All this amounts to the statement that in our Western society men have continued to hold certain sentiments and to conform to certain set ways of doing things even after they have changed what they say about these sentiments and these acts. Our revolutions seem in many ways to have changed men’s minds more completely than they changed men’s habits. This is by no means to say that they changed nothing at all, that what men think is of no importance. Ideas are not quite magicians in this world, or Robespierre would not have fallen, and Trotsky would today be in Moscow and not in Mexico. But they are not to be dismissed as having no part in the social change. Indeed, what our Marxist friends would call the “ideological” changes effected by our revolutions deserve careful consideration.
One may distinguish two contrasting roles played by these ideas born of revolution. First, our revolutions in the end would seem to have taken the sting out of the radical ideas and slogans of their early days. They achieved the necessary miracle of reconciling aspiring men to the substantial failure of their aspirations. They turned what were originally verbal instruments of revolt, means of moving men to social action against the existing order, into something we shall have to be up-to-date and call the myths, folklore, symbols, stereotypes, rituals, of their respective societies. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which once was the trumpet call to the storming of heaven on earth, is now in the Third French Republic no more than a bit of national liturgy, a comforting reminder that Frenchmen are the privileged heirs of a heroic past. There are signs that in Russia even so explosive a phrase as “Workers of the world, unite!” can be accommodated to the conservative, restraining necessities of ritual. After all, as too-logical radicals have pointed out, the Bible itself is full of good revolutionary doctrine; what organized Christianity has done with the Bible organized Communism ought to be able to do with a much simpler book like _Das Kapital_.
A second role is a more positive one. Even in their use as ritual, these ideas are not purely passive, mere bits of mumbo-jumbo. We cannot here go into the important and involved question of the role of these myths and symbols in a society. We certainly must avoid the stupid question as to whether such symbols “cause” any kind of social change. Here as almost everywhere in the social sciences the cart-and-horse formula of causation is useless, and indeed misleading. Sufficient for us that in all our societies we find that the memory of the great revolution is enshrined in practices that seem to be an essential part of the national state as a going concern. Insofar as men are today in England, France, America, and Russia heartened by awareness of membership in a nation, guided perhaps, and certainly consoled, by the nobler and more abstract beliefs, made conscious of some kind of security, of a status, by all sorts of ritualistic acts associated with the State or with the Church as a department of the State, fortified by the prospects still held out in the grand words of a Milton, a Jefferson, a Danton, a Lenin--insofar as men are so moved, the revolutions we have studied have given largely to the content of their emotions. In England, in America, in France, the memory of their great overturns has become a factor in the stability of existing society: in Russia, unless all signs fail, a similar state of affairs has just about been reached.
Yet our revolutions have also left behind a tradition of successful revolt. What is to established, contented, conforming, conventional men merely a ritualistic satisfaction, remains for discontented men a spur to activate their discontent. Our modern Western revolutionary tradition is to a certain extent cumulative, and the latest revolutionists in the tradition, the Russians, have carried their awareness of revolutionary history almost to an obsession. Trotsky, for instance, though he naturally never uses the conceptual scheme of the fever as we have employed it, seems constantly to be watching the course of the Russian revolution almost clinically, constantly looking for events to take courses observed before in France, in England, or wherever men have revolted in the name of the many against the few. If Mussolini and Hitler are equally interested in such clinical observations, this is but proof of our modern assumption that there are uniformities in history.
Again this tradition of revolt is an imponderable, but it seems to have gone into the making of the Western democracies, and to be one of the elements that is in its full form lacking in the development of Italy and Germany, where democratic revolutions have been abortive or at best unimpressive. To state the existence of this revolutionary tradition is not necessarily to make a judgment of value. We bring it forth as an observable fact, one not to be effectively denied by partisans of any stripe. Its exact influence in the complex equilibrium of our present societies we cannot here attempt to determine. Notably, we find great difficulties in estimating how far it has taken root in Russia. Possibly the Communism of Stalin is but “fascism of the Left.” But the whole temper of the Western democracies is influenced, surely, by the fact that they were born of one kind of revolution, with one kind of “ideal”--that is still best summarized as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”
_II. Some Tentative Uniformities_
When all necessary concessions are made to those who insist that events in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we have studied do display some striking uniformities. Our conceptual scheme of the fever can be worked out so as to bring these uniformities clearly to mind. We shall find it worth while, in attempting to summarize the work of these revolutions, to recapitulate briefly the main points of comparison on which our uniformities are based.
We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution. Even retrospectively, diagnosis of the four societies we studied was very difficult, and there is little ground for belief that anyone today has enough knowledge and skill to apply formal methods of diagnosis to a contemporary society and say, in this case revolution will or will not occur shortly. But some uniformities do emerge from a study of the old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.
First, these were all societies on the whole on the upgrade economically before the revolution came, and the revolutionary movements seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression. Certainly these revolutions are not started by down-and-outers, by starving, miserable people. These revolutionists are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.
Second, we find in our pre-revolutionary society definite and indeed very bitter class antagonisms, though these antagonisms seem rather more complicated than the cruder Marxists will allow. It is not a case of feudal nobility against bourgeoisie in 1640, 1776, and 1789, or of bourgeoisie against proletariat in 1917. The strongest feelings seem generated in the bosoms of men--and women--who have made money, or at least who have enough to live on, and who contemplate bitterly the imperfections of a socially privileged aristocracy. Revolutions seem more likely when social classes are fairly close together than when they are far apart. “Untouchables” very rarely revolt against a God-given aristocracy, and Haiti gives one of the few examples of successful slave revolutions. But rich merchants whose daughters can marry aristocrats are likely to feel that God is at least as interested in merchants as in aristocrats. It is difficult to say why the bitterness of feeling between classes almost equal socially seems so much stronger in some societies than others--why, for instance, a Marie Antoinette should be so much more hated than a Barbara Hutton; but at any rate the existence of such bitterness can be observed in our pre-revolutionary societies, which is, clinically speaking, enough for the moment.
Third, there is what we have called the desertion of the intellectuals. This is in some respects the most reliable of the symptoms we are likely to meet. Here again we need not try to explain all the hows and whys, need not try to tie up the desertion of the intellectuals with a grand and complete sociology of revolutions. We need state simply that it can be observed in all four of our societies.
Fourth, the governmental machinery is clearly inefficient, partly through neglect, through a failure to make changes in old institutions, partly because new conditions--in the societies we have studied, pretty specifically conditions attendant on economic expansion and the growth of new monied classes, new ways of transportation, new business methods--these new conditions laid an intolerable strain on governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions.