Revolutions

Abstract

Social revolutions are typically conceived as transformative historical events that fundamentally change the social structures of society. Their outcomes, as such, are usually associated with the transition to modernity, the rise of capitalism, and the emergence of democracy. It is their transformative effect, despite similarities, that sets them apart from rebellions, revolts, political revolutions, and other types of social movements, making them rare events in history. Compared to political revolutions, which are typically orchestrated from above, social revolutions are mass based. Their root causes are structural in nature, and the processes associated with their mass mobilization typically involve cultural, psychological, and political factors. The systematic social scientific study of revolutions may be traced back to the 19th century. These early works accounted for the structural causes and social forces behind them. Some project a concern with the deleterious effects of revolutionary dynamics. In the context of 20th-century history, the events that followed the Russian Revolution spurred academic interest on this complex sociopolitical phenomenon. The first generation of scholarship on revolution may be identified as the “Natural History School.” Scholars writing in this vein in the 1930s identified common historical patterns through which the American, English, French, and Russian Revolutions unfolded. In this perspective, revolutions emerge as a “natural” historical outcome of old regime practices, and their outbreaks follow a sequence of historical events that culminate in the establishment of a new regime. Second-generation theorists writing in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s focused on psychological factors, in particular expectation and frustration mechanisms. Scholars belonging to this generation also paid attention to the effects of institutional imbalance (or systemic pathology) on the potential for revolution. Third-generation scholars, primarily writing in the 1970s and 1980s, developed structural explanations of revolution, claiming that the key to making sense of the causes of revolution requires the student of revolution to consider the nature of “state breakdown” and the revolutionary potential of lower classes. Scholars belonging to this generation also paid attention to the political processes in the development of revolution. Fourth-generation scholars aimed to highlight agency in their analyses, although not at the expense of structural explanations. These scholars, writing since the 1990s, have more concretely examined the role played by culture and ideology, the structural features of gender and race, and increasingly the emotional and storytelling dimensions of revolutionary processes. Since this last generation of scholars’ focus on cultural and structural factors, more recent work has increasingly paid attention to the connections between globalization and revolution.