions are/aren't and the major causes, actors, consequences. Where this book falls apart is in analysing revolutions throughout history. Given it is 'very short', unfortunately this means we have some quick summaries of major revolutions which leads to some things not being very clear and some things actually being wrong. I appreciated it for informing me more about the Mexican Revolution and Arab Spring, which were not my areas of expertise, but overall I am disappointed. Read the first few chapters.

[Thebookiemonster · Rating 4 out of 5]

It did a great job of characterizing conditions and regimes ripe for revolution. I enjoyed how many revolutions it covered, and still with enough detail to make me feel like I could explain the background, causes and outcome of the revolution without having to know the middle names of every minister involved. This was exactly what I was hoping for.

It's not organized in the best way and you have to hunt around in the first part looking for what makes a revolution happen and what makes it successful. By the end though, all of those were covered so much that I had absorbed the information.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, decent summary on the key conditions that can enable a revolution to take place and the case studies from the past 100 years or so. Chief among the key factors is a divided elite and alternative leader/leading group. Another thing that people often forget is while the revolution sounds heroic and satisfying for the demonstrators ("look at all the booty I collected from that corrupt government minister's house. Let's burn his house."), it takes at minimum a few years to reestablish a stable government and public order.

[Muhammad Usman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a concise but very useful book which analyses the reasons behind revolutions in general and the effects thereafter. It mentions different types of revolutions and then gives a brief description and analysis of various revolutions in history ranging from the American revolution to the Arab spring.
It may appear a bit too short at times but that is what the book was meant to be in the first place. Obviously any detailed study of individual revolutions require more detailed texts.

[bks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 3 chapters offers a succinct definition of revolution "a mean, not an end". What comes after a revolution is equally important. The book lists provides examples, without very detailed analysis due to word constraint. The book is pro-Western, although the author tried to be unbiased. The warrant "democracy is the best system" is arguable.

[Daniel Cunningham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was too concise for me. I wanted more discussion of the causes, paths, outcomes, etc. of revolution. All that is there, some only very briefly, and all in the first third or quarter of the book. The remainder is a catalog of revolutions with several pages of description. Perhaps "A Very Short Introduction", but too short for me.