Facts and conceptual scheme being thus disposed of, it remains to consider the possibility of finding some kind of uniformities in the way in which our facts fit into our conceptual scheme. Most of us would assume that on the rough level of common sense some kind of uniformities can be discerned in history. But at least among professional historians there is a tendency to deny that these uniformities are real and important, and we must therefore give the matter brief attention. In a recent review of Professor W. C. Abbott’s magisterial edition of Cromwell’s speeches and writings, a learned and conventional English historian wrote that “it is unfortunate that Professor Abbott has thought to elucidate the English revolution by comparing it with the American and French revolutions. Revolutionary technique undoubtedly interests a world familiar with the writings of Marx and Trotsky and the method of Lenin, but comparisons in history as elsewhere are odious and revolutions are more remarkable for their particular differences than for their common elements.” This is undoubtedly an extreme view, and the English have for the last century and more been insistent that their revolution was unique--so unique as to have been practically no revolution at all.
A full consideration of the problem of historical uniformities would be very long, and might well end in the cloudland of metaphysics. We shall have to be content with the crude assertion that the doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense. History is essentially an account of the behavior of men, and if the behavior of men is not subject to any kind of systematizing, this world is even more cock-eyed than the seers would have it. But you have only to look at a page of Theophrastus or of Chaucer to realize that Greeks of more than two thousand years ago and Englishmen of six centuries ago seem extraordinarily like Americans of today. Even Mr. Christopher Morley’s jazz version of _The Trojan Horse_ does not seem unreal. Comparisons may be odious, but they form the basis of literature as well as of science, and provide a good deal of the staple of everyday conversation.
As we have seen, an essential element in any attempt to work scientifically is the detachment of the scientist. In the historian, this is the ability to keep his observations of what has happened uninfluenced by what he would like to have happened, or to happen. We have already encountered this difficulty in our discussion of a conceptual scheme, where to think of a revolution as a fever seems at first sight a way of condemning the revolution, of giving it a bad name. It must be repeated that in all the social sciences genuine scientific detachment is difficult to attain, and in any “absolute” or “pure” sense impossible of attainment. Even in the natural sciences, desire to prove an hypothesis or a theory of one’s own may bring to the distortion of facts some of the most powerful sentiments in human beings. But the natural scientist does not want to improve a molecule or an amoeba--at least, not “morally.” Upon the social scientist, however, there pours the full force of those sentiments we call moral as well as those we call selfish. He can hardly avoid wanting to change what he is studying: not to change it as the chemist changes elements he compounds, but to change it as the missionary changes the man he converts. Yet this is just what the social scientist must try to avoid as a better man would avoid the devil. One of the hardest things on this earth to do is to describe men or institutions without wanting to change them, a thing so hard that most people are not even aware that the two processes are separable. Yet separated they must be if we are to get anywhere with the social sciences.
In this study we shall make this attempt to describe without evaluating. It will not be a complete success, for here on this earth completion is rare. Absolute detachment is a polar region, unfit for human life; but one might well make an effort to get out of the steaming jungles, and come a bit closer to the pole. In less figurative language: it is impossible to study revolutions without having sentiments about them, but it is quite possible to keep your sentiments relatively more out of your study than in. And an inch gained here is worth several ells on less fertile frontiers of the mind.
_IV. Limitations of the Subject_
This willingness to put up with, indeed this expectation of, partial and incomplete results is one of the distinguishing marks of science. It would be possible to start out with the intention of discovering uniformities in all recorded revolutions. To begin with, the hardest conceivable task is, however, rather the privilege of the philosopher than that of the scientist. At any rate, it seems now scientifically unprofitable and therefore unwise to ask the question: What have all known revolutions in common? The very question shows the logical limitations of the subject: we can never know _all_ revolutions. Any answer would have to make up in scope and assurance what it would lack in concreteness. You might ask: What have all known men in common? The systematist in biology could indeed list certain uniformities under _homo sapiens_. But the commoner kind of answer would be that men all have souls, or that they are all created equal, or even, as Cicero discovered, that “Nihil est enim unum uni tam simile, tam par, quam omnes inter nosmet ipsos sumus.” (For no one thing is as like, as equal, to another one as we human beings are like and equal one to another.) These answers are all very important, but they are not quite the sort of thing we are after.
We shall, then, study four revolutions which on the surface seem to have certain resemblances, and deliberately avoid certain other types of revolution. Our four took place in the post-medieval Western world, were “popular” revolutions carried out in the name of “freedom” for a majority against a privileged minority, and were successful; that is, they resulted in the revolutionists’ becoming the legal government. Anything like a complete sociology of revolutions would have to take account of other kinds of revolution, and notably of two, the revolution initiated by authoritarians or oligarchies, or conservatives, that is, the “Rightist” revolution; and the abortive revolution.
No doubt there are sentimental distortions involved in distinguishing our four revolutions as “popular,” but even words heavily encrusted with sentiments have reference to concrete things; and the English, French, American, and Russian revolutions were attempts to ensure a different kind of life from that aimed at in the Fascist revolution in Italy and the National Socialist revolution in Germany. If, however, these Fascist revolutions seem too recent to be judged, or even to be catalogued, fairly, we may find in the time of troubles in Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. less controversial evidence. Here the revolution of 411 B.C. was the work of the conservative or oligarchic group, and was directed against the old democratic constitution under which Athens had been ruled since Cleisthenes, if not since Solon. In the Council of Four Hundred set up by the successful revolutionists, the extreme oligarchs split with the moderates. After the assassination of the extremist Phrynicus, and the arrival of bad news from the front, the moderate Theramenes was able to take over power and set up a “mixed” constitution, seeking to combine the best of democracy and oligarchy. Then the fleet, in general strongly democratic, won the battle of Cyzicus, and paved the way to a fairly complete restoration of democracy in 410.
The final victory of Sparta led in 404 to a similar revolutionary cycle in Athens, beginning with the extreme oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants and ending again with the restoration of democratic forms. In these movements, the sequence--to use perhaps misleading modern political analogies--is from Right to Center to Left, or from Extremists to Moderates to the Old Gang, a sequence clearly quite different from that we shall encounter in England, France, and Russia. Those devoted to the concept of social equilibrium will note that in these Athenian revolutions the tendency seems to be toward the restoration of old habits and old institutions; and there is much here--the role of political clubs, for instance, and the varied uses of violence--familiar to any student of modern revolutions. Yet the sequence of power, the time-scale, and much else in these Athenian revolutions mark them off from those we have chosen to study, and suggest that they belong at least to a different sub-class.
Of abortive revolutions we have numerous examples. Needless to say, abortiveness is not measured by the failure of revolutionary movements to live up to the ideals professed by their leaders. We mean by abortive simply the failure of organized groups in revolt. Thus the American Civil War is really an almost classical example of an abortive revolution. So too is the Paris Commune of 1871. The European revolutions of 1848 were on the surface mostly abortive, though in many countries they helped bring about important and comparatively permanent administrative and constitutional changes. An abortive revolution may, of course, mold the defeated revolutionary group to an even more heroic determination, and pave the way to continued underground resistance, plotting, propaganda. The blood of martyrs has built council halls and presidential palaces as well as churches. The abortive revolution is especially important in the welding together of oppressed nationalities, which after a few heroic uprisings attain a pitch of exalted patriotism and self-pity that makes them almost unbeatable. Contemporary Ireland and Poland were born of a long series of revolutions that failed, and in their final emergence as independent nations they bear the clear and unlovely scars of these great moral victories. Indeed, in a complete study of revolutions, there would have to be a special sub-class for revolutions in which a territorial or “national” group rises against another and dominating territorial or national group.