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Confining Conditions and Revolutionary Breakthroughs*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
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I want to try to connect the course of several regimes with what, for want of a better name, I shall call “confining conditions”—the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of these regimes. Do I prejudice the case by calling the sum total of the prerevolutionary situation confining conditions rather than calling them more neutrally, as Val Lorwin suggested to me, simply antecedent conditions? Yet every situation which a new regime finds at its inception is an antecedent one. I am concerned specifically—and only—with the conditions that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue. How the new regime may accomplish this, or may fail to, is the subject of this paper. Therefore I consider the nature of the confining conditions, chiefly those of social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.
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References
1 See esp. ch. 1, “Approaches to the study of political power,” and ch. 10, “Economics and Politics in the 20th century,” in Neumann, Franz, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, 1957)Google Scholar.
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“The overhang of agricultural excess population permitted the manning of equipment which was physically usable with the surplus peasants of yesterday, which could be removed from the countiyside without a notable detriment to agricultural output and be employed at a real wage barely exceeding their wretchedly lower consumption levels of the earlier status.” (p. 184)
5 Gurland, Kirchheimer, Neumann, The Fate of Small Business in Nazi Germany, 78th Cong., 1st sess., Hearings, Sen. Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, Comm. Print No. 14 (1943), p. 152.
The story and some figures can be found in Schweitzer, Arthur, Big Business in the Third Reich (Bloomiagton, Ind., 1964)Google Scholar, chs. 4 and 5.
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7 It goes without saying that the conclusions I draw from Moore's analysis are entirely my own.
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