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Theories of Revolution: The Third Generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Jack A. Goldstone
Jack A. Goldstone
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

The work of Ted Robert Gurr, Chalmers Johnson, Neil Smelser, Samuel P. Huntington, and Charles Tilly has dominated the recent study of revolutions. However, Jeffrey Paige, Ellen Kay Trimberger, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Theda Skocpol have lately produced theories of revolution that are far better grounded historically than those in earlier works. Five major points were neglected by earlier theorists: (1) the variable goals and structures of states; (2) the systematic intrusion of international pressures on the domestic political and economic organization of societies; (3) the structure of peasant communities; (4) the coherence or weakness of the armed forces; and (5) the variables affecting elite behavior. Starting from these points, Paige, Trimberger, Eisenstadt, and Skocpol have produced analyses of the causes and outcomes of a variety of revolutions. Yet significant challenges to the theory of revolutions—such as extending the range of cases analyzed, clarifying the grounds of peasant behavior, and tying theoretical analysis to demographic data—still remain.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , April 1980 , pp. 425 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1980

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References

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4 Since Professor Eisenstadt is some 25 years senior to the other members of this group, to label all of them as a single “generation” is not quite correct chronologically. However, Eisenstadt's writings on revolution have appeared at the same time, and, more importantly, share a similar outlook and structure, with the work of his younger contemporaries; I therefore wish to treat all these theorists as forming a single “generation” of writers on revolutions in order to stress their collective departure from the outlook and models of earlier writers.

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10 Gurr, in particular, offers an extremely complex version of this analysis—with coercion, past violence, legitimation, institutions, and other factors all influencing the psychological deprivation-revolutionary situation nexus. Nonetheless, psychological deprivation remains the driving force of his analysis; other factors are added primarily to moderate the way in which changes in the critical variable lead to political violence.

11 Eisenstadt, S. N., “Sociological Theory and an Analysis of the Dynamics of Civilizations and of Revolutions,” Daedalus, Vol. 106 (Fall 1977), 59–78Google Scholar.

12 Eckstein (fn. 3).

13 Muller (fn. 3); Oberschall (fn. 3).

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