Editing Revolution (section)

== Studies of revolution ==
[[File: Revolution - 2014.jpg |thumb|R E V O L U T I O N, [[graffiti]] with [[political]] message on a house wall. Four letters have been written backwards and with a different color so that they also form the word [[Love]].]]{{Main|Social revolution}}

[[File:Prise de la Bastille.jpg|left|thumb|The [[storming of the Bastille]], 14 July 1789 during the [[French Revolution]].]]
[[File:Gilbert Stuart Williamstown Portrait of George Washington (cropped)(2).jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[George Washington]], leader of the [[American Revolution]].]]
[[File:Lenin.WWI.JPG|thumb|upright|right|[[Vladimir Lenin]], leader of the [[Bolshevik Revolution of 1917]].]]
[[File:Sunyatsen1.jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[Sun Yat-sen]], leader of the Chinese [[Xinhai Revolution]] in 1911.]]
[[File:การปฏิวัติสยาม พ.ศ. 2475 การเปลี่ยนแปลงการปกครองของประเทศไทย 01.jpg|thumb|[[Khana Ratsadon]], a group of military officers and civil officials, who staged the [[Siamese Revolution of 1932]]]]

Political and socioeconomic revolutions have been studied in many [[social sciences]], particularly [[sociology]], [[political science]] and [[history]].<ref name="NOWO:5">{{cite book|first=Jeff |last=Goodwin |author-link=Jeff Goodwin |title=No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |date=2001 |pages=5}}</ref> Scholars of revolution differentiate four generations of theoretical research on the subject of revolution.<ref name="Goldstonet4" /><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Beck |first=Colin J. |date=2018 |title=The Structure of Comparison in the Study of Revolution |url=https://osf.io/x8bf7/download |journal=Sociological Theory |language=en-US |volume=36 |issue=2 |pages=134–161 |doi=10.1177/0735275118777004 |issn=0735-2751 |s2cid=53669466|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Theorists of the first generation, including [[Gustave Le Bon]], [[Charles A. Ellwood]], and [[Pitirim Sorokin]], were mainly descriptive in their approach, and their explanations of the phenomena of revolutions were usually related to [[social psychology]], such as Le Bon's [[crowd psychology]] theory.<ref name="Goldstonet3" /> The second generation sought to develop detailed frameworks, grounded in [[social behavior]] theory, to explain why and when revolutions arise. Their work can be divided into three categories: psychological, sociological and political.<ref name="Goldstonet3" />

The writings of [[Ted Robert Gurr]], Ivo K. Feierbrand, Rosalind L. Feierbrand, James A. Geschwender, [[David C. Schwartz]], and Denton E. Morrison fall into the first category. They utilized theories of [[cognitive psychology]] and [[frustration-aggression theory]] to link the cause of revolution to the state of mind of the masses. While these theorists varied in their approach as to what exactly incited the people to revolt (e.g., modernization, recession, or discrimination), they agreed that the primary cause for revolution was a widespread frustration with the socio-political situation.<ref name="Goldstonet3"/>

The second group, composed of academics such as [[Chalmers Johnson]], [[Neil Smelser]], [[Bob Jessop]], [[Mark Hart]], Edward A. Tiryakian, and Mark Hagopian, drew on the work of [[Talcott Parsons]] and the [[structural-functionalist]] theory in sociology. They saw society as a system in equilibrium between various resources, demands, and subsystems (political, cultural, etc.). As in the psychological school, they differed in their definitions of what causes disequilibrium, but agreed that it is a state of severe disequilibrium that is responsible for revolutions.<ref name="Goldstonet3"/>

The third group, including writers such as [[Charles Tilly]], [[Samuel P. Huntington]], [[Peter Ammann]], and [[Arthur L. Stinchcombe]], followed a [[political science]] path and looked at [[pluralist theory]] and [[Conflict theories|interest group conflict theory]]. Those theories view events as outcomes of a [[power struggle]] between competing [[advocacy group|interest groups]]. In such a model, revolutions happen when two or more groups cannot come to terms within the current [[political system]]'s normal [[decision-making]] process, and when they possess the required resources to employ force in pursuit of their goals.<ref name="Goldstonet3"/>

The second-generation theorists regarded the development of revolutionary situations as a two-step process: "First, a pattern of events arises that somehow marks a break or change from previous patterns. This change then affects some critical variable—the cognitive state of the masses, the equilibrium of the system, or the magnitude of conflict and resource control of competing interest groups. If the effect on the critical variable is of sufficient magnitude, a potentially revolutionary situation occurs."<ref name="Goldstonet3"/> Once this point is reached, a negative incident (a war, a riot, a bad harvest) that in the past might not have been enough to trigger a revolt, will now be enough. However, if authorities are cognizant of the danger, they can still prevent revolution through reform or repression.<ref name="Goldstonet3"/>

In his influential 1938 book ''[[The Anatomy of Revolution]]'', historian [[Crane Brinton]] established a convention by choosing four major political revolutions—[[English Civil War|England (1642)]], [[American Revolution|Thirteen Colonies of America (1775)]], [[French Revolution|France (1789)]], and [[Russian Revolution|Russia (1917)]]—for comparative study.<ref>{{cite book |first=Crane |last=Brinton |author-link=Crane Brinton |title=[[The Anatomy of Revolution]] |edition=revised |location=New York |publisher=Vintage Books |date=1965 |orig-date=1938}}</ref> He outlined what he called their "uniformities", although the [[American Revolution]] deviated somewhat from the pattern.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Armstrong |first1=Stephen |last2=Desrosiers |first2=Marian |title=Helping Students Analyze Revolutions |journal=Social Education |volume=76 |issue=1 |url=https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/se_760138.pdf |date=January 2012 |pages=38–46}}</ref> As a result, most later comparative studies of revolution substituted [[Chinese Communist Revolution|China (1949)]] in their lists, but they continued Brinton's practice of focusing on four.<ref name="Goldstonet4"/>

In subsequent decades, scholars began to classify hundreds of other events as revolutions (see [[List of revolutions and rebellions]]). Their expanded notion of revolution engendered new approaches and explanations. The theories of the second generation came under criticism for being too limited in geographical scope, and for lacking a means of empirical verification. Also, while second-generation theories may have been capable of explaining a specific revolution, they could not adequately explain why revolutions failed to occur in other societies experiencing very similar circumstances.<ref name="Goldstonet4"/>

The criticism of the second generation led to the rise of a third generation of theories, put forth by writers such as [[Theda Skocpol]], [[Barrington Moore]], Jeffrey Paige, and others expanding on the old [[Marxism|Marxist]] [[class conflict|class-conflict]] approach. They turned their attention to "rural agrarian-state conflicts, state conflicts with autonomous elites, and the impact of interstate economic and military competition on domestic political change."<ref name="Goldstonet4"/> In particular, Skocpol's ''[[States and Social Revolutions]]'' (1979) was a landmark book of the third generation. Skocpol defined revolution as "rapid, basic transformations of society's state and class structures ... accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below", and she attributed revolutions to "a conjunction of multiple conflicts involving state, elites and the lower classes".<ref name="Skocpol_ssr"/>

[[File:West and East Germans at the Brandenburg Gate in 1989.jpg|thumb|left|The fall of the [[Berlin Wall]] and most of the events of the [[Autumn of Nations]] in Europe, 1989, were sudden and peaceful.]]
In the late 1980s, a new body of academic work started questioning the dominance of the third generation's theories. The old theories were also dealt a significant blow by a series of revolutionary events that they could not readily explain. The [[Iranian Revolution|Iranian]] and [[Nicaraguan Revolution]]s of 1979, the 1986 [[People Power Revolution]] in the [[Philippines]], and the 1989 [[Autumn of Nations]] in Europe, Asia and Africa saw diverse opposition movements topple seemingly powerful regimes amidst popular demonstrations and [[General strike|mass strikes]] in [[nonviolent revolution]]s.<ref name="Forantorr"/><ref name="Goldstonet4"/>

For some historians, the traditional paradigm of revolutions as [[class struggle]]-driven conflicts centered in Europe, and involving a violent state versus its discontented people, was no longer sufficient to account for the multi-class coalitions toppling dictators around the world. Consequently, the study of revolutions began to evolve in three directions. As Goldstone describes it, scholars of revolution:
#Extended the third generation's structural theories to a more heterogeneous set of cases, "well beyond the small number of 'great' social revolutions".<ref name="Goldstonet4"/>
#Called for greater attention to conscious [[Agency (philosophy)|agency]] and contingency in understanding the course and outcome of revolutions.
#Observed how studies of social movements—for women's rights, labor rights, and U.S. civil rights—had much in common with studies of revolution and could enrich the latter. Thus, "a new literature on 'contentious politics' has developed that attempts to combine insights from the literature on social movements and revolutions to better understand both phenomena."<ref name="Goldstonet4"/>

The fourth generation increasingly turned to quantitative techniques when formulating its theories. Political science research moved beyond individual or comparative case studies towards large-N statistical analysis assessing the causes and implications of revolution.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Leroi |first1=Armand M. |last2=Lambert |first2=Ben |last3=Mauch |first3=Matthias |last4=Papadopoulou |first4=Marina |last5=Ananiadou |first5=Sophia |last6=Lindberg |first6=Staffan I. |last7=Lindenfors |first7=Patrik |title=On revolutions |journal=[[Palgrave Communications]] |date=2020 |volume=6 |issue=4 |doi=10.1057/s41599-019-0371-1 |doi-access=free}}</ref> The initial fourth-generation books and journal articles generally relied on the [[Polity data series]] on [[democratization]].<ref>{{cite web|title=PolityProject |url=https://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html |website=Center for Systemic Peace |access-date =17 February 2016}}</ref> Such analyses, like those by A. J. Enterline,<ref>{{cite journal|title=Regime Changes, Neighborhoods, and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992 |journal=[[Journal of Conflict Resolution]] |date=1 December 1998 |issn=0022-0027 |pages=804–829 |volume=42 |issue=6 |doi=10.1177/0022002798042006006 |language=en |first=A. J. |last=Enterline |s2cid=154877512}}</ref> [[Zeev Maoz]],<ref>{{cite book|title=Domestic sources of global change |last=Maoz |first=Zeev |publisher=[[University of Michigan Press]] |year=1996 |location=Ann Arbor, MI}}</ref> and Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder,<ref>{{cite book|title=Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies go to War |last1=Mansfield |first1=Edward D. |publisher=[[MIT Press]] |year=2007 |last2=Snyder |first2=Jack}}</ref> identified a revolution by a significant change in the country's score on Polity's autocracy-to-democracy scale.

Since the 2010s, scholars like Jeff Colgan have argued that the Polity data series—which evaluates the degree of democratic or autocratic authority in a state's governing institutions based on the openness of executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition—is inadequate because it measures democratization, not revolution, and doesn't account for regimes which come to power by revolution but fail to change the structure of the state and society sufficiently to yield a notable difference in the Polity score.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Measuring Revolution |journal=Conflict Management and Peace Science |date=1 September 2012 |issn=0738-8942 |pages=444–467 |volume=29 |issue=4 |doi=10.1177/0738894212449093 |language=en |first=Jeff |last=Colgan |s2cid=220675692}}</ref> Instead, Colgan offered a new data set to single out governments that "transform the existing social, political, and economic relationships of the state by overthrowing or rejecting the principal existing institutions of society."<ref>{{Cite web|title=Data - Jeff D Colgan |url=https://sites.google.com/site/jeffdcolgan/data |website=sites.google.com |access-date=17 February 2016}}</ref> This data set has been employed to make empirically based contributions to the literature on revolution by finding links between revolution and the likelihood of international disputes.

Revolutions have been further examined from an anthropological perspective. Drawing on Victor Turner's writings on ritual and performance, [[Bjorn Thomassen]] suggested that revolutions can be understood as "liminal" moments: modern political revolutions very much resemble rituals and can therefore be studied within a process approach.<ref name="Thomassen">{{cite journal|last=Thomassen |first=Bjorn |author-link=Bjorn Thomassen |title=Toward an anthropology of political revolutions |journal=Comparative Studies in Society and History |year=2012 |volume=54 |issue=3 |pages=679–706 |doi=10.1017/s0010417512000278 |s2cid=15806418 |url=https://rucforsk.ruc.dk/ws/files/38613537/Notes_towards_an_Anthropology_of_Political_Revolutions.pdf}}</ref> This would imply not only a focus on political behavior "from below", but also a recognition of moments where "high and low" are relativized, subverted, or made irrelevant, and where the micro and macro levels fuse together in critical conjunctions. Economist [[Douglass North]] raised a note of caution about revolutionary change, how it "is never as revolutionary as its rhetoric would have us believe".<ref name="North_book">{{cite book |last1=North |first1=Douglass C. |title=Transaction Costs, Institutions, and Economic Performance |url=https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnabm255.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160201055849/http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABM255.pdf|url-status=dead|archive-date=1 February 2016|date=1992 |publisher=ICS Press |location=San Francisco |page=13 |isbn=978-1-558-15211-3 |via=U.S. Agency for International Development}}</ref> While the "formal rules" of laws and constitutions can be changed virtually overnight, the "informal constraints" such as institutional inertia and cultural inheritance do not change quickly and thereby slow down the societal transformation. According to North, the tension between formal rules and informal constraints is "typically resolved by some restructuring of the overall constraints—in both directions—to produce a new equilibrium that is far less revolutionary than the rhetoric."<ref name="North_book" />