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Peasant Autonomy, Peasant Solidarity and Peasant Revolts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Hudson Meadwell
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Extract

I have argued two points. Firstly, Skocpol has confused peasant autonomy and peasantstate alliances. The relationship between autonomy and revolt is spurious. Secondly, peasant solidarity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of peasant revolt. It is not necessary because revolt concentrated in a specific niche in a peasant community cannot be attributed to peasant solidarity. Nor is solidarity sufficient, because it has effects only in communities with relatively high skill levels. When solidarity does have independent social effects, it is as a community norm and tends to be associated with a sort of revolt that is not intended to change the lord—peasant relationship.

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Notes and Comments
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 1988 , pp. 133 - 140
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 115, 117, 134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Skocpol, , States and Social Revolutions, p. 116.Google Scholar

3 Skocpol, , States and Social Revolutions, pp. 116–17.Google Scholar

4 Skocpol, , States and Social Revolutions, p. 116.Google Scholar

5 On the loss of a check on exploitation provided by the central government when the Ching dynasty collapsed, see Rosenberg, William G. and Young, Marilyn B., Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 82Google Scholar; Thaxton, Ralph, ‘On Peasant Revolution and National Resistance: Toward a Theory of Peasant Mobilization and Revolutionary War with Special Reference to Modern China’, World Politics, 30 (1977), 24–57, pp. 27–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Skocpol, , States and Social Revolutions, pp. 150–1.Google Scholar

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11 This argument arrives, by a somewhat different route, at a conclusion found in the literature on collective action. See Hardin, Russell, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1982). p. 81.Google Scholar