Have we entered another time of revolution and insurgency? Mastery of the ideological drivers answers only part of the question. Taking a functional approach to the structure and mechanics of revolution is equally if not more important.
Have we entered another time of revolution and insurgency? Mastery of the ideological drivers answers only part of the question. Taking a functional approach to the structure and mechanics of revolution is equally if not more important.
This means recognizing the underlying preconditions for such a violent state of affairs to burst forward.
Revolutions, of course, occurred well before Marx, yet we tend to view them through a Marxist lens, be it Marxist or counter-Marxist. In misperceiving the origins of revolution, we handicap ourselves in trying to prevent or counter them.
Few revolutions are led by the poor and oppressed. Violent revolutions are generally orchestrated and led by educated, privileged, upwardly mobile, intellectual activists and organizers. The leaders tend to be from professional- and merchant middle class backgrounds, with wealthy patrons or allies.
Just as people have anatomies, so do revolutions. Anatomy has no relation to ideology. Every part of anatomy has a particular function, working in concert with the other parts.
To study anatomy is to understand how all the parts work together. In studying the parts and functions, we can recognize revolutions’ strengths and weaknesses, and treat them accordingly.
The Anatomy of Revolution
The late Crane Brinton makes a comparative study of these functional aspects in The Anatomy of Revolution, a classic in the field that he first wrote in 1938, with a last revision in 1965. His work is free of the economic determinism and class oppression that the Marx-influenced worldview of revolution normally takes.
Brinton was Harvard student during World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. He became a scholar of the 17th century English Civil War that overthrew the monarchy, executed the king, and saw Oliver Cromwell take power. During World War II, Brinton became chief of research at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) station in London.
In The Anatomy of Revolution, Brinton argued that revolutions arise not from the misery of what Marx called the toiling masses, but from unfulfilled expectations of the privileged and their sense of injustice when progress stalls.
Revolutions, Brinton said, are like a fever in the body politic, a disease with its own life-cycle. Under Brinton’s “fever model,” they begin with “prodromal” symptoms, burst into an acute crisis, then enter a state of delirium and internal shock. They end in a stage of eventual convalescence that often seems like hospice.
Brinton dissected revolution in four cases: The English Civil War or revolution of the 1640s, the American Revolution of the 1770s, the French Revolution of 1789-1799, and the Russian Revolution(s) of 1917.
He argued that these different revolutions share what he called uniformities in their causes, their processes, and their outcomes.
Revolutionary preconditions
If we think of revolutionary situations in Marxist terms, we search for absolute misery by a large segment of the population that is victim of “oppression.” This is the core of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and the critical theorists their adherents spawned.
Brinton took a different approach, a functional one in which he compared revolution to disease. Although the disease is already consuming the body, its symptoms go unseen or misdiagnosed, and the revolutionary precursors go untreated.
Revolutions, he argued, come not from abject misery and hopelessness, but from growing discontent among educated or privileged groups that sense or nurse an injustice of some sort, either against themselves or others. Expectations rise. When those exceptions to unfulfilled or dashed, the revolution begins.
This is where those with education, economic means, social and political standing, and privilege become the real agents of revolution. Elite campaigns against “injustice” can spawn a broader movement of revolutionaries.
Brinton identified typical pre-revolutionary signs, broken down below. They include the financial breakdown of the state or society, government systems and leaders seen as corrupt or ineffective, rising class or social tensions, intellectuals turning (or being bred) against the system, and elites losing confidence and even defecting against the social, economic, and governing structures that gave them their privileged positions.
These pre-revolutionary conditions are what Brinton called “symptoms of the fever.” They begin not in poor, oppressed areas, but in generally prosperous ones in which certain conditions fertilize elements of society for the sowing of discontent.
Stages of revolution
Brinton suggested that revolutions pass through recurring stages in a life-cycle:
- Old Regime / Pre revolutionary phase. This stage shows the “symptoms of the fever,” the sickness of the status quo, before a revolution breaks out. “Regime” refers not only to the government and related institutions, but to the status quo at large. Fever symptoms can be prodromal, or warning signs of a disease yet to break out. While most are aware of the points below, few identify them as symptoms of a mortal sickness and misinterpret their importance entirely.
- Economic weakness: Chronic deficits, fiscal strain, uncontrolled government spending, heavy or resented taxation, lack of hard currency and credit.
- Political weakness. Ineffective government; bloated bureaucracy; inability of government to enforce its policies; crisis of the political, legal, or moral legitimacy of government; perceived corruption or incompetence of authority.
- Transfer of allegiance of the intellectuals. Educated elites and opinion-makers shift loyalties from defending the government to deserting it and challenging its very basis of existence. These elites represent culture, politics, economics and commerce, law and justice, religion and morals, and society at large. That transfer of allegiance often marks the tipping point to the revolution itself.
- Civil antagonism. Growing or deepening conflict between traditional ruling groups and new social or economic forces whose expectations rise faster than the regime can accommodate, leading to polarization.
- Rule of the Moderates. A legal and moderate government emerges – “moderate” being a very relative term. The moderates attempt reforms under provisional governments or new constitutional frameworks, while struggling with crises, fragmentation, and inability to satisfy public expectations or radicals’ intensifying demands.
- Intensification of protests. The moderates cannot control or suppress manufactured and genuine expressions of strong public discontent. Limited reforms cannot satisfy intensified demands. The system becomes unstable.
- Direct action creates rallying points. Symbolic actions and dramatic events, from toppling symbols of the old order, mass petitions, large-scale or vivid street clashes, and storming prisons become rallying points against the Old Regime and the successor moderates.
- Breakdown of the economy. Economic and financial breakdown continue with deficits, indebtedness, fiscal crises, currency devaluation, and related hardships.
- Polarization of judiciary, police, armed forces. The instruments of force – judiciary, law enforcement, secret services, military – become increasingly divided and unreliable. This limits the moderates’ ability to enforce their policies against the radicals.
- Political power shifts hard. Being too cautious and compromise-minded in the public eye, moderates lose support as disciplined radicals gain prestige and generate hope for change by offering decisive solutions. As support for the moderates collapses, the instruments of force split or shift their loyalty, and the radical vanguard gains ground.
- Crisis: Accession of the radicals, or Reign of Terror. This is where the full symptoms of the fever burst forth. More extreme factions, better organized and more fanatical, oust the moderates, centralize power, set out to remake society (“heaven on earth,” “workers’ paradise,” “just and equitable”), and often rule through deprivation of rights, repression and mass arrests, emergency measures, purges, executions, and terror. Accession of the radicals can also result in civil war, exportation of revolution, and invitation or incitement of foreign wars.
- Thermidorian Reaction, or “convalescence.” Exhaustion and backlash lead to the fall of the radicals. The fever breaks. Moderates, relatively speaking, often return under a dictatorial strongman. (Brinton considers Napoleon and Stalin to have been relative “moderates” in comparison to Robespierre in France, and the revolutionary Bolsheviks, of which Stalin had been one. Stalin was an anomaly in that he had no higher education.) This period sees, at some point, a relaxation of terror or at least of its intensity (Stalin formalized, “legalized,” and provided some order to the terror as he consolidated control), restoration of some pre-revolutionary norms, a rise in nationalism, and a focus on stability and institution-building.
The exception to the rule is the American Revolution. It approached neither a terror phase nor the reaction coming from such a phase.
Revolutionaries seldom deliver
Revolutionaries, Brinton found, tend to be idealistic, skilled at theory and mobilization, but poor at governance. They promise sweeping change but usually deliver modest results far from promised utopian ideals. Some inefficiencies and inequalities are cleared, but human nature recovers much of the battle-scarred landscape as society reverts to many old habits, if under new guises or names.
In short, according to Brinton, revolutions are temporary fevers that ultimately restore health (or at least stability) to the social body politic, but seldom alter the body’s inherited structure.
Wider patterns and methods
Brinton listed “uniformities” or common patterns among revolutions. These uniformities include impossible demands placed on the old government, failed repression, initial unity among revolutionaries followed by bitter infighting, progressive radicalization until a small extremist minority dominates, and then the emergence of a single strong leader.
Again, the American Revolution is the outlier, without the extremism. Washington, who could have been dictator or king with wide popular acclaim, chose the route of Cincinatus to return to his farm. Who knows what reaction could have occurred over time, had Washington followed the European tradition of chiefs-of-state-for-life?
Revolutions, Brinton argued, tend to develop more self conscious “techniques” over time – organization, propaganda, terror – that later revolutionaries studied and imitated.
American revolutionaries, particularly the Puritan New Englanders who sparked most of it, studied Cromwell. Many French revolutionaries studied the Americans. Marx and his followers – and among the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky – extensively studied the French and chose the route of Robespierre and the Jacobins in what they imagined as a proletarian, as opposed to France’s bourgeous, revolution.
Outcomes
In the long run, Brinton concluded, revolutions change institutions and clear away some inefficiencies, but they usually do not completely transform social structures as much as their rhetoric implies. Much of the old culture and class patterning persists beneath new political forms.
As an exercise, the reader can apply Brinton’s political fever symptoms to our own society today. What would be the diagnosis?
Read The Anatomy of Revolution
Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution has been out of print for years. Downloadable copies in the public domain are here as PDFs:
AUTHOR
J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy.
His academic and professional areas of concentration are foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion.
He is the former Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.
He has been an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. He has guest lectured at the FBI Academy, George C. Marshall Center, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, National Intelligence University, and other military schools and combatant commands.
Dr. Waller holds a Ph.D. in international security affairs from the University Professors Program at Boston University. His award-winning doctoral dissertation, written in 1993 and published as Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994), foresaw the rise of a KGB officer to seize political control of Russia. He received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan contras.
He is author or editor of books relating to intelligence, political warfare, public diplomacy, terrorism, subversion, and strategy. See his page on Academia.edu. His latest book is Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains (Regnery, 2024).
He has written for American Greatness, the American Mind, the Daily Beast, Daily Caller, The Federalist, Forbes, Insight, Investor’s Business Daily, Kyiv Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Clear Politics, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal. See his page on Authory.
Dr. Waller is on Twitter/X at @JMichaelWaller.
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