Our conceptual scheme will give us a great deal more difficulty than will our supply of facts. In the social sciences, at least, the distinction between a conceptual scheme and a metaphor is still an uncertain one, and there is no great harm in looking at our present problem as a search for a framework of not too-literary metaphor to hold together the details of our revolutions. Yet one of the most obvious of such metaphors, that of a storm, has several faults. One can outline it readily: at first there are the distant rumblings, the dark clouds, the ominous calm before the outbreak, all this corresponding to what our textbooks used confidently to list as “causes” of the revolution; then comes the sudden onset of wind and rain, clearly the beginnings of the revolution itself; the fearful climax follows, with the full violence of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, even more clearly the Reign of Terror; at last comes the gradual subsidence, the brightening skies, sunshine again, as in the orderly days of the Restoration. But all this is too literary and too dramatic for our purposes, too close altogether to the metaphor as used by prophets and preachers. Insofar as it can be brought into use as a conceptual scheme it rests on a science, that of meteorology, which has little direct help to offer the social scientist.
At almost the opposite side there is the conceptual scheme of a social system in equilibrium, as best developed in Pareto’s _The Mind and Society_. The tender-minded are often annoyed by the term equilibrium, which has for them mechanistic overtones damaging to the dignity of man. In modern science, however, the term has proved useful in fields such as chemistry and physiology, well outside that of the mechanics in which it had its origin. Furthermore, the word as the practicing scientist uses it has no metaphysical connotations whatever. The concepts of a physico-chemical system in equilibrium, a social system in equilibrium, John Jones’s body in equilibrium, do not in the least prejudice the immortality of anyone’s soul, nor the ultimate victory of Vitalists over Mechanists. The concept of equilibrium helps us to understand, and sometimes to use or to control, specific machines, chemicals, and even medicines. It may some day help us to understand, and within limits to mold, men in society.
Its use in the study of revolutions is in principle clear. A society in perfect equilibrium might be--purely theoretically--defined as a society every member of which had at a given moment all that he could possibly desire and was in a state of absolute contentment. Obviously any real society can be in but an imperfect equilibrium, a condition in which the varying and conflicting desires and habits of individuals and groups of individuals are in complex mutual adjustment, an adjustment so complex that no mathematical treatment of it seems possible at present. As new desires arise, or as old desires grow stronger in various groups, or as environmental conditions change, and as institutions fail to change, a relative disequilibrium may arise, and what we call a revolution breaks out. We know that in the human body, for instance, the disequilibrium we call disease is accompanied by certain definite reactions which tend to restore the body to something like what it was before the onset of the disease. It seems quite likely that in a social system in disequilibrium there is something of the same kind of reaction towards the old conditions, and that this helps explain why revolutions do not turn out entirely as revolutionists want them to. The old adjustments tend to re-establish themselves, and produce what in history is known as the reaction or the restoration. In social systems, as in the human organism, a kind of natural healing force, a _vis medicatrix naturae_ tends almost automatically to balance one kind of change with another and restorative change.
This conceptual scheme of the social equilibrium is probably in the long run the most useful for the sociologist of revolutions. It is for our purposes, however, a bit too ambitious. It needs for full success a more accurate grasp of more numerous variables than we can at present manage. Though it need not necessarily be formulated in precise mathematical terms, it ought to be formulated in terms more close to those of mathematics than we can honestly employ. In other words, it is better suited to a complete sociology of revolutions, or a “dynamics of revolution,” than to our modest study of the anatomy of four specific revolutions. We are here attempting merely a preliminary analysis, attempting to classify and systematize at a relatively low level of complexity.
Though it has one very grave defect, the best conceptual scheme for our purposes would seem to be one borrowed from pathology. We shall regard revolutions--wholly, be it understood, for convenience, and with no implications of eternal and absolute validity, and with no moral overtones--as a kind of fever. The outlines of our fever chart work out readily enough. In the society during the generation or so before the outbreak of revolution, in the old regime, there will be found signs of the coming disturbance. Rigorously, these signs are not quite symptoms, since when the symptoms are fully enough developed the disease is already present. They are perhaps better described as _prodromal_ signs, indications to the very keen diagnostician that a disease is on its way, but not yet sufficiently developed to be the disease. Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves, and when we can say the fever of revolution has begun. This works up, not regularly but with advances and retreats, to a crisis, frequently accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists, the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence, usually marked by a relapse or two. Finally the fever is over, and the patient is himself again, perhaps in some respects actually strengthened by the experience, immunized at least for a while from a similar attack, but certainly not wholly made over into a new man. The parallel goes through to the end, for societies which undergo the full cycle of revolution are perhaps in some respects the stronger for it; but they by no means emerge entirely remade.
This conceptual scheme may be used without committing its users in any sense to an organic theory of society. The organic theory, the motion of a “body politic,” is a metaphor developed by political philosophers into a kind of metaphysics. A good German idealist can find almost anything he wants in the organic theory, from the categorical imperative to a justification of anti-Semitism and a condemnation of parliamentary democracy. The word “society” is used in this study as a convenient way of designating the observed behavior of men in groups, their interactions, and that is all. We find it convenient to apply to certain observed changes in given societies a conceptual scheme borrowed from medicine. We should find it inconvenient and misleading to extend that conceptual scheme and talk of a body politic, with a soul, a general will, heart, nerves, and so on. When, for instance, we apply terms like “prodrome,” “fever,” “crisis,” to the French revolution, we are very definitely _not_ thinking of a personified France which suffers all these. To some this distinction may seem only a verbal one, and unimportant. It is, however, based on one of the most important distinctions in human thinking--the distinction between metaphysics and science.
The really grave defect of this fever chart lies deeper, in the apparently unalterable fact that our ordinary language, to which words like “fever,” “disease,” and “crisis” clearly belong, is only in small part logical. The intellectuals of our generation are rather inclined to worry over the non-logical overtones of words, which is perhaps a good sign for the social sciences. Mathematicians, most scientists, and even symbolic logicians, manage to say what they mean, and can communicate exactly with one another. When, however, a given act by a given person, John Doe, is referred to by five separate reporters as persevering, firm, determined, obstinate, and pig-headed, you obviously learn as much about the feelings of the reporters towards John Doe as about John Doe himself. The reporters are trying to spread abroad their own feelings, not to describe John Doe. Many people from Thucydides through Bacon and Machiavelli to Pareto have understood this use of words. It has been noted even by people like Jeremy Bentham and Mr. Stuart Chase, who cannot perhaps be said to have fully understood it. In our own day a dozen disciplines, from psychology and philology to political theory, have made us keenly aware that propaganda lurks in every syllable, in every accent. This awareness seems not to have resulted in any appreciable drying-up of propaganda.
Now nobody wants to have a fever. The very word is full of unpleasant suggestions. Our use of terms borrowed from medicine is likely, at the very least, to arouse in many readers sentiments which bar further understanding. We seem to be damning revolutions by comparing them with a disease. To those of liberal sympathies and hopes we shall seem to be condemning in advance such great efforts of the free human spirit as the French revolution. To the Marxists our whole inquiry has probably been suspect from the moment we wrote doubtingly about the American proletariat, and our conceptual scheme will appear to them simply the expected bourgeois dishonesty. Yet it seems too bad to offend even the Marxists unnecessarily. Protestations of good intent are probably useless, but we may none the less record that consciously at least we are aware of no feelings of dislike for revolutions in general. We do indeed dislike cruelty whether in revolutions or in stable societies. But the thought of revolutions sets up in us no train of unhappy associations. Unconsciously and subconsciously we may well feel horror of revolution to our thoroughly bourgeois marrow, but without benefit of Freud we dare not commit ourselves about our unconscious. Of more persuasive force with the distrustful is perhaps the fact that, biologically, fever in itself is a good thing rather than a bad thing for the organism that survives it. To use a figure of speech, the fever burns up the wicked germs, as the revolution destroys wicked people and harmful and useless institutions. On close and fair inspection our conceptual scheme may even seem to have overtones of implication too favorable, rather than too unfavorable, to revolutions in general.