The anatomy of revolution

We are today very much aware of revolution. The bare word itself is likely to set stirring a whole set of sentiments and associations in the mind of any modern man or woman. For some, perhaps for most in the older democracies of the West, these sentiments are not far from fear and dislike. For others, revolution is still a word of good promise, a beginning of better things, a necessary part of the progress of the race. Once, indeed, and not so very long ago, hopeful liberals could believe that certain favored countries--England, the United States, Germany, the good little countries of Europe like Switzerland and Holland, possibly even the classic land of revolution, France--had outgrown this kind of political instability. Freedom in the long run might slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent everywhere, even in South and Central America. All this seems, like so many other Victorian hopes, very distant to us now.

For our postwar world has produced a series of revolutions by no means limited to lands in general political disrepute. Russia in 1917, Central Europe in 1918-19, Italy in 1923, Spain in 1931, Germany again in 1933, all underwent violent changes of government to which the name revolution is usually attached. Some of these revolutionary movements were, indeed, not strictly in the nineteenth-century pattern: they were put through, not in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, but in the name of authority, discipline, power. They were, if you like, authoritarian, conservative, reactionary. Hitler and Mussolini did not talk the language of Hampden, Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, Mazzini, nor even that of Marx and Engels.

The older democracies, as yet apparently stable politically, have undergone a series of economic strains which certainly appear more serious than similar strains they survived successfully enough in the nineteenth century. The breakdown of the Versailles settlement, the return of international anarchy, the difficulties of government finances, contributed further to a sense of insecurity in these democracies. Recent events in Russia have, to put it mildly, bewildered and discouraged those outside that country who in one degree or another looked hopefully on the Russian revolution. The whole tone of writing on politics has changed, especially in countries like England, France, and the United States. Prophets of doom are now almost as common as prophets of progress used to be in the good old days when we could blandly rejoice in clichés like “Evolution, not Revolution.”

Even in the United States, where pleasant memories of 1776 are incorporated into such unrevolutionary bodies as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the great crash of 1929 set all sorts of people to worrying about, or hoping for, a catastrophic overturn. Sober people in conservative circles began to discuss whether a little farm in Vermont wouldn’t give them subsistence and reasonable safety from the wandering robber-bands of the coming Reign of Terror. Hopeful radicals, too well read in Marx, began to discuss whether economic privation might not make a majority of American workers realize that they are a proletariat, and not a group of potential capitalists. Down through Hollywood and the columnists there ran the naïvely cynical catch phrase, “Comes the revolution....”

It is, then, almost impossible for us in these days to be indifferent toward revolutions. Yet we shall not go far towards understanding them unless we can maintain toward them, if not indifference, at least detachment. This last word, one may hope, is not just a favorable way of saying what “indifference” says unfavorably. A physician may feel far from indifferent towards his patient, but he will not be a good physician unless he is detached in his observation and treatment of his patient’s malady. We may dodge here a whole lurking set of philosophical difficulties, and say simply that what we commonly call modern science has as one of its basic elements the detachment of the scientist. The scientist, as a private person, may love and hate, hope and fear; as a scientist, he must try to leave all this behind when he enters his laboratory or his study.

To attempt to maintain in the analysis of human affairs the detachment of the physicist or the chemist is very difficult, and to a great many upright and intelligent people seems unprofitable, even treasonous. You should, they feel, hate Hitler all the time, before, while, and after you start explaining him; otherwise your explanation may edge into extenuation.

But to understand all is by no means to pardon all. At any rate, the scientific understanding of the place of the mosquito in yellow fever has not led us to tolerance of, or indifference to, that particular type of mosquito. Quite the contrary. We cannot, of course, expect such immediate and apparently spectacular results as were obtained with yellow fever from the study of man in society, from what are a bit optimistically called the social sciences--anthropology, economics, political science, history, sociology, and the like. But we may well consider the possibility of approaching the study of revolutions in something of the spirit the natural scientist carries to his work.

Our aim in the following study is the modest one of attempting to establish, as the scientist might, certain first approximations of uniformities to be noted in the course of four successful revolutions in modern states; the English revolution of the 1640’s, the American revolution, the great French revolution, and the recent--or present--revolution in Russia. We must make clear at the start some of the limitations of our study: this is not the only, nor necessarily the best, way of studying revolutions; this study does not pretend to be a complete sociology of revolutions; it deliberately limits its field to four relatively well-studied revolutions; its conclusions are to be taken to refer to these four revolutions, and any extension of such conclusions to other revolutions, or to revolutions in general, is to be undertaken with caution and humility.

Were we attempting to find an ideal type for revolution, were we seeking a kind of Platonic idea of revolution, we might be fairly reproached with picking four nice neat revolutions which made almost too good a case, too perfect a pattern. But we are making no such attempt. It should be very clear that not all revolutions, past, present, and future, will conform to the pattern here drawn. Our four revolutions are not necessarily even “typical” in the sense the word “typical” has for literary critics or moralists. They are simply four important revolutions with which we have chosen to begin a work of systematization still in its infancy. Subtler systematizations will come later, from other and more advanced workers. Above all, we do not here claim any prophetic wisdom. We do not expect to be able to predict from this study just when and where the next revolution will break out on this earth.

At this point it may be objected that the social sciences have been aping the natural sciences for several centuries, and got no further forward, that they ought therefore to try and stand on their own feet, that they ought to work out their own methods without bothering about what has been done in the natural sciences. There is a kernel of truth in this objection. Certainly writers like Fourier or Herbert Spencer, who have proclaimed themselves literally the Newtons or the Darwins of social science, appear to have gone wrong from the start. A prophetic soul drawing upon philosophy and the arts--a Spengler, for instance--will probably make at least as much sense out of the study of men in society as will the social scientist who tries to take over unaltered the methods and materials of physics or biology. Yet one hesitates to turn the study of men in society wholly over to the Spenglers. The long tradition of what may be called rationalism has in our society made conquests not to be lightly abandoned even in this postwar world. That tradition makes it imperative to attempt to continue, and extend, the kind of work we call scientific.

There has, indeed, been a great deal of nonsense written under the protecting name of science. It is easy to sympathize with Mr. Max Lerner’s outburst: “I am frankly skeptical when people working on the study of societies begin arming themselves with scalpels, slide-rules and test-tubes. For they are promising more than they can possibly fulfill. The protestations of complete objectivity that we have been hearing from students of society in the past quarter century take on a religious note: it is as if they were washing themselves in the blood of the scientific lamb.” Some of Mr. Lerner’s objections to the appeal to science and to scientific detachment are probably those of the romantic lover of his fellow-men, and are almost wholly irreducible by logic or experience; but some are those of the skeptic and critic, and such objections can be shown to rest in good part on a misunderstanding of scientific method not by any means limited to Mr. Lerner. So common is this misunderstanding that we must attempt here to put the matter as clearly as possible in a very few words. This will be in no sense a detour; it will be an essential approach to our subject.

II. The Bare Elements of Scientific Methods

First, not even the “exact” sciences like astronomy or physics are exact in the sense of “absolute” or “infallible.” Their firmest laws or uniformities are to be regarded as tentative. They may be upset at any time by further work. But at any given moment they are not to be tampered with unless they prove unreliable in relation to observed facts. A few mystics, inhibited in our crass society from the delights of navel-gazing, have made too much of the contemporary revolution in physics. Newton’s laws have not been “disproved”; nor has the principle of indeterminacy been so firmly established as to make all men equally good at the game of poker. What has happened in modern physics, as far as a layman can judge, is that the physicist has been sharply reminded that even his neatest uniformities are not absolutes, but are subject to correction, that he is safer in regarding these uniformities as based on observations rather than on the will of God, or the nature of things, or on reality.

This brings us easily to the second point. Science makes no attempt to study or describe reality--certainly not ultimate reality. Science is not even concerned with truth, in the sense that word has for theologians, for most philosophers, and for a good many other people. The desire to find a final cause, an unmoved mover, a Ding an sich, seems to be so common in men that we have no grounds for believing that this search is not, in one form or another, a fairly constant element in human society. Only, scientists as scientists can have no part in such a search. This by no means need be taken as indicating that the search is silly, and ought to be stopped. Some scientists have lately been, as private persons, very active in the search, and indeed, after the manner of such searches, successful. Faith has long since found God in unlikelier places than the atom. But such discoveries are not the discoveries of science. That discipline is based, not on faith, but on skepticism, on a skepticism that will not even worry itself over its status in the universe. And so the scientist works on serenely, undisturbed by the philosopher’s final thrust: that to be constantly skeptical is to believe in doubt, which is after all a form of faith.