Historian Crane Brinton’s book, The Anatomy of Revolution, highlights five similarities between four historic revolutions. These range from class antagonism to inefficient government machinery and even the ruling class switching sides. As a Westerner living in America’s Gilded Age, the symptoms sound awfully familiar… Hmm, makes you think.
Do you know the five symptoms of revolution? Apropos of absolutely nothing, I’m sure, I have been thinking a lot about historian Crane Brinton’s book, The Anatomy of Revolution. This volume contains an excellent little autopsy of the most prominent revolutions from the last few hundred years. Brinton compares the American Revolution (I’m sure you know a thing or two about that one), the French Revolution, the English Revolution (that’s the one with Oliver Cromwell — it’s lesser-known in America) and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which Americans might know as the Communist Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution.
The book’s purpose is to see what elements of these revolutions align. What kind of similarities can be teased out between these huge, important historical events? In the end, Brinton summarizes five symptoms of revolution.
Before providing this list, Brinton is quick to mention, “We must be very tentative about the prodromal symptoms of revolution.” He writes that this is a highly complicated subject and that because there are so many different variables at play, it is perhaps impossible to diagnose any incipient revolutions that might be happening in the present day with certainty (wink). “But,” he says, “some uniformities do emerge from a study of the old regimes in England, America, France, and Russia.”
Intolerable gap and class antagonism
Brinton’s first symptom of revolution is “an intolerable gap between what [members of the working class] have come to want—their ‘needs’—and what they actually get.” As Brinton notes, revolutions frequently show up following periods where the standard of living was going up and then abruptly stopped. Much as we have seen in the past 40+ years since American President Ronald Reagan and the double-barreled acceptance of neoliberalism by both major political parties, productivity has gone way up while wages are frozen in place.
In comparing the four major revolutions, Brinton writes: “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. … These revolutionists are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.” This is because people grew up thinking, much like in our society, that they would someday end up better off. When that doesn’t happen, it creates a widespread feeling of discontent. That’s highly relatable.