Review: Disruption: Why Things Change, by David Potter

Abstract

Addressing the successes and failures of key social movements throughout the history of Western civilization, David Potter’s Disruption: Why Things Change offers a sobering assessment of efforts to transform human institutions and world views. The formula is deceptively simple. Disruptive change begins on society’s fringes in opposition to mainstream conservatives. Stable societies allow incremental innovations but do so at the price of preserving existing power structures. Yet more profound change occurs when the competence of existing institutions is challenged, often during periods of distress or technological transition. Nevertheless, agents of change come from the political intelligentsia. Their initial success often rests on the ability to create new ideologies of legitimacy by speaking a language and addressing concerns understandable to those outside their circle. Yet the challenge comes in creating stable unifying structures that do not incorporate the ideological extremism their efforts may summon with the consequent collapse of the political center.As a work of history, not political theory, Disruption explores several episodes involving substantive change. Constantine, for example, used Christianity to unify the fourth-century Roman Empire by relying on rational self-interest rather than force as the instrument of religious conversion. This contrasted with the way seventh-century Byzantine Emperor Heraclius alienated conquered subjects by imposing authority rather than negotiating it. By that time, the feuding Persian and Roman empires could not defend themselves against Arab conquest. At the same time, rivalries among the successors of Muhammad, who had welcomed Jews and Christians into Islam, could not generate a governing ideology that sustained loyalty until ‘Abd al-Malik used the Koran to codify religious practices and principles.Taking advantage of printing press technology and powerful German princes who opposed the Holy Roman Empire, Martin Luther inaugurated the individual focus of the early sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation by denying that priests had divine power. French theologian John Calvin soon questioned the divine right of monarchs while Holland’s William of Orange ensured that rights of citizenship in the modern state embraced freedom of religion and conscience. These notions received validation among the eighteenth-century Enlightenment theorists of France and Britain who argued that agreements constituted the basis of legitimate authority. Yet it took a cohesive elite in the former American colonies with traditions of representative government to forge these theories into a Constitution in which the expedient search for rules to govern, including the toleration of slavery, were more important than justice.The limited gains of the American case stand in contrast to the abysmal failures of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Nazi Germany. Each involved an ideologically correct minority who exploited the incompetence of authorities and rivals. Each invoked the slogans of Enlightenment reason, Marxist doctrine, or Social Darwinism to praise the virtues of the common people and direct democracy. Yet with the collapse of the political center, these merciless tyrannies unleashed new aristocracies instituting mass murder, secret police, purges of compatriots, and disastrous military adventures, offering stark warnings about the pitfalls of transformative change.