Subjective Conditions and Revolutionary Conflict: Some Remarks

Abstract

The sociology of revolutionary conflict has been overwhelmingly concerned with the analysis of 'system contradictions' as 'objective conditions' of conflict and has shown remarkably little interest in what may be called loosely the analysis of 'subjective conditions'. This neglect has led to inadequacies in the interpretation of particular types of conflict, especially in the case of middle-class and student radicalism. These inadequacies are the result of difficulties in relating political conflict to structural strains and of the insufficient consideration of the problem of the emergence of 'subjective conditions'. A reorientation of sociological theories of conflict should take as its main task the study of the ways in which an antagonistic or 'ruptural' ideology comes to emerge. In this theoretical reorientation, 'subjective conditions' should no longer have a 'residual' or a 'passive' character and should be related to typical social conditions. As Harold Wolpe puts it1: There has been relatively little progress towards the elaboration of a theory concerning the development of the subjective conditions of revolutionary situations.... Much of the empirical analysis of the conditions and manner in which the subjective perceptions of the relevant group develop is . . . either ad hoc and unsystematic, or treats revolutionary consciousness as the unproblematic outcome of certain situations and actions'. The Parsonian theory does consider 'subjective conditions': it conceives social and political integration as the result of the common acceptance of a value-system and conflict as the result of limited failures of internalization/socialization; however, it does not provide a satisfactory answer to the general question of the social and political basis of value-systems nor to the question of the social determination of interests and ideologies. Non-functionalist approaches are not totally immune to such criticism: in Lockwood's contributions to a theory of social and political stability and conflict, conflict is associated with the degree of structural incongruity ('system malintegration'), with the degree of non-conformism to the values ('social' malintegration), and, thirdly, with the degree of structured inequality;2 although the social determination of interests is a major theme, little is said about the processes leading to breakdowns in situations of'social integration'