Maturation of the State-Centered Theory of Revolution and Ideology

Abstract

Once upon a time we had a theory of revolution and ideology. The basic outlines of the theory were set by Marx and Engels, but the general frame of analysis was widely accepted. Revolutions were class conflicts: a privileged class faced increasing pressure from a discontented class. The revolutionary transfer of power eventually broke through the block, setting off a new period of social change. This process was synchronized with a succession of ideological hegemonies. The ruling ideas were those of the ruling elite; as class challengers emerged, their change in consciousness acted as a barometer as well as a mobilizer for the coming revolution. For Marxists, the class actors in the drama were the owners of the means of production versus the suppliers of labor power and the owners of rival means of production. NonMarxists also made use of the scheme. The English and French revolutions typically were attributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie, or sometimes to the rise of the gentry. The wave of nineteenth-century European revolutions and many of the modernizing revolutions of the twentieth century also were described as and the resulting institutions and ideologies typically were referred to as bourgeois or middleclass democracy. The general model of and falling was separated from a class basis while preserving its structural features. In U.S. sociology since the time of Sorokin in the 1920s, the emphasis has shifted to the mobility of individuals; revolutions were attributed to the blockage of mobility by persons of talent and ambition, whereas open mobility according to merit was regarded as the safety valve that relieved pressure and prevented revolutionary conditions from occurring. The study of social mobility (later called status attainment) that dominated sociological research through the 1960s was largely the result of accepting the underlying model whereby the blocking of rising social classes causes revolutions, together with a preference for the piecemeal and gradualist reform that mobility was believed to represent. The theory of ideology also was modified, although it stayed within the framework of the original Marxian/Hegelian model. There was nothing explicitly Marxist about Crane Brinton's (1938) natural history of the great revolutions, but the ideological desertion of the intellectuals was taken as the first harbinger of upheaval. Mannheim's famous theory of ideology extended the Marxian model to incorporate the utopian ideology of the revolutionaries themselves. Mannheim aimed to step outside the historical process by locating a free-floating group of intellectuals who could play the role of liberal social engineers; they, in turn, needed a social base-if outside the class structure-and Mannheim's later work turned to the sociology of education and the sociology of intellectual communities themselves.