Why do Men Revolt? - III
A political view on Crane Brinton's concept of social explosion
By Laishram Omorjit
Intellectual Pleasure in reading Brinton's book:
Crane Brinton's last (1965) edition of the book, "The Anatomy of Revolution" that he first wrote in 1938 continued to stick to the inner spirit of the revolutionary state of mind and thereby prevented the meaning of revolution from wandering off into the blind alleys of evolutionary path. It is to be hoped that the present generation will gain intellectual pleasure from something first written more than sixty years ago.
In his classic analysis of the characteristic features of the four great revolutions of the world (i.e. the revolutions of England, France, America and Russia), Brinton wrote: "Certainly, however, none of our revolution quite ended in the death of civilization and culture. The network was stronger than the forces trying to destroy or alter it, and in all of our societies the crisis period was followed by a convalescence, by a fundamental course taken by interactions in the old network".
The Heroic world of Revolutionists:
In regard to the heroism of those revolutionists of the above-mentioned four revolutions, Brinton opines, "More especially, the religious lust for perfection, the crusade for the Republic of virtue, died out, save among a tiny minority whose actions could no longer take place directly in politics. An active proselytizing indolent, ascetic, chiliastic faith became rapidly an inactive, conformist, worldly ritualistic faith.... Yet those who feel that revolution is heroic need not despair.
The revolutionary tradition is a heroic one, and the noble beliefs, which seem necessary to all societies, are in our Western democracies in part a product of the revolutions we have been studying. They were initiated even in Russia, by Peter Gay's "Party of humanity". Our revolutions made tremendous and valuable additions to those strands in the network of human interactions which can be isolated as law, theology, metaphysics and, in the abstract sense, ethics...."
Revolutions are not a form of logical action:
Crane Brinton further argues, "Had these revolutions never occurred, You and I might still beat our wives or cheat at cards or avoid walking under ladders, but we might not be able to rejoice in our possession of certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the comforting assurance that one more push will bring the classless society".
When one compares the whole course of these revolutions certain tentative uniformities suggest themselves. If the Russian Revolution at the end of our series is compared with the English at its beginning, there seems to be a development of conscience revolutionary techniques. This is of course especially clear since Marx made the history of revolutionary movements of the past a necessary preparation for revolutionists of the present.
Lenin and his collaborators had training in the technique of insurrection which Independents and Jacobins lacked. Robes-pierre seems almost a political innocent when his revolutionary training is compared with that of any good Bolshevik leader....
Sam Adams, it must be admitted, seems a good less innocent. All in all, it is probable that this difference in the explicitness of self-conscious preparation for revolution, this growth of a copious literature of revolution, this increasing familiarity of revolutionary ideas, is not one of the very important uniformities we have to record. It is conspicuous uniformity, but a form of logical action. The Bolsheviks do not seem to have guided their actions by the scientific study of revolutions to an appreciably greater degree than the Independents or the Jacobins. They simply adapted an old technique to the days of the telegraph and railroad trains".
(Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, Prentice-Hall Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1965, PP: 250-264)
(Concluded)
(The writer is a post-graduate degree holder in Political Science from Bombay University).
(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press)
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