Does Modernization Breed Revolution?

Abstract

There are quite a few different senses in which one can imagine large-scale structural change as breeding, shaping, causing, sparking, or resulting from major political conflicts. One of the most sophisticated recent syntheses of the standard views concerning all these matters comes from Samuel Huntington. In his Political Order in Changing Societies, Huntington argues that the widespread domestic violence and instability of the 1950s and 1960s in many parts of the world was in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics, coupled with the slow development of political institutions. Modernization and social mobilization tend to produce political decay unless steps are taken to moderate or to restrict its impact on political consciousness and political involvement. Most societies, even those with fairly complex and adaptable traditional political institutions, suffer a loss of political community and decay of political institutions during the most intense phases of modernization.