 Under the historian's crafty influence, revolutions tend to occupy a glowing, almost magical space in our imaginations. They are moments when the whole world changes, or at least an entire civilization, and they fascinate as much as they terrify. What can we learn from these wild events, these frenzied mishmash moments of human action, violence, and progress? Jason Kuznicki joins me now to talk comparative revolutions. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. I think that right off the bat, some people in the Austrian tradition, some certainly post-modernists, people who are methodological individualists, and people who are not, but have other intellectual concerns at hand, might bristle at the somewhat old idea of comparative history. By now it's a somewhat old idea, at least. Aren't all situations in history unique, sculpted by unique individuals that can always choose to do something different? So what is really the value or purpose of comparative history? So yes, all situations are unique. Individuals make choices. Individuals are the constitutive elements of all societies, and they are the basis of a social science founded in methodological individualism. That's all true. But comparative history can still be valuable, because there are, despite the differences brought by individual actors, nonetheless some commonalities that are worth looking at, there are not exact parallels, but there are near parallels in history. And the book, The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Britton, which we're gonna be discussing, is a classic study of four revolutionary events in Western history that certainly had parallels. They certainly had some significant similarities that appear to be more than just coincidence or just a sufficiently large number of people making the same choices. So what are the examples we're working with then? We have here the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, that is to say the transition to communism. And I know that a lot of people will be furious to hear the four of them put into the same category. I am aware of that. And guess what? There are reasons to do this. There are certainly commonalities despite our necessarily very different valuations of the end products of each of these revolutions. How do we know that when we look back in the past, we're not just imposing our own view to see commonalities. We're imposing patterns on the past rather than sort of digging them out naturally. How do we avoid doing that? In a sense, we're always at risk of doing that. In a sense, we're always at risk of bringing to the historical data some framework and imposing it on the data and then determining that this must be what happened. And the reason that this is always a risk is because we can't run experiments in history that are designed to falsify our preconditions. So if we have some preexisting notion of how revolutions take place and we look at a revolution and we find it, well, we've confirmed it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all revolutions are that way and it doesn't mean that it had to be that way. And it also does not mean that simply because it looks this way to us that we have seen it accurately, we might be looking at data that we've sort of squashed or distorted in some way to fit into the mold. And that's always a risk that historians run. To the historians, most important virtue is sort of an extreme humility. I would say so. Okay. I would say so. Not all historians would say that. Some would say, look, I've got it all figured out. I've got the pattern that explains everything. What I like about Crain Britton in particular is his intellectual modesty. He admits, he has this really great sort of theoretical preface where he admits that what he is doing is in some ways an exercise in metaphor. He says, I'm going to compare revolutions to a fever. And I know that this is a metaphor and this is fanciful and there are limits to it. There are limits to what a naturalistic metaphor, naturalistic processes metaphor can actually do for us. And he also admits that when you say that the English Civil War and the French Revolution were like one another, that again, is an exercise in metaphor. And we have to be very careful, not just to identify similarities, but also differences. It's the art in the arts and sciences, right? The craftsmanship involved here. Absolutely, it's absolutely the art. And it also gets back to one of my sort of favorite intellectual hobby horses, which is lumpers versus splitters. Do you lump together the English Civil War and the French Revolution because of their similarities or do you split them apart because of their differences? Well, the correct answer there is it depends what you're trying to accomplish. If you want to point out that both of them had a sort of Thermadorian reaction at the end, that's a useful comparison. If you want to distinguish that Cromwell was a person of very different temperament from Robespierre, well, you might want to do that. There's something useful there. Well, I'm not somebody who sort of dogmatically thinks we should exclude methods that are slightly problematic or maybe even a lot problematic. So let's take the risk of doing comparative history here and dive into this idea of revolutions having a particular anatomy. And I want to focus in first on that idea of a revolution. What exactly is a revolution in the way that Brinton is talking about? So Brinton is trying to give us an account of this historical phenomenon that is emphatically not Marxist and also not reactionary. There is a tendency among those on the right to view all revolutions as presumptively bad and there is a tendency of those on the left to view all revolutions as sort of the stepping stones of human progress toward a more perfected society. And he's trying to sail a sort of middle path between them and not to take either of those two views. Instead, what he wants to do is look at what we can say based on empirical data without having this sort of built-in conceptual framework that might predispose our thinking to one conclusion or another. Is this something, is a full revolution, something that's unique to the modern world or the early modern world, modernity in general? Were there pre-modern revolutions? There were certainly pre-modern, popular political actions, no doubt about that. I think what is new in the modern era is the ideological revolution, a revolution that takes place motivated by a set of causes that are simultaneously secular and political and held by a substantial segment of the society. So when Alexis de Tocqueville writes about the French Revolution, he writes that it was unusual because it had almost a religious character. And this is a very insightful observation, I think. The word we would use is it had an ideological character. The French Revolution had an ideology to it. When you look at it compared to the English Civil War, it's a lot harder to disentangle religion from the English Civil War because religion was just constantly a part of the revolutionary's own program. Religion certainly had an important part to play in the French Revolution as well and one that often gets underplayed, but there were a whole lot of secular ideological concerns in the French Revolution that you don't see so much of in the English Civil War. So I would say as modernity progresses, you got more and more people who are literate, who are absorbing ideas about politics and who would like perhaps to act on them. And that's one of the factors in modern political revolutions. Are there any necessary preconditions that society, the economy, the political system has to fulfill before a full revolution is possible? Well, Britain certainly thought so. He thought that there were a number of preconditions that he could discern in all four of the revolutions he studied. One of them was that the society was facing difficulties over government finance. People were complaining about taxes and yet the government did not have enough money and these questions of finance are precipitative causes of certainly the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution. All of them are in some ways tied up with government finance. Another precondition that he claims to discern in all of them is the sense that social mobility has been impaired in some way that is unacceptable to the people in the society. So when the French bourgeoisie complains about their position in society and how they ought to be able to rise and they are denied that, this is something that very strongly alienates them from the social order and inclines them to revolution. For a long time, the bourgeoisie had hoped to rise and it was not an unusual or an unfounded hope. They hoped that they could buy their way into the nobility which was the way that you typically became a nobleman in France. You bought an office and it conferred on you a noble title and then you could think of yourself as being of a higher social station. This seems like a very, you know, venal and corrupt process to us and of course really it was but this was the way that you did it. This was how you rose in society. Well, leading up to the revolution there were a lot of people who wanted to do this and who did not have as many opportunities as their ancestors had had and they were bothered by this and they felt that sting of wanting to rise and feeling they were entitled to rise and not being allowed to rise. The military sort of becomes one of the main vectors for it. It does and a lot of people at the time justified turning their allegiance to Napoleon because they saw him as someone who made the careers open to talents which in the case of the military is absolutely true. If you wanted to be an officer in the old regime you had to be a noble pretty much. It was just, you know, it was a requirement but under Napoleon the way to become an officer was to win battles and this is in a way this is why Napoleon was a successful military commander. Now we know that there are maybe dozens perhaps hundreds of potential possible revolutions for every single one that's successful. They die in their infancy, you know. They never really get going. They are discovered and found out the plotters are, you know, hanged or banished or what have you. What are the necessary preconditions for a successful revolution? This is one of the most interesting points of the book to me. Brinton distinguishes successful revolutions by pointing out that in each of the cases there is a kind of parallel set of institutions that develop alongside the government. He calls it an illegal government and by this he doesn't mean necessarily that it's formally illegal. It's, I might call it a shadow government to avoid that connotation. There's a shadow government that people transfer their allegiance to rather than be loyal to the old system or the existing system. They are first and foremost a Jacobin or they are first and foremost a member of the Soviet or their allegiance is to, in the case of the American Revolution, their allegiance is to their state, not primarily to the British crown. And in each of these cases it's not necessarily true that there's anything illegal going on but there is a transfer of loyalty and these outside institutions attempt not just to command the allegiance of their followers but also increasingly to do the work of governing and they're there to step in and take over when the time comes. When is that? So like, do there have to be huge numbers of people involved or can a small, very well orchestrated click of individuals take over and establish a new government? Does society have to be in shambles like Russia during the war? Things falling apart all around everyone? Not necessarily, it's not necessarily the case. Britain says that there's a key moment in all of the revolutions where the old order resorts to violence to maintain itself and is defeated in every single one of the cases. Charles I, I'm sorry, Charles II, rather. I'm sorry, no, Charles I succeeds. Charles I does not succeed at violence. Charles I is not able to maintain himself on the battlefield. You've got exactly the same failure of violence in the Storming of the Bastille. It was not even a terribly strategic military asset. It's a prison. It was not holding very many people. There were seven of them there. And as the phrase among historians goes, arguably they all deserve to be there. There were counterfeiters and rapists and just not very good people who were in there. You're putting those on par. Well look, I mean arguably they all deserve to be there. They were not politically persecuted. There had been political prisoners in the Bastille previously, but not currently. There weren't any weapons. But what happened there was the old order tried and failed to defend itself. And that sent a very powerful signal to the society. That sent a signal that things are capable of changing. And that's the case in all of the revolutions. All of them have this kind of signal early attempt to use violence that fails. So is it fair to say then that some revolutions come from above and some come from below? There's not necessarily a fixed model or a certain number of people you need. There's not a magic critical mass in society that you need to hit. That's correct, that's correct. And it's also the case that you don't see revolutions. You don't see revolutions that are taking place merely on the basis of social class antagonisms. The French Revolution is not just made by the bourgeoisie. Brinton looks at the composition of the Jacobin clubs and he finds that the people who are in these clubs come from all walks of life virtually. Not the nobility, but just about everyone else in society, you find some of them there. And that's remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, because it falsifies claims made by Marxist historians that the revolution was made by the bourgeoisie alone for their interests and they shaped the government to be what they wanted it to be. It's not really the case. And second, it's interesting because it's in parallel with the other revolutions. You find this pattern repeated that people join the revolution not merely based on social class, but based on ideology. What kinds of constraints do revolutionaries operate under once they are in control of a new government or even a new society, perhaps? They are in a lot of ways at their most vulnerable when they take over power because immediately whichever revolutionary faction gains political power, they are called upon to do the things that the old government was failing to do. And often that old government was failing for reasons beyond its control. So it is not necessarily the case that the new government can do any better. They're inexperienced. They are facing violence in the streets commonly. They are perhaps one faction among many. They have now got people to their left and to their right who hate them. And so when a new government takes over at an initial early stage of a revolution, it's commonly, it's a moderate, perhaps a reformist government and it fails. This is a commonality to be seen certainly in three of the four revolutions, not so much in the American revolution, but certainly in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, all three of them had that characteristic very, very strongly. You know, I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that the American Revolution, it's 13 separate entities basically cooperating together. Maybe there's less, there's more of a sense of unity because of the fact that they have to join across governmental bodies. But it strikes me, that seems like Oliver Cromwell at Putney during the Putney debates. They have the king basically captive and they're camped with the new model army at Putney outside of London between the king and the parliament physically. And Cromwell is having to listen to all these radical levelers talk about getting rid of aristocratic privileges and landholders privileges, get rid of the house of lords, get rid of the monarch, get rid of property. And he's got to sit there and listen to it all, you know. He can't, it's most of his army perhaps that believes this stuff. So what do you do? Yeah, what do you do indeed? Because a lot of times these governments are faced with very strong ideological demands and also conditions on the ground that may make them completely impossible. Expectations become very, very high. The ability to satisfy them is very, very low. Now, one of the things that revolutionaries are constantly on their guard about is the impending counter-revolution. So what kinds of things do you have to do then? Well, I mean, you seem to be getting ahead of yourself because we haven't even talked about the terror yet. We haven't talked about the height of the revolutionary fever. Well, what's the point of the fever that does seem to strike societies when they're in the midst of revolution? Whether it's terrorism against Tories or terrorism by the new French regime, the massacres in the Vendée, you know. What is it that gets ahold of people that seems to make them think all enemies have to be liquidated? Well, this is one of my favorite parts of the anatomy of revolution. Crane Britain does a very good job of ruling out individual character traits as constitutive of terror. It's not that vicious people got in charge. It's not that these people would have maybe been serial killers during a time of peace or something. He has seven factors that he points to as seemingly the precursors of terror. And if you listen to them carefully with the example of the French Revolution in mind and also the American Revolution, you can see why the American Revolution was notably short on terror. So his factors are as follows. First, there is a habit of violence that develops. People become accustomed to violence as the solution to problems. In the French case, the law courts had been out of commission for quite some time before the terror had even started. There was popular revolutionary justice. There was popular vigilante justice even for causes unrelated to the revolution. People took the law into their own hands. Violence was something that people were much more accustomed to seeing and to performing. Second, he says that a key factor is pressure from a foreign civil war. Now, the American Revolution was a war of national liberation, but we were not fighting some other foreign power at the same time. If we were, if say Prussia was on our border and they were invading us, then that might have been a prompt to terror. That might have been a prompt to much more extremism. Third, there is the newness of the machinery of the centralized government. This is not the case in the American Revolution. The state governments go on more or less as they had. They reorganize themselves somewhat, but they're not radically transformed or abolished. Fourth, there is an acute economic crisis. This is certainly true in the French Revolution where crops had been failing and where the paper money scheme that they got into ended up going bust and the paper money was worthless and lots of people were impoverished. Not so much the case in the course of the American Revolution, although we had our own paper money scheme, which I'm sure you'll cover in another talk. Fifth, there are class struggles. Now, in the American Revolution, there are some class struggles, but not nearly to the politicized and identitarian extent that they were in the French Revolution. Certainly, race is something that is not really present in the other revolutions. Race is present in the American Revolution in a way that it is not so much in the other revolutions we're talking about, although there have been revolutions with a very significant race component, like the Haitian Revolution. There's a sixth variable, which is sort of difficult to describe, but the revolutionary leaders have undergone what he calls an apprenticeship in revolutionary tactics. They've been selected in almost a Darwinian sense for their ability to manipulate an extremist revolutionary group. And this to me, this is Lenin. He spent his whole life trying to make revolution. He was very accustomed to it, not just accustomed to violence, but accustomed to the kind of manipulation of small group dynamics that allows you to ruthlessly turn on a dime and cash in your former friend. Now, it makes sense to turn into an enemy, so you do it. And finally, there is what he calls an element of religious faith, which was shared by the independence, the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier with the idea that ideology is a kind of secularized religion. It's a modern, secular version of religious belief. So all of these different factors seem to contribute to the development of a reign of terror in a revolution. And now from what I know about the French Revolution, the Jacobins were terrified that the counter-revolution would always be out there, no matter where a monarch was left, right? They would always be waiting to come back and reinstall feudalism, because what else do kings do but rule over serfs, right? They had a great deal of concern about that, and their concern was not unfounded. Let's face it, there were kings who were very much hostile to the French Revolution. They did roll back the revolution, right? And not only were there kings who were hostile to the revolution, but uncomfortably for Marxists, there were peasants who were hostile to the revolution. And where Marxist historians often struggle to talk about events like the Vendée counter-revolutionary, you know, uprising, we don't have to share their discomfort. I'm fine with believing that peasants were devout and loyal to the Catholic Church, and when they saw the revolution going after the Catholic Church and trying to nationalize its lands and convert the Catholic Church into a sort of national religion, I'm fine with saying, okay, they were angry about that. They were motivated sufficiently that they would try to strike back. That makes sense to me as a motivation. Do the revolutionists ever find themselves in the position of having to become the counter-revolution? Well, there is this sense in which revolutionaries often have to ask when the revolution stops or ask how can we stop the revolution? Now, where's the point at which we're done? And this is a question that seems to come up with the greatest intensity, I think, in the French Revolution, where we have a revolution that first produces a kind of constitutional monarchy and people are very happy that it's done and they think, aha, the French Revolution has just happened and here we are in France has improved, but there are still problems. And one of the problems is what to do with the Church, what to do with its extraordinary powers, which are guaranteed by the central government, what to do with the king who's constantly dragging his feet on all sorts of revolutionary questions and turns out is increasingly and finally decisively sympathetic with the counter-revolution. So how do you deal with that and how can you maintain a constitutional monarchy where your monarchy is not a willing player? This isn't Queen Victoria kind of gradually easing into a constitutional monarchy where you have ceremonial powers and very little else. This isn't the case. This is a king who is determined to gruel as his ancestors have ruled as something as close to absolutist as he can. Yeah, it seems like maybe Lenin in the Russian Revolution is the hardest case of this, but I could certainly see Cromwell being a counter-revolutionary figure later in his, I mean, he's a dictator practically. He becomes the Lord Protector because they don't want to call him the king, but he's making it more everywhere. Functionally, he's pretty much a king by the end of his life, yes. He makes his son be the Lord Protector after him. I mean, that's, if that's not an inherited, if that's not monarchy, I'm not sure what is, you know? It's, I mean, we could say that the same thing has happened even in the present day in North Korea where there was a communist revolution that ended up producing something that looks an awful lot like a monarchy now. It looks an awful lot like an absolute monarchy. Now that leads me to my next question here. Do moderates ever really win a revolution? I mean, perhaps the American revolution is the best case of that here, right? Washington's no king, and he's not exactly the old colonial establishment either, though it is definitely, you know, the new federalists are a collection of elite interests. And Washington's political enemies were certainly quick to make him out to be a king and to complain that he was behaving like one. The fact is though, they're not tremendously numerous or influential and he also confounds them by actually stepping down from the presidency. You know, probably he could have ruled for as long as he wanted to as president and if he had overstepped constitutional bounds, it's an open question how well those bounds would have restrained him, but he was fairly scrupulous about not doing that to the best of his understanding and also to relinquishing power, which set a pretty important example. And also, I think it may matter that Washington didn't have children. Yeah, nobody to inherit, right? No one to inherit from him, exactly. So then are there any other examples, major examples of moderates winning the revolution and actually forming the regime in the end? You could say that that's a certain of the post-Soviet revolutions, the anti-Soviet revolutions in the late 20th century turned out that way. I mean, Poland, Czechoslovakia, these went on to produce societies that became more or less Western and liberal and that the moderates in a sense did win there. So yeah, it does sometimes happen, but the classic revolutionary phenomenon that Crane-Britain is looking at, this is not something that you should expect. You should not expect the moderates to win, again, because of the situation that they find themselves in, which is sort of like being the old regime, but also having enemies on both sides, which does not make things terribly stable. Yeah, he says power always moves from right to center to left, so it can stay on the right for an awfully long time, like middle age is long, but once it starts moving to the center, it doesn't last there very long before the left take control of it, and then presumably you swing back around the other way at some point. Yeah, Tocqueville has this famous aphorism that the most dangerous time for a corrupt society is when it undertakes reforming itself, that this is when things can become very, very unstable, but you are correct to point out that there is in each of these revolutions also a reaction, a reaction that brings back something like the old order or something that does decisively put the end to the revolution. So you get in the Russian revolution, Stalin takes over, and he is certainly a communist, and nobody's disputing that, but the idea of the revolution being ongoing is something that he actually is quite opposed to, and it's done, we're gonna stop here. In the French revolution, you have the Thermadorian reaction, which is sort of the paradigm of it, and in the English Civil War, there is the restoration, where we're done with Cromwell, we bring back literally the same royal line that we had before Charles II, excuse my earlier difficulty, Charles II returns and is king, and we go back to something not exactly like, but something quite similar to what had been before. Is a permanent revolution possible, in your opinion? What would that entail? I don't think so, I don't think so, and I think that the anatomy of revolution is a very good job of pointing out why this isn't something that's possible, and that's because the ordinary people who are not usually interested in or involved in politics find that they are tremendously imposed upon by revolutions. Revolutions, even at their best, are inconveniences, and often they are massive inconveniences, and often they are deadly, and people don't want to have constant disruption in their lives. There is a very strong counterweight that pushes in the direction of stability of some kind. I don't care what it is, but let's just have an ordinary life of some kind, and so revolutions are intermittent periods in history. They are times of instability before a new equilibrium is to be found, and I know that equilibrium is another one of those metaphors that can't really be applied to the social sciences with any great exactness, but it does seem clear that these desires by the part of ordinary, not tremendously politically motivated people matter, and they do help to bring an end to periods of revolutionary change. As a libertarian, do you think revolutions are desirable? Political revolutions are the kind we're talking about. Well, I mean, that's sort of like asking whether rain is desirable. Would you have been on any of these sides that we've talked about today? Would you have been with the revolution? Of course, of course. I hope I would at least. I hope I would have sided with the American Revolution, and I hope I would have sided at least with the initial stages of the French Revolution. I admire Thomas Paine a great deal. He would have been on the block. Well, you know, he nearly was. He nearly was. Thomas Paine, who despite being a very bad speaker of French, got elected to the convention in the French Revolution based on his reputation and on what he had done in the American Revolution. He at one point gave a speech in which he recommended that Louis XVI should not be executed. And that turns out not too long afterward to be a cardinal sin. And he's marked for death, but escapes it. Condorcet wanted the king sent to the galleys, right? And well, and Paine wanted him exiled. Paine said we should send him to a little farm in America and make him work for his living, which is just, you know, it's this preciously naive kind of suggestion, but. Talk about a revolution though, but that's a big one. And less bloodthirsty than what they eventually did with him, I mean, you know, that might have been nicer if it had turned out that way. See, now that sounds like a much more libertarian kind of French Revolution. You know, I wish that it might have turned out differently, but the proponents of liberty are apt to lose out very frequently in these revolutions to those who are less squeamish about using the political means instead. Jason Kuznicki is a historian here at the Cato Institute, editor for Cato Books with a PhD in history from the Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is Technology and the End of Authority. What is government for? Liberty Chronicles is a project of libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit libertarianism.org.