Does anyone ever get the revolution they asked for?

I’ve been reading Voline — not a great writer, but an interesting read.

“When, on my arrival [in Petrograd], some comrades wanted to know my first impressions, I told them this: “Our delay is irreparable. It is as if we had to overtake on foot an express train, which, in the possession of the Bolsheviki, is 100 kilometres ahead of us, and is travelling at the rate of 100 kilometres an hour. We not only have to overtake it, but we must grab hold of it at full speed, hang on, get into it and fight the Bolsheviks, dislodge them, and finally, not take over the train, but, what is much more delicate, put it at the disposal of the masses and help them make it go. A miracle is needed for all that to succeed. Our duty is to believe in that miracle and work for its realization.””

I think that starting with your two binaries may camouflage the fact that revolutions start out general and become more narrow as internal politics determines which factions wins out. So the goals of the revolution are never as singular as they appear later.

And as Voline’s story indicates, the ones who win out are generally those most ready to use organized violence. Is there any real connection between utopia and revolution, these days?

What counts as a revolution? Does a successful nationalist push to end connection to a “colonizing” power and establish an independent polity count as revolutionary, or do you only count as revolutions things that try forbid social and economic changes. If the former, Norway’s independence from Sweden (1905) might be a case of a revolution which got just what it wanted and was fairly happy with it. (A “revolution” whose happy outcome was cited by Jane Jacobs as a reason for Anglo-Canadians not to be frightened of Quebec separatism.)

Who is the revolutionary asking?

Perhaps the revolutionary is asked, and has an answer and the answer works well enough — success.

Perhaps the revolutionary is asked, and has no answer, or an unworkable answer.

Perhaps the revolutionary is asked, asks for expert advice & assistance, and either takes the advice & assistance, which turns out to be workeable or adaptable to circumstances — succcess.

Or the revolutionary refuses to take the advice & assistance, or takes it, but screws up the implementation. Or, it is really bad advice & assistance.

Oh, good question.

I think part of the answer is that the results of even successful revolution are incalculable, and part of what successful revolutionaries must be prepared to do is to guide the outcome and be prepared to like what they get. Neither the American Founding Fathers nor the leaders of the Indian Independence movement knew what they would get, but they found it was better than what they had before their respective revolutions.

I think Keynes critique of Communism is relevant here: to be successful revolutions must first want something that they know how to achieve and is possible; must have good theories, in other words. The on-going right-wing revolution in the USA has this problem: its economic model is fundamentally flawed, and there is no way for them to get both kind of markets and property system that they want and, at the same time, have the kinds of lives they want.

More tomorrow. I think this an interesting and important question and I hope it sparks more good discussion.

In the Mexican revolution, some groups got what they wanted and others were disappointed, both cases 1 and 4. Perhaps this is typical in the overthrow of an authoritarian regime when class or regional conflicts are also present. When there are enough contending factions involved, with disparities in military or economic power, there may be so few stable coalitions possible that a generally satisfactory outcome is unlikely.

Aren’t the people starting a revolution generally conservatives, who think they are starting a counterrevolution or a restoration?

It was (in the story) Zhou Enlai.

“‘Land to the peasants’ or ‘down with the king’ seem like proposted institutional changes concerning which one can say later: did it happen? If so, did it turn out well or badly? (Again, not that the answer is clear.)”

Right, so, once you deliver a ‘checkmate’ (as, for example, in 1979 Iran) you have achieved what you set out to do. But then, since there can’t be vacuum, now it’s all up for grabs, and so you get an Islamic Republic. Which is, I suppose, what most people wanted at the time, since it was approved by a referendum. So, wasn’t it a success, then? And compared to what? I don’t see anybody there advocating restoration of monarchy, so it must be something like 1b: you got what you wanted, and it’s a step in the right direction.

It seems reasonable to say that you get what you want, institutionally if the institutional changes are actually made, the way you want them, pretty quick. Not 100 years after the revolution but right after the revolution. Or soon after.

OK, then the revolutionaries of 1789, 1830 and 1848 got pretty much exactly the institutions they wanted in the short term. The Meiji revolutionaries also got I think exactly what they fought for though they were member of the oligarchy before anyway, so the whole event might not qualify as a revolution, depending on whether you think a revolution necessarily involves popular movement (and setting aside the idiosyncratic term of Restoration traditionally used in pure Bruce Wilder @11 style).

oops typo – sacret should of course be sacred in case anybody thought I was inventing some mysterious new jargon word.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m in general anti utopian and anti-revolutionary because
1. Utopians almost always make the perfect the enemy of the good and risk replacing things that work modestly with things that don’t work at all
2. Revolutions carry all the baggage of the process of revolution. Evolution will happen anyway – we should try to encourage it by a adopting a progressive frame of mind.

Secession-type events where an existing government unilaterally breaks off from its parent, because the parent has suddenly lost power or desire to stop it by force, would seem intuitively peaceful. Nationalist revolts against personal unions and past annexation treaties that left the state apparatus in place – Belgium against the Netherlands, Sweden against Norway.

The Balkan nationalist movements seceding from Ottoman arguably got the independence they wanted. It is the Great Power states that backed them that found that their plans all conflicted with everyone else’s plans.

A revolution destroying the old music industry, but getting X-Factor/America’s Got Talent, rather than the (wished for) Grateful Dead model?

Nah, I believe a vast majority of rational people of that region (except Slovenia) realize that it’ll always be a failure. There is no upside whatsoever, and will never be.

A couple of thoughts:
1. I read somewhere once (that’s my official MLA format citation) that Zhou Enlai thought that he was being asked about the “revolution” of 1968, and so “it’s too soon to tell” is somewhat less gnomic than advertised. Can anyone confirm/refute/shed light on this interpretation?

2. If the Scots were to vote themselves out of the UK, would this count as a revolution? (Which, of course, is a different question than “would it be a successful revolution?” to which we all know that the answer would be yes, because, as someone said once, “if it’s not Scottish, it’s cr*p.”)

I’ve heard the Zhou thing as well. It’s even possible he was thinking about De Gaulle’s coup.

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of revolutions are solidly in category 1. Unless we’re counting numbers of people, rather than number of incidents. We’ll have a long way to go with 2/3/4 before catching up to the tens of thousands of local peasant revolutions that resulted in small-scale land redistribution. (Category 1 is severely constrained by population size, and the modern state is large-sized, so we can’t expect much to happen ‘as planned’ there. The more people there are, the more fuzzy ‘as planned’ is.)

TheSophist, yes that is Chas Freeman’s account of what Zhou was referring to. And DeGaulle’s coup came earlier, by this time he was about to lose a referendum and step down.

Bryan Caplan has argued, based on Eugen Richter’s “Pictures of the Socialistic Future” that the G.D.R really was what the revolutionaries were after since they were “born bad”. It would be preferable to rely on the writings of revolutionaries themselves, rather than a fictional account by one of their detractors.

“But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name–” William Morris, “Dream of John Ball”)

I’m wondering if the Dutch revolt and formation of the Dutch Republic could go mostly in box 1, or if 2 would be more accurate.

I’d add that a lot of medieval religious revolutions could probably go into box 3, by initially putting in new institutions (to qualify as a revolution) that failed to have their intended impact on individual morality (though most of these were crushed or dissolved in fairly short order, but many did have some lifespan). I don’t know enough details about any particular instance to judge in detail, but I think this would add numerous cases to consider.

Also wondering if the original Caliphate would qualify as a revolution in the sense of a revolution against the previous institutions in the Arabian peninsula, and if this would be box 1 or 2.

“They may or may not have got what they wanted, but they didn’t think of themselves as wanting a revolution.”

That sounds to me as if, institutionally speaking, they got something they didn’t ask for, but it was good. That is, it’s not so much that the question is wrong. The answer is some form of 2

It doesn’t at all follow from the quoted bit that the answer is a form of 2. Because “they” may have gotten exactly the institutions they wanted, except that unexpectedly for them, they got these through revolutionary means rather than non-revolutionary means. This is especially clear given that the next paragraph (in 13) implies that whether or not some institutional change qualifies as revolutionary depends on the smoothness of the transition. (As an aside, if this is the criterion, did India [or the Subcontinent if you prefer] have a “smooth transition”? If not, was it an instance of revolution?)

Anyway, it’s this focus on the nature of the transition rather than the actual institutional change itself that strikes me as problematic. Esp. post the French case, we tend to call “revolutions” precisely those events that are violent, protracted, and partly as a result, extremely disruptive—and not just in an institutional sense. (“Velvet revolution” etc. seem to me to be extended senses of the term.)

JH presents a different criterion though:

let’s say a revolution is what you get when you get something new that has to be institutional, but it can’t be encompassed by existing institutions.

This criterion doesn’t mention violence, militancy, etc., at all. If we take *this* criterion seriously, then I’d suggest that the vast majority of what we’d call revolutions would fall under 1 (also: fair number of 3’s). It’s only implicit reliance on the usual sense of “revolution” that makes us think that 2 & 4 are overfull.

I’m sure it’s been said but #2 isnt really a success; you get something new that was better than before but probably not as good as it could have been. An ambiguity at best. Most likely leading to a lifetime of ‘what ifs’ from the revolutionaries, making it possibly worse than what went before

I’m surprised that nobody else has pointed out yet that revolutions are often heterogeneous, with different revolutionaries wanting different things — in extreme cases “down with the ancien regime” may be the ONLY thing they agree on — and therefore will often, or even usually, fall into multiple boxes at once.

If the Jacobins got what they wanted, and the Girondins didn’t, and most of the former and all of the latter were ultimately unhappy with it, then the French Revolution falls into boxes 1, 3, and 4 at the same time — and I’m not so sure you couldn’t find someone else for whom the result was a box 2. (Napoleon?)

Of course if the *only* thing you want is “down with the king” then any non-quashed revolution is going to be a 1 or 3 for you (depending on whether or not after the king falls there really is a deluge), but if some of your fellow revolutionaries have more specific goals for what happens after the king falls, then it may still be a 2 or 4 for them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the revolution doesn’t have goals any more than the nation has interests — people in the revolution have goals, but not all people in the revolution have the same goals. And the same thing potentially applies to evaluating the result as good or bad. There may be some extreme cases where everyone agrees the result is bad, but I doubt if there will be any where everyone (even limiting it to everyone who supported the revolution) agrees the result is good.

A long, long time ago, I read a book which I remember had a great impact on me, which is now literally all I remember about the book. The Anatomy of Revolution, by Crane Brinton, published in 1965 (which is also when I read it). Maybe I should re-read it. Then there’s always Pete Townshend’s take on the issue, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Add me to the list of people you’re going to say are copping out of the question by claiming it’s simpleminded or otherwise misbegotten, but maybe I have a slightly different cop-out that might be of interest.

What I find fundamentally misbegotten about this question is the idea of attributing even the fact of revolution to revolutionaries, much less how the revolution turns out. All the revolutions with which I have any familiarity were made by their society’s elites, not its revolutionaries, by the powerful, not the powerless.

Take the French Revolution as the locus classicus. It was started by the Parlement de Paris when it refused to register Neckar’s new taxes. The elite that did this intended precisely that this would force the Estates General to be called, a forum they imagined that they would be able to control and use to change how France was governed in ways that they could control. Only after a long further string of this elite’s disastrously foolish dabbling in revolution, did any sort of even negative control of events fall to people who at the start of it all lived in garetts and basements plotting the downfall of the ancien regime.

So, sure, no doubt about it, we can preserve your taxonomy of the four ways that revolutions fail or succeed, but we can only do that by way of a massive label change. But if you do that, the taxonomy collapses into itself. From the point of view of the parlementaires of 1788, all four of your outcomes can be said to be true, and in spades:

1) They got a revolution, they got a new way of France managing its finances that did not stop at royal decrees.

2)They certainly didn’t want canaille managing France’s finances! But, however canaillish the folks who ended up calling the shots, that turned out much better than these idiot parlementaires running France’s finances.

3)They got a revolution. alright.

4)They did not get a dictatorship of the parlementaires and grandees of France, and yes, what they got instead was goddawful.

As Engels (I mean engels) points out, revolutions require “heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars.” This is exactly why revolution is neither here nor there, and should not be part of anyone’s program. What brings about deep, enduring, granular social change is quotidian virtue: patience, perseverance, generosity, solidarity, ingenuity, modesty, honesty, openness to criticism, a modicum of courage, a commitment to nonviolence (and some training in it — it’s a demanding skill), a smidgen of imagination (social change is not rocket science), and a willingness to work one’s ass off. Romantic rhetoric, revolutionary swagger, party loyalty, hierarchy, asceticism, discipline, and theoretical sophistication should be resolutely eschewed.
The Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Iranian, Zimbabwian, and to a lesser extent the Cuban, revolutions were — partly, but not entirely, because all these regimes (except perhaps for Zimbabwe — I don’t know) were under continual threat from the United States — such ghastly failures, such horrible travesties of socialist and communist ideals, that anyone advocating radical social change should probably preface her remarks with IANAR (I Am Not a Revolutionary).
The only benign, lasting change is gradual, molecular, deep-rooted, widely based, non-violent. Natura non facit saltum, and that goes for human nature as well.

P.s. to my 51: “great” in the sense of ‘major’, not ‘wonderful’

50: Your nobility is I am sure no great comfort to the young Chinese factory girls signing suicide contracts, or the actual suicides and emigres of Spain and Greece, although I bet it makes you feel terrific. I feel terrible.

Revolution doesn’t start with Lenin looking out and seeing the millions rush headlong toward each other across the Somme, with Krupp and Armstrong at their backs, to Max Weber’s bloody cheerleading (taking a short break from his hard boards), but it sure works as a hell of a metaphor for me.

Nothing has really changed. It has only gotten worse since then.

b. mcmanus @55
I know your comment wasn’t directed at me, but re “Weber’s bloody cheerleading”:
yes, he was a German nationalist, but much less extreme than some. Singling him out doesn’t make sense, imo. But I don’t want to derail the thread, though at this point the train seems to careening anyway.

“In hypothetical Gore administration Bin Laden wins”
/Confused slashy
//Sarcasm?

“In hypothetical Gore administration Bin Laden wins”

More than he has won so far?
Very hard to believe.

In a hypothetical Gore administration, bin Laden steals the Spear of Destiny from the Vatican, which makes him immune to bullets.

revolutions require “heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars.” This is exactly why revolution is neither here nor there, and should not be part of anyone’s program. What brings about deep, enduring, granular social change is quotidian virtue

The revolutions of 1989 for the most part required no terror, civil or national wars and resulted in deep, enduring social change. Most people got what they wanted or at least got rid of what they didn’t want.

“In a hypothetical Gore administration, bin Laden steals the Spear of Destiny from the Vatican, which makes him immune to bullets.”

True. And we’re only scratching the surface here

I think there is a fifth category here: what we asked for was internally contradictory, and therefore could not be achieved, or even, we didn’t know to ask for. There is always some of this. But sometimes revolutions fail because of bad theory.

And with that, good night.

philofra @66 has a point, given e.g. the protests in Egypt on the second anniversary of the revolution there (or the events that led to the toppling of the regime, if you prefer that terminology).

A question for Holbo, and others who are sympathetic to his classification scheme (and perhaps also for the anti-revolution people in general):

How would you classify the Haitian revolution? (Not an idle question, ps.)

@ 52 – Trotsky makes the same claim: no revolution w/o the Russian peasant. See Vol 1 Ch. 3.

So is Wright’s book worth the read? (I’ve always avoided “analytical” Marxism thinking I’d find it boring. Into Marx, not into rat choice or analytical philosophy. At all.)

What’s a revolution? A war of independence barely qualifies. Chopping off the head of a king may be no more than a dynastic struggle. The French revolution briefly instantiated a unification of Germany, regularized taxes and surnames, weights and measures, and ultimately catalyzed the delegitimization of monarchy throughout Christendom. That’s no small accomplishment for a bunch of rabble-rousers, and, two hundred some years later, it’s a pretty damned comfortable place to visit. N’est-ce pas?

So is Wright’s book worth the read?

—

I would say it is pretty much made to order for the intellectual appetites of the Crooked Timber moderation board and most of the regular commenters. It is in the spirit of “Red Plenty”, a rueful look at planned economies from the standpoint of Mises “calculation problem” economics. The net result is endorsement of cooperatives, something obviously made to order for the gradualist perspective here, plus an embrace of the Chinese Communist Party’s development policies. I debated Wright here:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/03/06/erik-olin-wrights-envisioning-real-utopias/

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/erik-olin-wright-replies/

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/a-reply-to-wright/

Here’s Russell Jacoby hammering Wright:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/dueling-utopias/

You’re probably right philofra. My apologies for the snappy response

Just piling on here, today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions. And so on. So time scale really does matter, as of course does what you call a problem, what you call a solution, and who does the calling.

philofra

Here’s a nice reading list on the Arab Spring if you’re interested

http://pomeps.org/category/academic-works/arabuprisings/articles-arabuprisings/general/

I think one of the biggest problems for revolutions (at least violent revolutions) is that the people who subsequently come into power per definition do not think it is without warrant to use violence against political enemies. Thus they don’t (or can’t) begin to govern in a way that is peaceful enough to be described as a successful “democracy” or whatever utopia they were fighting for to begin with.

@84, I understand. I’m saying that at least some of those 1989 transformations can be traced back to incidents of mass-violence that, I would argue, actually produced fundamental institutional changes. 1989 being, to an extent, only the final acknowledgment. I do realize that this is a controversial view.

mud man@64. The biblical story of Samuel and Saul is nearly paralleled by the stories of various Greek tyrants who rose to power on the back of a popular movement but turned out to be, well, tyrannical. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there’s a germ of historical truth in it.

bad Jim @77: the Frenc Revolution “catalyzed the delegitimization of monarchy throughout Christendom.” The Kings or Queens of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium. the Netherlands, Spain and the UK might beg to differ on this point.

@94 Re the French Revolution:
It was not one thing but went through several phases.
Probably worth remembering that, before the Terror, the Revolution accomplished a lot, above all in getting rid of the old regime, the legal underpinning of seigneurial and noble privileges, etc.
One summary holds that the Revolution’s two most lasting results, beyond the consequences for France itself, were entrenching the notion of ‘the people’ as the ultimate sovereigns, and ‘normalizing’ the idea of political change. Some of the immediate consequences were not good, and there was a lot of bloodshed, but I’m with ‘bad Jim’ @77 in judging the Revolution on balance positively, from the perspective of some 220+ years later.

It seems to me that behind the common notion of “revolution” is some sense of an operative social contract, between the rulers and the ruled, at the core of society. I’m not thinking of an abstract, philosophical idea, which can be used to derive concepts of just rules, but the actual rules and institutions, and how a more-or-less decentralized society works together.

One aspect of the actual social contract is the deal: just how good a deal it is, for those on the bottom, in the middle, at the top. Another is the pragmatic case: how well does the society or the nation-state work, how productive, efficient, resilient, adaptive, innovative, creative. Political identification and patriotism mean that the pragmatic case can be felt quite as passionately as the grievances of class, which, I suppose, is one reason why movements of national self-determination have been as frequent in history as rebellions against economic oppressions, and frequently one entangled the other.

The pure, vertical deal may be unfair — it is probably always unfair to some substantial degree — but, every deal that persists will have the characteristic that breaking the deal will be expected to be more costly to the lower classes than the possible benefit of . . . withdrawing from cooperation, pending re-negotiation of the terms. The elite are, by definition, better organized, albeit less numerous, and in possession of greater resources and greater discretion in the use of resources. They will arrange it so that breaking the deal is more costly to the many than continuing the deal, no matter how unjustly imbalanced is the distribution of benefits in the continuation. So, in that sense, it would make sense that few revolutionaries would succeed in toppling their elites, and few would realize substantial, net benefits, even in the medium-run, from an overthrow. Few unions have gone out on strike, expecting to recover in the next contract the cost of the strike.

The pragmatic case opens the possibility that the elite may not be satisfied with how well the vertical deal works, or what it requires. Isn’t that a major part of the story of the Revolutions of 1989?

The French Revolution, with its Fall of the Bastille, rampaging sans culottes and its Reign of Terror, may suggest a narrative of a society oppressed, finally rebelling when it has had enough. But, France in the late 18th century was very much a society acutely aware that as a nation-state, its institutions simply did not work well. And, the example of the American Revolution held out the possibility that a constitution could be rationally and deliberately re-written. In the event, the revolutionaries were remarkably incapable of managing the acute problems of money and bread, but mobilizing a nation in arms did solve the immediate foreign policy problem.

The wealth and power of a society, and the political economy of a nation-state, is tied up in the social cooperation structured by its operative social contract. Withdrawing from that social cooperation, breaking the social contract, is necessarily very costly, as it interrupts the social cooperation, which provides the production of goods and services, at the most basic level. If it is simply a matter of getting a better deal for the bottom, it may not worth the cost. Where the operative social contract is not merely oppressive, but also dysfunctional in some broader senses, so that even the elites feel dissatisfaction, then “revolution” may have a chance.

It seems to me very difficult to talk sensibly about “revolutions” as a class (perhaps with some idea of working out what worked or not, or what will work). Whether they happen, and how, and with what result, is deeply embedded in the attitudes, culture, expectations, vaguely-understood notions of what the social contract requires and so on. The Russian, Chinese and French revolutions were violent in large part because all the participants accepted violence as part of the accepted repertoire of social protest (in the forms, respectively, of peasant insurrection and palace coup, peasant uprising and urban barricades coupled with elite factional defiance) AND that state or elite violence was an appropriate response. By contrast, the Iranian revolution of 1978 was largely free of mass bloodshed, in part because of the cult of martyrdom and in part because family linkages undercut the ability to mobilise on interest lines. Likewise, the nobles who led their neighbours and tenants in revolt against Charles I were just doing what their ancestors had done.

We are more wary of violence now – when we call for heads on pikes, it is just metaphor. But all sides accepted it as real then.

@99
minor pt. — Iranian rev. was ’79. But could you explain connection betw. ‘cult of martyrdom’ and lack of bloodshed?

bianca @29
“but then I saw @reason–when did people start thinking societies and governments “evolve” in ways that happen naturally (and for the good) unless some bad person tries to stop them?”

I don’t think it necessarily happens naturally, nor that it is necessarily stopped by or only by “bad” people. Bad with the right sort of institutions and attitude, it does happen. I just think revolutions are very bad for creating the right sort of institutions and attitudes.

Peter T @99:
” the nobles who led their neighbours and tenants in revolt against Charles I “: well, that’s true for some part of the Parliamentary forces. It’s more true of the nobles and gentry who led, etc, for Charles I. I don’t think it’s at all true of the London or Bristol Trained Bands, or of the New Model Army.

the Haitian rev. was the first successful revolution of slaves vs. masters (at least in the ‘modern’ era), wasn’t it?

Well, yes. (Though it was the first and last, no?) But I was curious whether the “revolution never brings about anything good”, “we need to patiently and non-violently work for incremental change” types—whether these types if they could transport themselves back in time would want to give such counsel to the Haitian revolutionaries. Perhaps they would, but the thought strikes me as pure farce.

More generally, it doesn’t seem to me that the people giving such counsel on here have a particularly good grasp of how and why (what we tend to call) revolutions come about. It seems to me that the Haitian case makes this particularly stark, but then I doubt I’m going to make much headway against someone like Stephen.

js. @107 — yes, I take your point.

Stephen @104:
LFC@102: if you include “national recognition”, would the American Revolution be in the class you mention?

I’m not entirely sure. On the one hand, I think the 13 colonies viewed themselves to some extent as little polities who had a common cause vs the colonial power but were not necessarily a singular ‘nation’; on the other hand, the opening of the Decl. of Independence refers to “one People…dissolv[ing] the Political Bands which have connected them with another….” But then the American Rev. is not something I claim any extensive knowledge about, much or most of what I learned about it in school having faded somewhat in memory.

Surveying revolutions surely must impress upon the mind the extent to which social, political and economic institutional change has its foundation in generational change, and the moments of conflagration or celebratory triumph are but milestones along a path longer than any human lifetime. I think Stephen goes too far in thinking the blood always superfluous to the result. Following Kornreich’s hint, I would suggest that the reactionaries also participate in revolutions, with their resistance, and they often win out. (As the risk of pointing out the obvious, we are living in the dark days of a revolutionary moment lost to the dark forces of an overweening plutocracy, heedless of the inevitable consequences. Thank you, neoliberal scum, for your service in bringing the next Dark Age closer.)

The French Revolution, as badJim@77 points out, did, eventually, begat a stable Republic, and a committment of the whole French body politic to republican ideology. It took a while, and ironically the Third Republic was birthed amidst one of those unaccountable moments in 19th century French history, when political enthusiasm for monarchy dominated. They still had l’affaire Dreyfus and Petain and Algeria to work through.

The American Revolution did not realize its program, until the Civil War, which puts its progress on the same time-scale as the French Revolution. On such time-scales, I suppose that one could argue, as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood in essence did, that the American Revolution, itself, fulfilled the hopes of Whigs and Levellers for the English Civil War.

Maybe, Zhou Enlai really was thinking 1789 not 1968, and we should give him credit. He was, after all, not just speaking idly; he was, at the moment of speaking, sponsoring Deng in setting in motion the Chinese “revolution” which approaches a crisis, now.

My only real knowledge of this subject comes from spending a lot of time on the streets in Cairo (not continuously though) since January 28, 2011. And reading some of the historiography of the French revolution. And a large slice of analysis and reporting in Arabic in the years since. Some people have thought I’ve been pretty accurate, but I don’t think anyone really guessed the extent of the revolt. I still think Furet is right that one of the most revolutionary features of such an event is that it irrevocably divides society in ways that last for years and possibly decades. The Whiggish idea that the French revolution instantiated something that 200 years later makes France a pleasant place to live means it was a successful revolution seems a bit odd to me. Would this reading backward have been so reassuring to the victims of the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv, or the Communards, or indeed to most Algerians or Tunisians of the 19th and first half of the 20th century? The ascent of Frederick the Great also set in motion some important and long-lasting changes. And Germany today is also a fine place to be. Ditto the Berber-Arab conquest of Andalusia which many people prefer both to France and Germany.

Martyrdom (the killing of the innocent/righteous by the forces of evil) play a central role in Iranian Shia belief and Iranian political myths.

Orientalize much? Just think about the actual example you provide (which is a good one). If, for whatever reason, you have tens of thousands of people—perhaps even just thousands of people—marching up to armed state forces, these forces are going to be faced with a pretty stark choice. And if they do respond with fire, that’s going to raise the stakes immensely (whether or not there’s the 40-day mourning period and procession after).* You really don’t need anything as half as exotic as a “cult of martyrdom” to explain this.

” I still think Furet is right that one of the most revolutionary features of such an event is that it irrevocably divides society in ways that last for years and possibly decades.”

Look about you at the greedy plutocrats gobbling up everything in the U.S. today — do you think they will stop, before they are afraid for their very lives?

The violence of an insurrection seldom marks the initiation of violence, just a change in focus. And, the bitter divisions of civil war usually have roots before the war in question, or there wouldn’t be a war.

There’s a Tory view, which says that France, before the Revolution was a tolerable enough place, and getting better, which just highlights the irrationality of idealism. It is similar to the view that the antebellum American South was moonlight and magnolias, and or the idea that the First World War, before and after, should be blamed on the failure of liberal ideas and reforms: Woodrow Wilson paved a road to Hitler, by failing to recognize what a stalwart fellow Kaiser Willy really was, or similar tendentious nonsense.

I don’t think it is Whiggish fantasy to trace the heritage of the French Revolution to institutions of political governance and law, and to attribute some of what we admire about French society to the development of th0se institutions. Of course, it is wrong to imagine that those developments just happened, or were inevitable outcomes of organic or natural processes, independent of all the struggles, sacrifices, conflicts and fighting.

Main point is that violence is in some sense a cultural language, with different forms, meanings, expected responses and so on at different times.

I agree with this. And I’m well aware of the importance of the concept of martyrdom for the Shia. Yet, I’m not sure that I would rely too heavily on the concept of martyrdom, or perhaps all that much at all, in accounting for the behavior of the state’s armed forces in 78-79. (For one thing, Iran at other times has been only too willing to use violence against its own citizens. So I think you need a more historically particular explanation for the revolution.)

David Kornreich @110

What absolute monarchs do you think survived in Europe even in 1914?

You may have an idiosyncratic value of “absolute”, if you think that Victoria was in any sense absolute on her accession. You are quite right to say there was much concern that Victoria might inherit while under age, giving rise to a Regency: but that was because the Regent would have been Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who had a reputation for rape, incest and murder, and was generally thought unfit for the duties of a constitutional monarch.

Peter T @116: “Main point is that violence is in some sense a cultural language, with different forms, meanings, expected responses and so on at different times”.

Does this equally excuse, reactionary, Fascist or Nazi violence?

It’s worth mentioning that one of main reasons why things turned out so badly for Haiti was the way it was treated by colonial/slave owning/trading powers after the revolution. The ‘reparations’ they were forced to pay France saddled the new country with a high interest debt that wasn’t paid off until half way through the 20th century. What this means for measuring the success of the revolution I don’t know, but it suggests that forces outside of the revolutionary movement itself can play a major role.

“You would, as I pointed out in replying to js, be quite wrong in supposing that my belief, based on some knowledge of contemporary and reading of historical events, is that revolution is always unjustified and unproductive.”

How can it be justified or unjustified? A revolution, as I understand it, is a spontaneous mass uprising. It can not be initiated by a decree, and for as long as it’s happening its leaders have a very limited power to steer it in any intended direction. It’s not in the category of things that can be justified. Some individuals (whose actions can be justified or not) will try to ride it and hope to come out on top, but that’s about as much as anyone can do.

Stephen: “I would maintain that it is usually far more bloody, terrifying, unjust and in the short run at least damaging than some revolutionaries – particularly those living in comfort in countries far distant from any revolutionary experience – begin to understand.”

We may well be simply talking past each other, or quibbling over nuance.

Revolutions, in my view, are redeemed by the success, if any, of the institution-building that comes after. Doctrines of non-violent civil disobediance are persuasive to me, in that they recognize that the violence of insurrection or revolutionary resistance may prejudice later efforts at institution-building, which efforts are the prize.

The institutions, which govern social cooperation, ante-revolution, have their own costs in dysfunction and injustice. Imagining that they were better by reason of some degree of apparent peace, or more amenable to amelioration or reform than they were, is a common Tory trick of selective memory, which I scorn, without intending to attribute such fallacy to Stephen. Outright collapse was what triggered the French Revolution; counter-revolution, which triggered so much violence, was trying to restore a completely dysfunctional regime.

The Whigs did emerge at the tail end of the English Civil War(s). Their political tendency got its name from the Wiggamore Raid. More importantly, the Whig style of meta-political thinking in strategic and institutional terms emerged from the paranoid style of the Civil War(s), and continued, to inform the American Revolution in the 18th century, with subtle arguments about instituting constitutional government.

The French Revolution went badly in large part because the French were so ill-prepared to address the urgent problems, which brought down the ancien regime: money and bread. French Enlightenment thinking on these subjects was largely rubbish; the Revolution arrived with enlightened opinion centered on a consensus in favor of laissez faire and hard money, which enshrined rank ignorance as truth, and a People, unaccustomed to civic deliberation on public policy, was disabled in the midst of crisis, by the inability to even imagine, let alone legitimate, technocratic competence in the management of political economy. For lack of a better marker, they turned, eventually, to the Man on Horseback — a successful general — to institute reform by authoritarian fiat. Napoleon did an OK job of it, for the most part: thoroughly rationalized Code of Law, Banque of France, efficient civil administration, kinda sorta separation of church and state, etc., though still pretty rough on the proletariat and easy on the wealthy and land-owning classes.

Much is sometimes made of the spirit of the French Revolution, which so influenced political thinkers in the 19th century. It should be noted that the spirit of counter-revolution was born at nearly the same moment, and was responsible for most of the violence that followed attempts at political modernization in Europe, well into the 20th century. Was counter-revolution ever worth it? (Asked ironically)

One thing I would say for revolutionary violence, even where it appears to fail abjectly, is that it pays dividends to others in later situations, by lending credibility to the threat of violence. The French Revolution may not have netted much to the French, but it is difficult to imagine that the Whig-Liberals would have been able to put over even the weak tea of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, if the London mob pelting the shutters of the Iron Duke did not remind the powers-that-be of something more dire. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 surely owed a debt to the fear of renewed civil war.

Again, I fully expect my own country will pay a high price, because the banksters, and the complacent “lesser evil” enabling them, cannot imagine the violence they carelessly nurture. Ditto for the Europeans following the precepts of the hapless Turgot, in managment of the Euro.

Bruce Wilder @111 notes the enthusiasm for monarchy at the advent of the Third Republic. It has been reported that a major sticking point was whether the flag would be the tricolor or the fleur-de-lis.

“Obviously 1688 kicked off terrible violence in Ireland”.

Not just in Ireland. The first (and subsequent) Jacobite risings were a direct consequences of the “glorious” “revolution”. Which led to the not-particularly-non-violent Massacre of Glencoe amongst other things.

Peter T

The idea that the state should take no role in the management of the economy was actually a novelty in the mid 18th century: the favored doctrine of the physiocrats, to whom are attributed the phrase, laissez faire, and the pejorative, bureaucracy. Feudal tradition and Catholic doctrines provided a background expectation, though, of an obligation to organize relief in famine, to routinely regulate fair prices and product quality and repress usury, as well as to promote public works and the development of industry, in accord with the mercantilist ideas current at least since the 16th century.

Turgot, a physiocrat, was the proto-neoliberal, preaching a strict austerity and free trade. Turgot, as an intendant in Limoges had promoted industry and organized famine and work relief efforts. He had addressed lending money at interest, seeking a compromise between traditional Catholic moralistic criticism and the newer, capitalist ideas. Like most Frenchmen of his day, he recalled Law’s system with little real understanding, but much passionate contempt. Here’s what the Wikipedia article on Necker says about the campaign of Necker and his wife to promote him as a replacement for Turgot in the direction of state finances:

Madame Necker entertained the leaders of the political, financial and literary worlds of Paris, and her Friday salon became as greatly frequented as the Mondays of Mme Geoffrin, or the Tuesdays of Mme Helvétius. In 1773, Necker won the prize of the Académie Française for a defense of state corporatism framed as a eulogy of Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert; in 1775, he published his Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grains, in which he attacked the free-trade policy of Turgot. His wife now believed he could get into office . . .

Necker, like virtually all of the leading bankers and financiers of Paris, was a Swiss Protestant. He would replace Turgot’s strict austerity with loans at high interest rates. (He would also make himself popular by creating a nationwide system of pawn brokers — a very unCatholic thing to do, but a desperately needed service in a country without much of a banking system.)

Free trade in grain, an end to privilege and taxation of land, (which is to say, the rich) had become the consensus of Enlightenment opinion, on the eve of the Revolution. Brienne would get free trade in grain during his brief turn in office; bad timing as it turned out. In the event, high bread prices would motivate mass participation in the Revolution. The October March, which brought King and Assembly back to Paris, changed everything.

The fact that direct knowledge of banking and finance was the monopoly of a Swiss Protestant colony in Paris contributed to the hopeless fumbling about of the revolutionary governments with assignants and the like. The loot of foreign conquest relieved an acute shortage of currency in Paris, which no one in government had the understanding to remedy in any other way, turning the character of the Revolution. In the end, Napoleon took power, in part, by negotiating with the Swiss bankers for a Banque of France, just as he negotiated an agreement with the Catholic Church.

Just in case anyone doesn’t understand why I consider Holbo a hardcore neo-liberal. The post could have been a paraphrase. From the absolutely essential recent Neil Davidson book on bourgeois revolution.

Irving Kristol, 1973

By her criteria the French and Russian revolutions should more properly be called “rebellions,” whereas only the American Revolution is worthy of the name. A rebellion, in her terms, is a meta-historical event emerging out of a radical dissatisfaction with the human condition as experienced by the mass of the people, demanding instant “liberation” from this condition, an immediate transformation of all social and economic circumstances, a prompt achievement of an altogether “better life” in an altogether “better world.” The spirit of rebellion is a spirit of desperation ”a desperate rejection of whatever exists, a desperate aspiration toward some kind of utopia. A rebellion is more a sociological event than a political action. It is governed by a blind momentum which sweeps everything before it, and its so-called leaders are in fact its captives, and ultimately its victims. The modern world knows many such rebellions, and all end up as one version or another of “a revolution betrayed.: The so-called “betrayal” is, in fact, nothing but the necessary conclusion of a rebellion. Since its impossible intentions are unrealizable and since its intense desperation will not be satisfied with anything less than impossible intentions, the end result is always a regime which pretends to embody these intentions and which enforces such false pretensions by terror.