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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
In what follows, I begin by asking a paradigmatic question to clarify some problems of definition (I). Next, Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution is examined as a scientific definition of revolution (II). Its application to the Netherlands revolt concludes the essay (III). Many logical problems are oversimplified and some are ignored altogether. This is done to keep the lid down on several Pandora's boxes, notably those labelled methodology in the social sciences, language philosophy, and historical laws, about which a great deal, some of it relevant here, has been written already. At the same time, I am concerned with the complexity of the problems raised and with suggesting that the ways in which definitions of historical events can be used deserve as much attention as the definitions themselves.
1 This is demonstrated (unwittingly) by Yoder, Dale, “Current Definitions of Revolution”, American Journal of Sociology, XXXII (1926), pp. 433–41Google Scholar. Cf. also Hatto, Arthur, “‘Revolution’: An Enquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term”, Mind, LVIII (1949), pp. 495–517.Google Scholar
2 Cf.: “To define in the first sense is to provide a word or number of words which can be substituted for the word in question without affecting the truth or falsehood of any sentence in which that word occurs”. Weldon, T. D., The Vocabulary of Politics (London, 1955), p. 23.Google Scholar
3 New York, Prentice-Hall, rev. ed. 1952.
4 The biological model is also urged by Brinton's direct precursor, Bauer, Arthur, Essai sur les révolutions (Paris 1908), pp. 6–7; pp. 69–70Google Scholar. The anatomist and physiologist, Bauer argues, have shown the sociologist that it is possible to reduce the infinite diversity of the organic world by the study of internal characteristics: the stumbling block to a comparative study of revolutions (that, in its totality, any given one is unique) is removed if the uniformities of those characteristics rather than whole events are studied.
5 The Jacobins. An Essay in the New History (New York 1930), p. 231.Google Scholar
6 Jacobins, p. 234; “The ‘New History’ and ‘Past Everything’,” The American Scholar, VIII (1939), pp. 152–5.Google Scholar
7 This distinction between teleological and scientific thinking is elaborated in his A History of Western Morals (New York 1959), esp. pp. 468–9.Google ScholarPubMed
8 Suggestions are not wanting on how many revolutions would be required, as this sample from political science, history, and sociology may show: Pettee, George S., The Process of Revolution (New York 1938), pp. xi–xiiGoogle Scholar, argues for studying the great revolutions only; Salvemini, Gaetano, Historian and Scientist (Cambridge 1939), p. 32Google Scholar, advises the greatest possible number; and Eliot, Thomas D., “The Use of History for Research in Theoretical Sociology”, American Journal of Sociology, XXVII (1921–1922), p. 633Google Scholar, recommends that social scientists study “myriads of smaller groups of all kinds, throughout the world in every age”, because near-uniqueness of larger social movements prevents these being compared. (Cf. n. 4 above.)
9 Especially Marnix, who, save for his greater longevity, might have been a Mirabeau after all, cf. Kingdon, Robert M., “The Political Resistance of the Calvinists in France and the Low Countries”, Church History, xxvii (1958), pp. 225–6.Google Scholar
10 This is R. R. Palmer's criticism of discussions of revolutions in terms of formal resemblances, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton 1959), pp. 10–11Google Scholar. The same could be said against definitions of revolution in terms of the theory of social movements, namely, as frustrations and dissatisfaction with the given. This, it has been pointed out, is wide enough to include dissatisfaction with change and thus covers the opposite of revolution as well, Vander Zanden, James W., “A Note on the Theory of Social Movements”, Sociology and Social Research, 44 (1959), pp. 3–7.Google Scholar
11 Jacobins, p. 239; Anatomy, pp. 202 ff.; A Decade of Revolution (New York 1934), pp. 158–62.Google Scholar
12 Koenigsberger, H. G., “The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands During the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History, XXVII (1955), pp. 335–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 However, Brinton's dictum, that “the masses do not make revolutions,” is not unambiguous, Anatomy, p. 170. In a very obvious sense it is not always true; perhaps even the sense that mobs are imposed on by agitators and lack decisive and rationally intelligible aims of their own, is difficult to maintain, cf. Rudé, George, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford 1959), esp. pp. 231 ff.Google Scholar
14 Kingdon, loc. cit.
