The Great Revolutions And The Civilizations Of Modernity S N Eisenstadt

The Great Revolutions And The Civilizations Of
Modernity S N Eisenstadt download
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-great-revolutions-and-the-
civilizations-of-modernity-s-n-eisenstadt-51249672
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
The Great Rebuildings Of Tudor And Stuart England Revolutions In
Architectural Taste Colin Platt
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-great-rebuildings-of-tudor-and-
stuart-england-revolutions-in-architectural-taste-colin-platt-44887184
The Great Demarcation The French Revolution And The Invention Of
Modern Property Rafe Blaufarb
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-great-demarcation-the-french-
revolution-and-the-invention-of-modern-property-rafe-blaufarb-10425284
Socialist Women And The Great War 191421 Protest Revolution And
Commemoration Corinne Painter
https://ebookbell.com/product/socialist-women-and-the-great-
war-191421-protest-revolution-and-commemoration-corinne-
painter-57251934
Living The French Revolution And The Age Of Napoleon Course Guidebook
Suzanne M Desan
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-the-french-revolution-and-the-
age-of-napoleon-course-guidebook-suzanne-m-desan-10993454

The Last Great Revolution Turmoil And Transformation In Iran Robin
Wright
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-last-great-revolution-turmoil-and-
transformation-in-iran-robin-wright-30973044
Geopolitics And The Great Powers In The Twentyfirst Century
Multipolarity And The Revolution In Strategic Perspective C Dale
Walton
https://ebookbell.com/product/geopolitics-and-the-great-powers-in-the-
twentyfirst-century-multipolarity-and-the-revolution-in-strategic-
perspective-c-dale-walton-23511522
Constantine The Great And The Christian Revolution G P Baker
https://ebookbell.com/product/constantine-the-great-and-the-christian-
revolution-g-p-baker-10582386
A Chinese Rebel Beyond The Great Wall The Cultural Revolution And
Ethnic Pogrom In Inner Mongolia Tj Cheng Uradyn E Bulag Mark Selden
https://ebookbell.com/product/a-chinese-rebel-beyond-the-great-wall-
the-cultural-revolution-and-ethnic-pogrom-in-inner-mongolia-tj-cheng-
uradyn-e-bulag-mark-selden-54193046
The Great Callup The Guard The Border And The Mexican Revolution 1st
Edition Charles H Harris
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-great-callup-the-guard-the-border-
and-the-mexican-revolution-1st-edition-charles-h-harris-5480458

ee iti
ae 3 1430 05205957 5

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation |
https://archive.org/details/greatrevolutionsO000eise

The Great Revolutions and the
Civilizations of Modernity

International Studies
in Sociology
and Social Anthropology
Editors
Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo
Rubin Patterson
Masamichi Sasaki
VOLUME 99

The Great Revolutions and
the Civilizations of Modernity
by
S.N. Eisenstadt
BRILL
LEIDEN - BOSTON
2006

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eisenstadt, S.N. (Shmuel Noah), 1923
The great revolutions and the civilizations of modernity / by S.N. Eisenstadt.
p. cm, — (International studies in sociology and social anthropology,
ISSN 0074-8684; v. 99)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 90—-04-14812-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Revolutions. 2. Social change. 3. Civilization, Modern. 4. Comparative
civilization. I. Title. I. Series
HM876.E57 2006
303.4—dce22 2005054257
ISSN 0074-8684
ISBN 90 04 14812 4
N\
© Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance
Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

Contents ¢ v
Contents
Preface
PART ONE
THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS AND THE ORIGINS
AND CRYSTALLIZATION OF MODERNITY:
SOME COMPARATIVE OBSERVATIONS
Chapter One Introduction: The Historical and Civilizational
Rrameworks aut tue (reat Mevolutions ter oes semen ye 2
Chapter Two The Distinctive Characteristics of the
Revyomupnary Processes. anos Lueolowtes Misa steeds doxesacsasterse Ls)
PART TWO
THE “CAUSES” AND HISTORICAL-CIVILIZATIONAL
FRAMEWORKS OF REVOLUTIONS
Chapter Three Structural and Social Psychological Causes_...... |
Chapter Four ‘The Historical Settings—The Contradictions of
8 REE ap Erg Fee Ek nee AOE ET SRO Re AT eee p ETO a MAES Su,
Chapter Five The Civilizational Frameworks of the Great
Brew ois oris—— 0 ie ial CZ ALS as oat p ck tre ices ame)
PART THREE
THE VARIABILITY OF AXIAL CIVILIZATIONS AND
POLITICAL DYNAMICS—THE DISTINCTIVENESS
OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
Chapter Six “Other-worldly” Civilizations—The Hindu
agi Sahay hae ope ee 2, ER eae, AS-aRE ROS Me Le Pe oh MORES AE 2 et mee heats oy
Chapter Seven The Political Dynamics in “this-worldly”
Civilization—the Chinese Confucian Political Order. ................ 7

vi © Contents
Chapter Eight Monotheistic Civilizations—Islam_ ...........:0e0 12
Chapter Nine Christian Civilizations the European
CLOMAPIER Fercevecvnsnavanreccsandvaneosusadenni vecatvrven-abtday sentyiiceoad: #2 ptbecgensaananese 85
Chapter Ten A Comparative excursus: Japan—the Non-Axial
Revolutionary Restoration and Concluding Remarks—
Conception of Social Orders; Access to the Political Order and
Political IDyiarines. <.pegcsn.conrecorsevadescvesudvctsnrenvarstsessextactesedceasestenneses 93
PART FOUR
COSMOLOGICAL VISIONS, MODES OF REGULATION
AND REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIALS:
POLITICAL DYNAMICS IN AXIAL CIVILIZATIONS
Chapter Eleven Revolutionary Potentials in Axial
CV UEZATI ONS, vse ideccaise cn cuwesticgs-dncusinetath vs 14 degeslaetiaciaaa pe agenoananetadeasaaiiaes 103
Chapter Twelve Cosmological Visions, Modes of Regulation,
and Political Dynamics in Imperial and Imperial-Feudal
SOMLCULES) « cesuses ck, daca diusa pare attest ne over deve aces ead hae naaeasseneaet ete ae 109
Chapter Thirteen Cosmological Visions, Modes of Regulation,
and Political Dynamics in Patrimonial Regimes ................00 119
Chapter Fourteen Concluding Observations—The “Causes”,
Historical Contexts and Civilizational Frameworks of
Revolutions: 2640, Go roe ee ote eres ee A ee enews 125
PART FIVE
THE OUTCOMES OF REVOLUTIONS
Chapter Fifteen The Outcomes of Revolutions—The
Crystallization of the Political and Cultural Program of
I Goce a sil i aera epee ie eas Crearen et Ueey CR tte: Carew mene au teL GRAMS NSP PaLS 13]
Chapter Sixteen The Outcomes of Revolutions—The
Variability of Revolutionary Symbolism in Modern Societies—
Preliminary Indications’ ia. cetssure ieee Sukie ad kde tee. ee
Chapter Seventeen The New Setting—Changes in the Modes
of the Models of the Nation and Revolutionary State
| Avs [-), ae ee Oe oe eee ee RE ANNO Radar one Ge tM 2? |

Preface * vit
Preface
In 1978 I published a book entitled “Revolution and Transformation of
Societies” (New York: The Free Press—Hebrew, German, Russian and
Portuguese translations) in which I analyzed the revolutions as one type
of macro-societal change and to compare them with other types of such
changes and transformations.
Since then I have reformulated the problematic of the Great Revolutions
putting it in the framework of comparative civilizational analysis, i.e. the
analysis of comparative civilizations and of multiple modernities, espe-
cially in the frameworks of the analysis of Axial Civilizations—the analy-
sis of which constituted the focus of an international research program
in the eighties and nineties.
The first step in such analysis has been the analysis of the Great
Revolutions—not only as changes of regimes, but as combinations of
such changes with the promulgation of distinct cosmological visions, i.e.
as kernels of distinct civilizations.
Second, was the analysis of the civilizational frameworks of the Great
Revolutions—1.e. the emphasis that it is only in distinct civilizations, in
specific Axial civilizations, and in specific historical contexts—those of
early modernity—that the various structural and social-psychological con-
ditions which have been analyzed_in great detail in the literature as
causes of revolutions give rise not only to decline of regimes but to rev-
olutions, to revolutionary transformations. In this context I point out
that only the analysis of different combinations of structural processes—
civilizational frameworks and historical settings can explain both the
different revolutionary potentials that developed in different societies, as
well as different outcomes thereof.
The third step of this analysis has been the analysis of the relations
between the Great Revolutions and the development and crystallization
of modernity—that the distinctive outcomes of the Great Revolutions
was indeed the crystallization of the cultural and political program of
modernity, within which the revolutionary imaginaire and activities con-
stitute a central but continually changing component—the concrete con-
stellations of which being constitutive of different multiple modernities.
I have been working on these problems for the last thirty years, in
close relation to studies on Comparative Civilizations and Multiple

vii © Preface
Modernities, discussing them with many colleagues, especially in various
graduate seminars and workshops in Jerusalem, Harvard, Chicago,
Heidelberg, Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt and the University of Konstanz.
From among the scholars with whom I have discussed these problems,
I would like to mention especially Said Arjomand, Johann Arnason,
Berndt Giesen, Wolfgang Schluchter, Edward Tiryakian, Bjorn Wittrock
and Jack Goldstone—whose work on revolutions provided me with con-
tinual challenges. |
The first draft of the book was prepared about seven years ago—but
it is only lately, in conjunction with my studies on Axial Civilizations
and Multiple Modernities I felt ready to re-work it in the form pre-
sented here, and I would like to thank Joed Elich of Brill for his encour-
agement and support for the preparation of the book.
I would like to thank Esther Rosenfeld and Miriam Bar-Shimon for
typing several drafts of the book, and Nadav Horev and Igor Sankin
for research assistance help in the preparation of the footnotes.
Above all I would like to thank Eva Patricia Rakel for her great help
in copyediting the book and its preparation for print.
I have limited the footnotes to what seemed to me to be necessary
minimum—fuller bibliographic references can be found in the various
books referred to, including my earlier book on Revolutions.
: S.N. Eisenstadt
Jerusalem, March 2005

PART ONE
THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS
AND THE ORIGINS AND CRYSTALLIZATION
OF MODERNITY: SOME COMPARATIVE OBSERVATIONS

5°15 & ya —
ite) Ghent
7 : a wi ad ouueees
; selon orig ues
whe Del caxavch "Vines
x _« * a G) ss nneiee
7 Ps ra)
7 ~i- 0 mae oe 4 Fabes dries yee
- : ©. aiial ih My) ow awe Age &
ae Pee poe ee ee
: i wf & : ake 8 ORS Ne
ae a» eu iee A alias
a i” A es Sf ao0 ee VMilir Vtar’ oe ioe (
a6 re OG es V4 Oe eee we SF Teer a ot eee
a —< cain + @ Hae 7 partes 8.00. jie pea
a ae Oe - p= Geeta > Oa a
- Snr he A Gwe Cow jury. ang is (on S :
| = PED mee ME Pond On te va
as, . oe ght rSiks Larrea my as ergsanye aT
weet va seer CAMARA | TITER
aie 7 jer hasehe ire
ef

ENstorical and Civilizational Frameworks ¢ 3
I. Introduction: The Historical and
Civilizational Frameworks of the
Great Revolutions
I
This book attempts to analyze the civilizational and historical context of
the development of the modern revolutions—of the Great Revolutions
and of their relations to modernity, to the civilization of modernity.
The Great (“Classical”) Revolutions'—the English “Civil War’, the
American and French revolutions, later on the Chinese, Russian and the
Vietnamese revolutions, possibly also others such as the Turkish revolu-
tion—have changed the world. They were closely connected with the
development of the modern world, of modern civilization—and since
then revolutionary ideologies, the revolutionary image and movements
have become a basic component of the modern and contemporary world.
Revolutions, revolutionary change, have become the epitome of “real”
social change, and the revolutionary phenomenon has developed to a
central topic and a focus of great interest and fascination to modern
intellectual ideological and scholarly discourse.
The study of revolutions has fascinated historians, sociologists and
political scientists alike. It has generated a vast literature, and given rise
to many studies, some dealing with general analyses, specific case stud-
ies, or a comparative perspective. Despite the abundance of these stud-
ies—possibly to some extent because of it—some central problems in the
study of revolutions, especially the analysis of the specificity of these rev-
olutions as distinct from other far-reaching processes of social and polit-
ical change, from other drastic changes of regimes and the conditions
under which they develop, and their overall impact have not been fully
addressed nor adequately analyzed.
Large parts of the literature on revolutions and social change have
assumed that these revolutions constituted the true, pristine, “real” social
change. Other processes were very often judged or scaled according to
their proximity to some ideal type of revolution. While originally this
term was limited to the Great Revolutions—the English, American,
French, Russian and Chinese ones—it has been lately applied to a very
wide array of political and social processes, in particular, to follow

4° Chapter One
Goldstone? and Gunt to “any forcible overthrow of governments, fol-
lowed by the reconsolidation of authority by new groups ruling through
new political (and sometimes social) institutions.” In this way the specificity
both of these Great Revolutions and of other processes—including other
types of macro-societal change——was often lost.
Accordingly in this book we shall explore the specific characteristics
of these revolutions; the causes and frameworks of their development;
the new cultural and political program promulgated by them—1.e. the
cultural and political program of modernity; the institutionalization of
this program, and the place of revolutionary symbols and movements in
the different modern settings in the civilizations of modernity.
First, we shall attempt, in somewhat greater detail, to indicate the
specific characteristics of these revolutions as distinct from other processes
of change, especially of macro-societal change, above all of drastic changes
of political regimes. We shall analyze the specific characteristics of the
ideologies as well as of the processes of political struggle and of social
and political mobilization that have taken place within these revolutions.
Second, we shall turn to the perennial question of the “causes” of rev-
olutions and re-examine the wide ranging literature on this subject. Last,
we shall address ourselves to the problem of the outcomes of revolu-
tions, above all to the relation of revolutions to modernity or modern-
ization, to the crystallization of modern civilization.
I
The basic assumption of this book is that these revolutions—which have
been of crucial importance in the crystallization amd dynamics of moder-
nity, of modern civilization and of the multiple modernities which devel-
oped within the frameworks of this civilization—constitute a distinct type
of macro-societal change. The specific characteristic of this distinct type
of macro-societal change is the combination of change of regime with
the crystallization of new cosmologies and ontological conceptions with
far-reaching institutional implications, i.e. of new civilizations.
Such combinations constitute a specific, possibly unique, case in the
history of mankind. In this book we shall attempt to explain the con-
texts in which such combinations crystallized, and how such combina-
tions have been connected with the “causes” of revolutions. The literature
on causes of revolutions is indeed enormous; it has lately greatly bur-
geoned, and it is not our intention to “add” a new specific item to this
literature. But the factors often listed as causes of revolutions—inter-elite
and inter-class struggles; economic hardships; spirals of economic devel-
opment and inflation; internal and international weakening of regimes—
are to be found in many cases of decline of regimes, especially of Empires.

historical and Ciwilizational Frameworks ¢ 5
In other words this literature does not address itself frontally to the prob-
lems of the broader civilizational and historical contexts, which give rise
to the specific combination of regime change with the crystallization of
new civilizational programs that are characteristic of the Great Revolutions.
Only in some of the recent studies devoted to the place of ideologies in
the process of revolutions, there are some interesting but preliminary
indications about this problem.
Accordingly, the identification of the specific constellation of civiliza-
tional frameworks and historical conditions, within the frameworks of
which the causes of revolutions analyzed aplenty in the literature facil-
itate the emergence of revolutions, constitutes the first central focus of
the analysis presented in this book. This analysis is predicated on sev-
eral premises. The first such premise is that the specific characteristics
of these revolutions, above all the interweaving of changes of regimes
with promulgation of new cultural political programs, have been deeply
rooted in the historical and civilizational frameworks in which they devel-
oped—first of all in Western Europe and later in the eastern (Russian,
Orthodox) Christianity and in Confucian civilizations in China and
Vietnam.
The second major premise—or more correctly—hypothesis of this part
of the book is that the major civilizational frameworks within which such
revolutions tend to develop are certain types of Axial Age Civilizations’—
i.e. above all those Axial Civilizations in which the political arena con-
stitutes an important forum of the implementation of the transcendental
visions predominant in them—and especially Imperial or Imperial feu-
dal systems and situations of transition to modernity.
The basic cultural orientations and civilizational premises prevalent in
these civilizations inspired visions of new types of social order with very
strong utopian and universalistic orientations, while the organizational
and structural characteristics of the societies which developed in these
civilizations provided the frameworks within which these visions could
be institutionalized.
It is within the framework of these structural and cultural character-
istics that different conditions singled out in the literature as causes of
revolutions—such as inter-elite and inter-class conflict—could, in the
appropriate historical situations, above all in those attendant on transi-
tion to modernity, have led to the modern revolutions. ‘The appropri-
ate historical conditions in which these revolutions develop in situations
of transition to modernity—i.e. in situations in which some of the basic
ideological premises of modernity, especially those bearing on the legit-
imization of the social and political order as well as the parallel inst-
tutional features thereof—could have crystallized and come into

6 © Chapter One ve
contradiction with their existing institutional systems and with the more
traditional patterns of legitimization.
It was in these circumstances that there developed a relatively high
degree of coalescence between movements of protest, institution-build-
ing, articulation and ideologization of political struggle—a coalescence
facilitating the development of the combination of changes of regimes
and structural changes with the crystallization of new overall civiliza-
tional programs, that is characteristic of the Great Revolutions.
When such a combination did not occur, the process of breakthrough
or transition to modernity, however far-reaching and dramatic, tended
to develop in different non-revolutionary patterns.
Of central importance in this analysis is that such combination may
arise in different chronological periods, as is obvious from the inclusion
in the category of Great Revolutions both of the “early” classical revo-
lutions—the English “Civil War,” the French, American, as well as the
later ones—the Russian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese revolu-
tions. One of the most interesting cases in this context is, of course, the
Iranian Khomeini revolution*—the seeming, but only seeming, anti-mod-
ern revolution, which yet shares many core characteristics with the Great
Revolutions.
Such constellations combining distinct cosmological visions and struc-
tural conditions and the specific historical context of early modernity
developed first in Western Europe and North America colonial contexts.
But some structural and ideological components, which existed in other
Axial Civilizations were at least conducive to receptivity of some of the
dimensions of social and cultural order of modernity as it was originally
promulgated in Europe. Of special importance in this context have been,
as we shall see in greater detail later on—above all the prevalence within
them of a conception of a chasm between transcendental and mundane
order and, on the institutional level, of groups of autonomous intellectuals.
The prevalence of these components explains at least to some extent
the relative responsiveness of many civilizations beyond Europe to some
of the themes promulgated by Western modernity, above all indeed
of revolutionary visions, themes, and activities, even if such responsive-
ness developed under the impact of colonial imperial expansion and
domination.
At the same time, the fact that within these civilizations there devel-
oped different conceptions of the Axial cosmology, which became com-
bined with different constellations and historical contingencies and with
the composition of autonomous intellectuals, gave rise within these civi-
lizations to different patterns of modernity. Whatever the common core
of these Great Revolutions—first, the European and American, later the

Historical and Civilizational Frameworks ¢ 7
Chinese and Vietnamese, and indeed also the Iranian revolution—and
of their relation to modernity, the differences between these revolutions
are also of importance in shaping the crystallization of different pro-
grams of modernities, or of multiple modernities.
Thus the basic thesis of this analysis is, that these revolutions have to
be analyzed in the context of civilizational formations, that they devel-
oped in specific civilizational contexts and that they were carriers of a
new Civilization—the civilization of modernity—and constituted a cen-
tral component of this civilization. In this context several problems arise.
Il
This brings us to the second major focus of this book, namely, the rela-
tion of these revolutions to the crystallization of modernity, of modern
civilization—1.e. of the place of the revolutionary visions and models as
central components of modern civilization, of the civilization of modernity.
First, the close relation between the Great Revolutions and moder-
nity raises the problem of how to explain the changes that took place
in those societies which were, indeed, modernized, but where a distinc-
tive modern society crystallized without the “internal” revolutionary
processes—even if they were indeed greatly influenced in the crystal-
zation of their specific modernities by the images of revolutions as they
crystallized in the Great Revolutions.
Among the most interesting such cases is Japan, in which the Meiji
Restoration, while evincing some very strong similarities to the Great
Revolutions, was yet its very conservative “Restoration” or Renovation
attests to—markedly different from them in some crucial aspects of the
revolutionary process as well as in the programs of modernity that crys-
tallized in its wake. Another such interesting case is that of India, in
which the modern order developed under the aegis of colonial and impe-
rial regimes, but unlike in such cases as Vietnam not through the com-
bination of national and revolutionary movements. Similarly, in Latin
America® different patterns of modernity developed also in which the
classical revolutionary component did not play a central role, except per-
haps in Cuba, where later a seemingly revolutionary regime developed.
The same is true for many Middle Eastern and African countries,’ where
again the Ethiopian scene evinced some interesting similarities to the
classical Revolutions.
Second, this very fact of the multiplicity of revolutionary and non-
revolutionary “entries” as it were into modernity attests to the impor-
tance of these different historical origins in shaping, even if certainly not
exclusively, the different distinctive patterns of modernity which devel-
oped in these societies, different multiple modernities.

8 © Chapter One
All these illustrations indicate that the revolutionary mode of change—
i.e. the combination of regime and institution changes with the crystal-
lization of new cosmological visions and the new civilizations, does not
constitute the only model of far-reaching macro-societal change. It does
not constitute such single model in the framework of major historic
modes or types of macro-societal social change that developed through-
out human history—even if in some cases, as,for instance in that of the
Abbasid “revolution,” many of the components of such revolutions did
appear. Moreover, as indicated above, the revolutionary model is not
the only model of crystallization of modernity.
The third problem in this context is the place of the revolutionary
visions, imaginary and institutional models attendant on the institution-
alization of different modern post-revolutionary regimes. ‘These visions
and revolutionary themes and activities continued to constitute compo-
nents of the modern symbolic repertoire of modern societies; of the
“imaginaire” of many social movements. Many of these movements por-
trayed themselves as continuation of the earlier revolutions, revolution-
ary symbolism thereof and in many situations of social change constituted
challenges to different modernizing and modern regimes. These ten-
dencies have been reinforced by the fact that many of these movements
developed contemporarily with the later Great Revolutions—be they the
Chinese, Vietnamese or later the Iranian one. Concomitantly the break-
down of existing, already modern regimes and the unfolding of new
ones—many of which presenting themselves as revolutionary—has
abounded.
And yet the basic phenomenology of these movements differed greatly
from that of the classical “early” or “later” Great Revolutions. Within
these movements there did not develop that combination of a regime
change and crystallization of cosmologies and new civilizatigns. The rev-
olutionary programs that were promulgated in these movements—and
even in some of the new regimes, such as in Cuba—were already set
within the “original” civilizational program of modernity, even if they
constituted specific radical interpretations thereof. In this context of spe-
cial interest are the transformations attendant on the disintegration of
the Soviet Union which constituted, as is well known, the great model
of the late Revolutions.
Thus to repeat, it is the analysis of the civilizational and historical
context of the development of the Great Modern Revolutions; their rela-
tions to modernity, to the civilization of modernity, and to the devel-
opment of multiple modernities; and the fate of revolutionary symbolism
and dynamics in post-revolutionary modern regimes, in the continually
changing civilization of modernity that constitute the major foci of this
book.

Eistorical and Ciwvilizational Frameworks ¢ 9
NOTES
' Foran, J. 1997. Theorizing Revolutions. London: Routledge; Eisenstadt, S.N. 1978.
Revolutions and the Transformation of Societies. New York: Free Press; Marx, K. 1971. On
Revolution. (ed.) S.K. Padover. New York: McGraw-Hill; Kamenka, E. 1990 (ed.). A World
im Revolution? Canberra: Australian National University Press; Goldstone, J.A. 1994 (ed.).
Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Studies. NewY ork/Orlando/Austin/Toronto/
London/Sydney/Tokyo: Harcourt Brace College Publishers—see the book and especially
bibliography in the book on pages 321-327; idem 1980. Theories of Revolution: The
Third Generation. World Politics. 32, pp. 425-453; Meyer, G.P. 1976. Revolutionstheorien
heute: Ein kritischer Uberblick in hisonscher Absicht. in H.U. Wehler (ed.), 200 Jahre
amerikanische Revolution und moderne Revolutionsforschung. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & RuPrecht,
pp. 122-176; Lubasz, H. 1966 (ed.). Revolutions in Modern History. New York: Macmillan;
Zagorin, P. 1976. Prolegomena to the Comparative History of Revolution in Early
Modern Europe, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18 April, pp. 151-174; Kossok,
M. 1969 (ed.). Studien iber die Revolution. Berlin: Akademie; idem 1974 (ed.). Studienzur ver-
gleichenden Reuolutionsgeschichte, 1500-1917. Berlin, Akademie.
On the utopian components of revolutions: Seligman, A.B. 1989 (ed.).. Order and
Transcendence; The Role of Utopias and the Dynamics of Civilizations. Leiden: E,J. Brill; Lasky,
M. 1976. Utopia and Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Saage, R. 1990.
Das Ende der Politisches Utopie? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; Friedlander, J.S., G. Holton,
L. Marx, and E. Skolnikoff, 1985 (eds.). Vistons of the Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? New York
and London: Holmes & Meier.
On the English Revolution see among others: Hill, C. The English Revolution and
the Brotherhood of Man, in Lubasz, Revolutions in Modern European History, pp. 39-55;
Stone, L. 1972. The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul; idem, 1970. The English Revolution, in R. Forster and R.P. Greene,
Preconditions af Revolution in early modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; pp.
55-108; Zagorin, P. The English Revolution, 1640-1660, in Lubasz, Revolutions in Modem
European History, pp. 24-39; Seaver, P.S. 1976 (ed.). Seventeenth-Century England: Society in
an Age of Revolution. New York: New Viewpoints.
On the American Revolution see among” others: Weir, R.M. 1976. Who Shall Rule
at Rome: The American Revolution as a Crisis of Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 6, no. 4. pp. 679-700; Morris, R.B. 1967. The American
Revolution Reconsidered. New York: Harper & Row; Greene, J.P. 1973. The Social Origins
of the American Revolution: An Evaluation and an Interpretation, Political Science Quarterly,
vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 1-22.
On the Russian Revolution see among others: Carr, E.H. The Background of the
Russian Revolution, in Lubasz, Revolutions in Modern European History, pp. 112-119; Daniels,
R.V. The Russian Revolution Runs Its Course, in ibid., pp. 128-136; Dietrich, Z.R. De
Russische Revolutie, in I. Schoffer (ed.), Zeven Revoluties, pp. 103-127; Schapiro, L. The
Bolsheviks and Their Rivals, in Lubasz, Revolutions in Modern European History, pp.
119-128; Turner, I. 1970. The Significance of the Russian Revolution, in E. Kamenka
(ed.), A World in Revolution? Canberra: Australian National University Press, pp. 25-39;
Venturi, F. 1960. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nine-
teenth Century Russia. New York: Knopf; Ulam, A.B. 1965. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual
and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan; Pipes,
R. 1968 (ed.). Revolutionary Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Regarding the
Vietnamese cases see McAlister, J.T. Jr., and P. Mus, 1970. The Vietnamese and Their
Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks; McLane, J.R. 1971. Archaic
Movements and Revolution in Southern Vietnam, in N. Miller and R. Aya (eds.), National

10 © Chapter One _
Liberation: Revolution in the Third World. New York: Free Press, pp. 68-101; Mus, P. 1967.
Buddhism in Vietnamese History and Society, Jahrbuch des Sudasien Instituts, 1, pp.
95-115; White, C.P. The Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance: Intellectuals, Workers, and
Peasants, in Lewis, J.W. 1974 (ed.). Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 77-95; McLane, J.R. 1971. Archaic Movements
and Revolution in Southern Vietnam. in N. Miller and R. Aya (eds.), National Liberation:
Revolution in the Third World New York: Free Press, pp. 68-101; Woodside, A. 1976.
Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
On the Chinese Revolution among others see: Gardner, J. 1972. Revolution in China,
in PJ. Vatikiotis (ed.), Revolution in the Middle East. London: George Allen & Unwin,
pp. 211-232; Meisner, M. Utopian Socialist Themes in Maoism, in Lewis Peasant Rebellion
and Communist Revolution in Asia, pp. 207-252; Zurcher, E. De Chinese Revolutie, in
I. Schoffer (ed.), Zeven Revoluties, pp. 145-167; Schwartz, B.I. 1968. Communism and China:
Ideology in Flux. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Schurmann, F. and O. Schell 1967
(eds.). Republican China: Nationalism, War, and the Rise of Communism, 1911-1949. New York:
Random House, Vintage; Milton, D., N. Milton, and F. Schurmann 1974 (eds.). People’s
China: Social Experimentation, Politics, and Entry onto the World Scene, 1966 through 1972. New
York: Random House, Vintage; Ping-ti Ho and Tang Tsou 1968 (eds.). China’s Heritage
and the Communist Political System: China in Crisis, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press; Gray, J. 1969 (ed.). Modern China’s Search for a Political Form. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 41-65; Wright, M.C. 1968 (ed.). China in Revolution: The First Phase,
1900-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 24-26.
> Goldstone, J.A. 1991. Ideology, Cultural Frameworks, and the Process of Revolution.
Theory and Society. 20, pp. 405-453; Goldstone, J.A., T.R. Gurr and Moshin Farrokh
1991 (eds.). Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century. Boulder, Westview Press.
3 Eisenstadt, S.N. 1986 (ed.). The Ongins and Diversity of Axial Age Cwilizations. Albany,
N.Y.: State University of New York Press; Arnason, J.P., S.N. Eisenstadt and B. Witrock
2005 (eds.). Axial Civilizations and World Mistory. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
* on the Iranian Khomeini revolution see: Arjomand, S.A. 1986. Iran’s Islamic
Revolution in Comparative Perspective. World Politics. vol. 38, no. 3, April, pp. 383-414;
Arjomand, S.A. 1989. History. Structure and Revolution,in the Shi'ite Tradition in
Contemporary Iran. International Political Science Review. vol. 10, no. 2. April 9, pp. 111-21;
Amineh, M.P. 1999, Dre globale kapitalstische Expansion und Iran-Eine Studie der Iranischen poli-
tischen Okonomie 1500-1980, Muenster, Hamburg, London: Lit Verlag, Chehabi, H.E.
1990. Iranian politics and religious modernism: the liberation movement of Iran under the Shah and
Khomeint. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Publishers; Khomeini, R. 1981. Islam and revolution:
writings and declarations of Imam Khomeini. Berkeley: Mizan Press; Taheri. A. 1985. The spirit
of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic revolution. London: Hutchinson; Sreberny, A. 1994. Small
media, big revolution: communication, culture, and the Iranian revolution. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
° on the developments of modern India. Bayly, S. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in
India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Heesterman, J.C. 1985. The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and
Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Kaviraj, S., 1996. India: Dilemmas of
Democratic Development, in A. Leftwich (ed.). Democratic Development. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
° on Latin America see in general Kumar, K. 1976. Le rivoluzioni del ventesimo
secolo in per-spettiva storica, in L. Pellicani (ed.), Sociologia delle rivoluzioni. Naples: Guida,
pp. 45-94; idem, 1971. Revolution, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Puhle, Jest:
Revolution von oben und Revolution von unten in Lateinamerika: Fragen zum Vergleich

Historical and Ciwilizational Frameworks ¢ 11
politischer Stabilisierungsprobleme im 20. Jahrhundert, in H,J. Puhle, Revolution und
Reformen in Lateinamerika: Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
2, pp. 143-159; Pollock, D.H. and A.R.M. Ritter, 1973 (eds.). Latin American Prospects for
the 1970°s: What Kind of Revolution? New York: Praeger; Waisman, C.H. 1987. Reversal of
Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and their Structural Consequences.
Princeton, N,J.: Princeton University Press; Halperin-Donghi, T. 1971. The Aftermath of
Revolution in Latin America. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks; Malloy, J.
1977 (ed.). Authoritananism and Corporation in Latin Amenca. Pittsburgh. Perm.: University of
Pittsburgh Press; Wiarda, H,J. 1974. Politics and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct
Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
7 on Middle Eastern and African countries Vatikiotis, P,J. 1972 (ed.). Revolution in the
Middle East. London: Alen & Unwin.

nv eas’ Ga Pio wane
te ¥
brs carshen at aac Me a bats api’
Se er es (rea has Pye este fw
Oy eae: aoe awe wpe 1U¢
(| =e Go Aap
ogihnes ee .
o Pee OS a; Team F Ody
0 ~ & <e © epiiewe FL Tee Demers
HS hte | = te ipiens hy perme, Tf e400
he Gd Cte BEng ee eo ea LE joel p> vel
> a a : i é > © tony etait’ ime as ial
it Cane 9 a Pr OS ae ue Ft wy Gs (°9@ Gog rw
7d 7 Neen 0 Gb) Gul Peed Sew We oa)
er as Pad i) oe? 6 7 @ hentae (eens .
is 1 os a > 4 Abel aw HD Pu
an) > sO oe c lee ¢ we He Ke
- > Y 2S Pme~ re ae’
- _ eo « ae 7 boaetn_ WU Oe Whats die
aS Lo - —_ 2 7 aA, =a. Of rn ee 9 ur
ge aya > G2. ome Diva Wate RS > FS
> in ae ams Pang ie qp aay
: ; a aperirT. ie: nema
oa sae ~~ = O28 —_ » he
; 5 aati (i eae Gas ol l=
—- Ried ep 4b~ $83 \ed BP. ;
i = : - Lf Gab 0-- a80An te OR 7
=
: _) of sae © he? Mee"
ue » tia “7 @ Ge oi wleCS aati orp :
a
V
« .
; 4 : en S édux,* a
Pao Tre oe ¢ ioe ee
2 nh on i one © Tece © BGs pus ae
; aT enaay Pobve . aealt
7 batam’ tinct, Rebels ee ae
i } ae ©. oe ie enews Vie te
oo.
—n bhi © “UH Oe may onl
> > —— : _ a eit ee)
sole sn age fey ti abe oes a
. ; : ~—— Sno & ine
Se Mate’ ives ose
nO -
- Cosa, fo Toros Wepkamme Ga ae
. <-' Fie “') Kafe se - as Thal
comm tora Wubi a orm joa es
- os cag Gm ae

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 13
I]. ‘The Distinctive Characteristics
of the Revolutionary Processes
and Ideologies
IV
Revolutions, especially the “Great Revolutions” denote of course, first
of all, radical changes of political regimes—far beyond the deposition of
rulers or even the changing of ruling groups. They denote a situation
in which such deposition and change, sometimes connected with the exe-
cution or assassination of the rulers, sometimes “just” with their dethrone-
ment and banishment, result in some radical change in the rules of the
political game and in the symbols and bases of legitimization of the
regime. Such change is usually a violent one—but the violence which
develops in these revolutions is not just that found in many riots or
uprisings. Rather, what characterizes such violence is its ideological
justification, amounting to near sanctification. Such justification is often
rooted in the attempt to combine the change in the symbols, bases of
legitumatization, and basic institutional framework of a regime, with new
visions of political and social order. It is this combination that is dis-
unctive in these revolutions. In other words, such revolutions tend to
spawn, with the unfolding of the revolutionary process, to use Said
Arjomand’s term,’ some distinct cosmologies, some very distinct cultural
and political programs.
The combination of violent change of regime with the promulgation
of distinct ontological and political vision is not something which hap-
pened only in these revolutions. The crystallization of the Abbasid
caliphate, often called the Abbasid revolution, is a very important illus-
tration, if possibly only a partial one, of such a combination in earlier
historical periods.
What is distinctive of these modern revolutions is the nature of the
cosmologies that have been promulgated by their bearers; nature of their
political-ideological visions and the relationship of such visions to the
mode of deposition of the rulers—and also, as we shall see later, sev-
eral critical aspects of the revolutionary process that developed within
them. However great the differences between these revolutions, they all
shared from this point of view some basic common characteristics. Within

14 * Chapter Two
all of them, there developed an attempt at the reconstruction of the
polity—the toppling of the old and the creation of a new political order
on the basis of a new vision in which themes of equality, justice, free-
dom and participation of the community in the political center were
promulgated. The promulgation of these themes was not, of course, lim-
ited to these revolutions; they can be found in many movements of
protest throughout human history. What was new was, first, the com-
bination of these perennial themes of protest together with new “mod-
ern” themes such as the belief in progress, and with the demands for
full access to the central political arenas and participation in it; second,
the combination of all these themes with an overall utopian vision of
the reconstruction of society and of the political order, not just with mil-
lenarian visions of protest. It was the strong utopian component which
built, as we shall see, on strong utopian traditions of the societies or civ-
ilizations in which these revolutions developed that was central here, and
the transposition of such utopian visions into the centers of their respective
societies.
The distinctiveness of the utopian visions which constituted the cen-
tral core of the cosmologies of these revolutions lay not only in the trans-
position of the perennial themes of protest, of justice, liberty and the
like into the central political arena, and in their combination with the
reconstruction of central political institutions. Closely related was also
the emphasis, rooted in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on the
attempts to bring the realm of reason into the political area—a theme
which could be found in the American and in a more radical way in
the French Revolution. This distinctiveness lay.also in the conception
of society as an object which can be remolded according to such vision.
It is this new view of society, 1.e. the view of society as an object of
active construction by human beings—above all by poktical action—
that constitutes one of the distinct characteristics of the cosmologies of
these revolutions. ‘These characteristics are clearly manifest in the French
Revolution—but the kernels thereof can already be identified among the
Puritans—who proclaimed the primacy of the political in the process of
reconstruction of society.’
Closely related to these future oriented visions was the strong empha-
sis on dissociation from the preceding historical background of the respec-
tive societies, a denial of the past, an emphasis on a new beginning, and
the combination of such discontinuity with violence. This orientation was
rather muted in the English Civil War, in which the references to the
(basically utopian) English past were very strong; it was already much
stronger—despite the frequent references to the English tradition—in the
American revolution and became a major theme in the French and all
the subsequent revolutions.

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 15
This new overall vision was closely related to what has often been
designated as the basic cultural program of modernity, which we shall
analyze in greater detail later on.
Vv
An important component of these visions of modernity was the univer-
salistic and missionary dimensions of these revolutionary ideologies.
Although each of them set up a new regime in a particular country—
a regime which promulgated, especially in the later stages of its institu-
tionalization, strong patriotic themes, and although this regime always
bore the ineradicable stamp of the country in which it developed, yet
the revolutionary visions were presented and promulgated, even if in
different degrees, as universal ones—applicable in principle to the entire
humanity.
The English Puritans were part of a wide international network of
different radical reformatory groups, and although their activities were
oriented mostly and quite consciously to the English scene, and often
presented as English, yet at the same time they were promulgated as
being of universal validity.
The declarations of the American revolution, whether the Declaration
of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights,
were couched in universal terms. Although the American revolution did
not tend to “export” itself, possibly because of the relative geopolitical
isolation of the colonies, yet the American revolutionary vision implied
the universal validity of its message, of what would later be defined as
the American way of lite. P
The universal message of the revolutions became most strongly con-
nected with a missionary zeal—reminiscent, as Maxime Rodinson has
shown,’ of the expansion of Islam. As in the case of Islam, the imple-
mentation of this vision was carried out by revolutionary armies which
were ready to reconstruct not only their own society, but others too. As
in the case of Islam, such missionary zeal did not necessarily make for
greater tolerance or “liberalism”’—but certainly bore an unmistakable
universalistic stamp.
In the context of the comparison with Islam, it is interesting to note
that from among the many movements of the second part of the twen-
tieth century which have been designated as revolutions, it is above all—
as we shall yet see in greater detail later on—the Islamic revolution of
Khomeini that again, albeit in an entirely new way, promulgated such
universal message and missionary zeal.

16 * Chapter Two
VI
The importance of the universal and missionary dimensions of the ide-
ologies of these revolutions can also be seen in the relative weakness or
secondary, even if not necessarily negligible importance—within their
symbolic repertoire—of the revolutionary construction of primordial sym-
bols of collective identity or consciousness of the societies in which these
revolutions occurred. *
In fact, all these revolutions occurred in the framework of their respec-
tive national societies and were greatly influenced by their political tra-
ditions. Some emphasis on primordial elements, as for instance the
emphasis on the rights of Englishmen in the English Civil War, or on
“La Patrie” in the French revolution, were promulgated in these revo-
lutions. Moreover, strong patriotic themes were promulgated by the rev-
olutionary regimes. In all these revolutions they were effected through
the initiation of festivals, establishment of citizens’ armies, and of the
kernels of a modern school system. In all these revolutions there took
place a far-reaching patriotic mobilization and the cultural construction
of the modern nation state.
But the specific “national” primordial themes were at the purely ide-
ological level, even if not in actual practice secondary to the more gen-
eral, universalistic ones which constituted the core of the revolutionary
vision. ‘The various patriotic themes were very often promulgated in uni-
versalistic terms and the respective nations presented as bearers of uni-
versalistic visions. It was only in Turkey that this universalistic component
of the secular patriotic vision was rather weak, but certainly not entirely
absent. i
Vil
"
These cosmological visions were not fully crystallized at the beginning
of these revolutions, especially of the earlier European ones.
In the first stages of most of these revolutions, the political demands
of the revolutionary actors were defined in more “traditional” terms of
protest—rectification of wrongs done by the rulers. It was only with the
intensification of the revolutionary process, with the growing threat or
fear of the counter-revolutions, that these visions and cosmologies became
predominant.
Nor were these themes and visions upheld by all the participants in
the revolutionary process. Quite often far-reaching disputes and dis-
agreements with respect to different aspects of these visions developed
among the participants—divisions which were often closely related to
their different political stances. But it were these cosmological themes,

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes © 17
with their far-reaching political implications, that provided the major
thrust of the revolutionary cultural program.
In this respect these revolutions were very similar to the institution-
alization of the Great Religions and of the great Axial Civilizations. In
fact, these revolutions took place within societies which developed within
some Axial Civilization, building on the eschatological and utopian com-
ponents of these civilizations. It is no surprise that, like in these civi-
lizations and religions, also in these revolutions and in the post-revolutionary
regimes, the relations between different primordial components of col-
lective identities, states and nations, and the universalistic revolutionary
message, constituted a continual problem and points of contestation in
the constitution of their collective symbols and in their political and ide-
ological discourse.
Vill
The central political institutional change signaled by these revolutions,
as Michael Walzer has pointed out, was the fact that in the first revo-
lutions (the English and the French and in a different, less personal way,
the American one) the rulers were not just driven out, exiled or killed,
but were deposed through a legal process. Even if the rulers themselves
did not accept the legality or legiumacy of this process, the fact that
such a legal process was at all undertaken is of immense significance. It
indicated very serious attempts to find a new, institutional grounding for
the idea of accountability of rulers.
This idea itself was not new. It was part and parcel of the basic
premises of the Axial Civilizations within whose frameworks these rev-
olutions developed. In these revolutions, however, this idea was trans-
formed in very far-reaching ways.
It became transformed by being fully institutionalized in an almost
routine way, leading to the various modern constitutional arrangements
of accountability of rulers (the executive) to the legislative. It was also
closely connected to the view of society as an object that can be con-
structed according to some vision or plan, according to the general
themes of modernity, and with the transformation of center-periphery
relations that these themes entailed—a vision or plan which it was incum-
bent on the rulers to implement, and for the implementation of which
they were responsible and accountable.
These “Great” revolutions were also characterized by some distinct
outcomes, namely the very high degree of coalescence of changes in
many arenas of social life—the political, the arena of political economy
and strata formation. They combined the unseating of the former ruling
class with far-reaching changes in the class structure of their societies.

18 © Chapter Two |
They weakened or abolished any formal ascriptive criteria, either dimin-
ished (as in the case of the English revolution) the formal power and
standing of aristocracies, did away with their political and formal social
privileges, or even—as in Russia—physically decapitated them. ‘They
installed, at least symbolically, other classes—the tiers-état, the bour-
geoisie in the French revolution, the proletariat and the peasants in
Russia and China—as the leading groups, and promulgated the concept
of citizenship and its major institutional derivatives.
IX
It was not only with respect to their cosmologies, or in terms of their
institutional outcomes, that these revolutions evinced some very distinct
characteristics. Of no less importance were distinct characteristics of the
political process that developed within them.
This process shared some very important characteristics with several
types of processes of social and political struggle to be found in many
societies, some in all of them. One such important component of these
revolutions was that of movements of protest and of rebellions, which
can be found in all human societies. Another crucial component of the
political process of the Great Revolutions, which can be found in all
societies, is that of political struggle between different groups in the cen-
ter. In the case of the revolutions, such struggle in the center tends to
be, as Charles Tilly has pointed out,° a struggle about competing sov-
ereignties, i.e. a struggle between different groups who attempt to dis-
lodge the existing “sovereigns” (those groups which monopolize sovereignty
and the exercise of power in a given society at‘a given period of time)
and to transfer sovereignty to themselves. But these universal compo-
nents of political struggle have acquired within the revolutions some dis-
tinctive characteristics. c
The first was the great intensity and continuity of these rebellions,
movements of protest and struggles in the center over relatively long
periods of time. But it was not only the intensity and continuity of these
processes that is distinctive. The second characteristic is the fact that
these different types of processes of change and movements of political
struggle have become interwoven, even if often very haltingly, in rela-
tively continuous and common organizational frameworks.
Temporary alliances between rebelling lords and peripheral rebellions
or movements of protest could be found in many societies; struggles at
the center could weaken it and hence facilitate the outburst of rebellion,
and vice-versa. Continuous, protracted rebellions could also often set the
stage for struggles at the center. All the connections between these
different political processes developed indeed in the revolutions and

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 19
though the picture necessarily varies between different revolutions, it was
such connections that constituted an important characteristic of the rev-
olutionary process. But what was distinct in these revolutions was first,
as Erik Hobsbawm has shown,’ the crucial importance of the direct
impact on the central political struggle of popular uprisings—the move-
ment of popular uprisings into the center.
The second distinct characteristic of the process that developed in
these revolutions was the continuous interweaving of these political
processes into some common, however fragile and intermittent, frame-
works of political action. In other words, in these revolutions, some new
forms of political organization and ideology developed which brought
together sectors of each of these types of political activity and processes
into common frameworks, even if, especially in the first revolutions, in
an intermittent way. The model army in the English revolution, the var-
ious clubs and political groupings of the American one, the many clubs
and cliques of the French revolution are among the most important illus-
trations of such new types of frameworks or of organizations.
The various organizations which developed in the first revolutions can
be seen as the precursors of modern political parties. Although no direct
lines exist from these groups to modern parties, some of the basic com-
ponents of modern parties can be already identified in these political
organizations of the revolutionary eras. These are, the existence of dis-
tinct political organizations not embedded in broader ascriptive social
settings, of political leaders unaffiliated to any given corporate social
group, whose attempts to mobilize supporters from different social groups
assume the existence of some potentially free floating forces.
Even when no permanent new political organizations developed, the
impact of revolutionary activity transformed, as Marc Khshanski has
shown,” the nature of the electoral process to the English parliament,
from a sort of status competition between different sectors of the higher
social echelon into radical political competition. The development of
such new types of organization was contingent, of course, on that of a
new type of leadership, one which appealed to various sectors of the
population, and which was not embedded in any of them or seen as
representing only some such sector.
In the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, organized groups
which existed already as parties or at least proto-parties before the rev-
olutions and attempted to bring such various social groups within their
framework constituted the vanguards of the revolutions.

20 © Chapter Two
x
The development of interweaving between different social and political
actors in the revolutionary process was not continuous, nor were the
organizations which emerged in them stable or homogeneous. Such inter-
weaving and organizations often developed quite haltingly—being rather
weak in the first stages of the revolutionary process, when the older types
of rebellions were predominant. The composition of many of the revo-
lutionary groups which greatly influenced the course and outcome of
such revolutions was continuously changing, many of them disappearing.
Such interweaving became stronger when various rebellious or reformist
groups faced “counter-revolutionary” forces and usually gathered momen-
tum afterwards.
Moreover, while in each phase of the revolutionary processes, there
developed several common frameworks of political activity and, at the
same time there developed also numerous conflicts and cleavages between
different political and social groups, which participated in these processes.
Two such cleavages and conflicts were of special importance in shaping
the process and outcomes of the revolutions. The first cleavage was
around the “class” composition of these groups, whether it were aris-
tocracy, gentry, middle and lower urban or peasant groups, and the rela-
tions between these classes that provided the social basis of these groups
and the relative predominance of each of these different elements. The
second cleavage was that between different groups of intellectuals, of
religious sects—distinct sectarian cleavages, each of which was the bearer
of distinct revolutionary visions. It was the combination of these two
types of cleavages—class and political sectarian—that provided the specific
dynamics and to no small degree the outcomes of the various revolu-
tions. It was the relation between these cleavages, between the different
political classes and ideological groups that shaped the cdalitions which
were most active in different phases of the revolutionary process and
greatly influenced the nature of the different post-revolutionary regimes.
XI
Closely connected to the interweaving of different types of political process
and to the development of new independent political organizations and
leadership was the transformation in the revolutionary process of the
liminal aspects and symbols which are often closely connected with the
various, especially peripheral, movements of protest into the centers of
their respective societies. It was not only that many such popular upris-
ings——best epitomized by the storming of the Bastille—moved into the
center and became transposed into it. More important is the fact that

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 21
in most of these revolutionary processes, the central political arena became,
for relatively long periods, shaped in a liminal mode. The center itself
became—at least for some periods —as it were a liminal situation or
arena, a series of such situations, or the arena in which liminality was
played out.
The liminal dimensions of the revolutionary process are closely con-
nected to the centrality of violence in it. It is not only that violence
spread wider and became a component of the central political strug-
gle—in itself a very important and distinct development. What is of cru-
cial importance is that, in distinction from such struggles many other
liminal situations, this centrality of violence—and in some cases its ide-
ological sanctification, its sacralization—became, as Merleau-Ponty pointed
out,’ the very essence of the revolutionary process. This centrality of vio-
lence became transformed into and visible in the very centers of these
societies. This centrality of violence signalled the combination of the
breakdown of the existing rules of political power, the loss of legitimacy
of the existing institutional frameworks, the delegitimation of the exist-
ing order and the search for the establishment of other rules and other
symbols of legitimacy.
One of the most important aspects of this centrality of violence has
been the development and sanctification of terror as one of the recur-
ring components or themes of the revolutionary experience. It was per-
haps only in Islamic Order of Assassins and in other Islamic sectarian
movements that something approaching such sanctification of violence,
of terror, could be found on any large scale.'°
The combination of these elements of ideology of protest, with the
liminality and sanctification of violence, explains the development in all
of these revolutions of a combination of violence, discontinuity and of
the ideology of totality of change as major components of the revolu-
tionary vision. Indeed this emphasis on the break with the past could
develop into the quest for what Bernard Yack has called for the long-
ing for Total Revolution.'' While the roots of such quest could be found
in the search for the “Endzeit” as it developed in many of the chilias-
tic visions in the Great Religions;'’ yet in the Great Revolutions, in the
revolutionary visions promulgated in them it often developed into a much
more radical total denunciation of any existing order, and into a con-
tinual quest for the promulgation of a totally new one.
This combination of violence and liminality, of the breaking down of
the existing symbolic boundaries and of the search for the reconstruc-
tion of new ones, epitomizes perhaps in the most succinct way the com-
bination of the constructive and destructive dimension of charisma, of
the charismatic dimension of human endeavor. The search for new order

22 © Chapter Two
in the name of utopian vision constitutes the epitome of the charismatic
search for contact with the cosmic orders and the “classical” revolu-
tionary situations, with their liminality and violence, their denial of the
existing order and the degradation of its symbols, the destructive poten-
tialities of charisma become highly visible.
XII
The preceding analysis does not exhaust all the crucial characteristics of
the revolutionary process, especially of the main actors participating in
it. Another central component of the revolutionary process—and one
which probably constitutes its most distinct characteristics—is the place
of specific cultural, religious or secular groups, religious or secular intel-
lectuals and of heterodoxies. .
The English and to a different extent the American Puritans; the mem-
bers of the French clubs so brilliantly described by Albert Cochin"’ and
later on by Furet, and the various groups of Russian intelligentsia,'* are
the best and best-known illustrations of this social type. It was usually
these groups that provided the distinctive element that transformed rebel-
lions into revolutions, as Marc Klishanski has shown for the develop-
ment of the Model army, or as Albert Cochin’s and Francois Furet’s
analyses of the French revolution clearly indicate."
It was not only that these groups promulgated and articulated the dis-
tinct cosmologies or ideologies of these revolutions: It was also, usually
above all, from the members of these groups that the new leadership
and the organizational skills, which were so central for the crystalliza-
tion of the new political activities discussed above, were recruited. It
were also these groups that provided the visions and articulated the ide-
ologies and propaganda that was crucial in bringing together the dis-
parate social forces that joined in the revolutionary process.
It was these groups that provided the crucial link between the distinct
revolutionary cosmologies and the revolutionary process. And it is—as
we shall see in greater detail later—of great importance for our analy-
sis that they are to be found only in some societies or civilizations.
Sectarian activities and heterodoxies existed in all these societies long
before the revolutions, although, unlike rebellions and central political
struggle, they are not to be found in all human societies. In many cases,
as for instance in the European Middle Ages, some sectarian groups
would ally themselves with rebellions, whether of peasants or of urban
lower classes, and in other cases with some of the actors in the politi-
cal struggles in the center. All these did indeed provide, as we shall yet
see in greater detail later on, a very crucial background for the devel-
opment of the revolutions.

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 23
But it was only in these revolutions that they became continually inter-
woven with rebellions, popular uprisings, movements of protest and with
the political struggle at the center. They constituted the most crucial ele-
ment which to no small degree shaped the entire of the political process
that developed in these revolutions. Indeed it is impossible to understand
these revolutions without the ideological, propagandist and organizational
skills of these intellectuals or cultural elites. Without them the entire rev-
olutionary process as it crystallized in these situations would probably
not have occurred.
This mode of involvement of intellectuals in the political process and
in political power entails a radical transformation of the relations between
intellectuals and the powers, and of their political activities. Here some
sectors of the more institutionalized intellectual individuals, performing
various functions in universities, in legal institutions and the more “mar-
ginal” heterodoxies, were, at least for short periods of time, brought
together in the center—attempting to reconstruct it.'®
XIII
Comparative excursus—radical non-revolutionary
change—the Meiji Ishin
All the Great Revolutions were characterized not only by each of these
distinct characteristics—the promulgation of revolutionary cosmologies,
new overall cultural and political programs, of the distinctive political
processes that developed in them, and of the far-reaching results—but
above all by their combinations. Needless to say, the relative importance
of the different components of these combinations varied greatly between
these revolutions. Some of these components—as for instance the full
elaboration of the distinct modern cosmologies or the emphasis on the
break with the past—were weaker in the English revolution. It was indeed
in the French revolution that all these components came together in the
most dramatic way—and hence it is the French revolution that has been
seen as the first pristine model of modern revolutions. But whatever the
difference between the Great Revolutions, they were characterized by
some combinations of the various components enumerated above.
Such combinations are not something that is to be found, even in an
incipient way, in all processes of change, not even in all processes of
social transformation leading to the crystallisation of modern societies.
This can perhaps be best illustrated by a brief comparison with some
situations and processes which have been often compared with these rev-
olutions. The most important one—one to which we shall often return,

24 © Chapter Two
and which is also of crucial importance for the understanding of the
development of different programs of modernity, of multiple moderni-
ties —is the so-called Meiji Restoration, the Meiji Ishin of 1868, in Japan."’
The Meiji Restoration has been often compared with the Great Revolutions.
Like the Great Revolutions it generated a radical change of regime and
gave rise to far-reaching processes of social, economic and political trans-
formation. 3
It has also been compared with these revolutions because it spawned
a new cultural and political program which, with all its restorative and
“traditionalist” components, constituted a radical break from the pre-
ceding ‘Tokugawa Shogunal regime.'”
And yet with respect to some crucial features, especially revolution-
ary ideology and the nature of the political process that developed within
it, the Meiji greatly differed from these revolutions.
As in the Great Revolutions, three types of political movements, rebel-
lions, movements of protest and political struggle at the center, abounded
in the pre-Restoration setting and in the process leading to restoration
as well as in the first two decades of the new regime.
The late Tokugawa period, from the beginning of the 19th century
(from the so-called Tempo reforms of 1841-43), abounded in peasant
rebellions and in many rural and urban movements of protest, as well
as in continuous struggles in the central court and domain of the Shogun,
in the bakufu, as well as between the bakufu and the great lords, the
daimyos. Extensive struggles developed also within the domains with
growing dissatisfaction on the part of many of the lower echelons of
samurai. It was the combination of the cooperatian between the different
domains, especially between the upper echelons and domains and groups
of lower samurai, with the connivance of the Imperial court that ulti-
mately toppled the Tokugawa regime. R
Intellectual ferment also abounded. New forms of political ideological
discourse were developing, greatly influenced by neo-Confucian schools
and education and by the various nativistic schools and movements. The
great expansion of education and literacy, of Confucian schools and
academies, which probably made late Tokugawa Japan the most liter-
ate pre-industrial society, provided a very important background to the
development of such discourse. New groups of unattached educated
Samurai, shishi, and to a smaller extent urban and peasant groups orga-
nized themselves and roamed around the country promulgating the var-
ious would-be revolutionary programs.
There naturally developed many ad-hoc contacts between these different
groups and between them and some urban groups and rebellious peas-
ants, but significantly there did not develop any organizations or frame-

Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes ¢ 25
works in which they and the more popular rebellions or movements of
protest were interlinked. The latter constituted a very important back-
ground to the toppling of the Tokugawa regime, but they were not a
basic component of the political process of the Restoration.
In the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary processes, which toppled
the ‘Tokugawa regime, no new types of political organization developed
in which such different groups could be brought together in common
modes of political acting. Nor did any types of political leadership emerge,
which would attempt to mobilize the disparate social forces, the different
movements of protest and the participants in the more central political
struggle. ‘he new types of political organization which did develop, such
as the various semi-conciliar meetings, were mostly confined to different
samurai groups and were usually restricted to specific classes or regions.
Some incipient tendencies to diversification of contacts did develop espe-
cially among the more popular sectors and the lower samurai, but they
certainly were not encouraged in this direction by most of the more cen-
tral revolutionary actors. Parallely, many of the themes of popular cul-
ture, such as strong emphasis on communality and communal equality
and autonomy, on direct unmediated relations to nature, which flourished
in the late Tokugawa and early Meyi period, were not on the whole
taken up by the more central groups. Some of the samurai groups, espe-
cially those who promulgated the millenarian semi-utopian, nativistic
communal “reverse utopian” vision, did have close contacts with some
of the more popular groups, and took up some of the themes of popu-
lar culture, but they were not very central in the revolutionary process,
nor in the insututionalization of the new regime.
What was perhaps most distinctive about the Meiji Restoration as
compared with the Great Revolution was the almost total absence of
autonomous, distinct religious or secular intellectual groups as active ele-
ments in the political process of the Restoration. Cultural developments,
as we have indicated above, were of very great importance in the back-
ground of the Restoration. There was first of all the very wide spread
of education, especially of Confucian education, among samurai groups,
the merchants and even some sectors of the peasants, making Japan
probably the most literate pre-industrial country. From the late eight-
eenth century the numerous Confucian academies greatly contributed to
the development of such political consciousness, and to the undermin-
ing of the legitimacy of the Tokugawa rule. Many of the movements of
protest, whether in the periphery or in the center, were imbued with
relatively recently constructed ideologies, whether Confucian or “nativis-
tic’. Similarly many of the middle or lower samurai who were impor-
tant in the political process of the Restoration engaged in intensive

26 * Chapter Two
political discourse couched in Confucian or nativistic terms. It was, at
least partially, in these terms—as well as in pragmatic terms of inefficiency
in view of the imminent attacks by foreigners—that the discourse of dele-
gitimization of the Shogunate and of restoration of the centrality of the
Emperor was couched. Moreover, many new religious groups, the “new
religions” for instance, played a very important role in providing the
background for the delegitimization and downfall of the Tokugawa regime.
But in all these developments, there were but few independent Con-
fucian scholars or Buddhist monks who played an autonomous role or
who attempted to construct the basic frameworks of the revolutionary
discourse.
It was above all the samurai, some of them learned in Confucian lore,
and the shishi, who were most active in the Restoration, but they did
not act as Confucian scholars bearing a new Confucian vision, nor as
members of autonomous religious groups. They acted as members of
their respective social and political groups bearing a distinct political
vision, and promulgated the different political discourses.
Large parts of the discourse that developed during the revolutionary
process leading to the Restoration veered between two poles, the more
millenarian or “inverse utopian” one aiming at the establishment of a
restored “original,” “pristine” native national community, and the more
pragmatic one focusing on the reconstruction of political organizations,
on new legal constitutional arrangements—above all on some type of
conciliar government which was not connected with an overly social-
political utopian vision. Both types of discourse, in so far as they shaped
the actual process of the Restoration, were promulgated mostly by different
sectors of samurai—and not by independent, autonomous intellectuals,
or heterodox sectarians.
The preceding discussion does not mean, as has often keen suggested,
that the Meiji Restoration was a purely political event. Indeed “Restoration”
is not the proper translation of the term “Ishin.” “Renovation” is a more
appropriate translation, implying a new cultural program—and the des-
ignation of “revolutionary” Restoration is probably most appropriate to
the Meiji Ishin.
But this vision, this cultural program, differed greatly from that of the
Great Revolutions. It constituted, in line with the revolutionary discourse
mentioned above, a mixture of pragmatic orientations concerned with
adaptation to the new international setting, with strong millenarian and
above all Restorationist components and ideologies.
The new cultural program or cosmology espoused in this process, were
in a way the mirror images of those of the Great Revolutions. It was
promulgated as a renovation of an older archaic system, which in fact

_ Characteristics of Revolutionary Processes © 27
never existed, not as a revolution aimed at changing the social and polit-
ical order in an entirely new direction. There were almost no utopian
elements in the vision. In fact the whole turn back to the Emperor could
be seen, as Hershel Webb pointed out long ago,'? as an “inverted utopia”.
The message promulgated by the Meiji Restoration was oriented to the
renovation of the Japanese nation—it had basically no universalistic or
missionary dimensions. After the Restoration numerous individual schol-
ars engaged in the pursuit of knowledge from abroad and promulgated
various new ideas at home, but ultimately it was the so-called Meiji oli-
garchs, composed of the leaders of the different rebellious factions in the
Restoration, that molded the Meiji regime.
It is the combination of these characteristics that makes the designa-
tion of revolutionary Restoration as the most appropriate to describe the
Meyji Ishin. It was indeed, because it envisaged a new type of society,
and a new modern cultural program, a revolutionary transformation—
more than a “simple” violent change of regimes, or even of ruling class.
At the same time, however, this cultural program differed, as we have
indicated, in crucial ways from that ushered in by the Great Revolutions.
NOTES
' Arjomand, S.A. 1986. Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective,
World Politics, vol. 38, no. 3, April, pp. 383-414.
* Haller, W. 1955. Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution. New York:
Columbia University Press; Walzer, M. 1974. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in
the Origins of Radical Politics. New York: Atheneum.
> Rodinson, M. 1979. Marxism and the Muslim World. London: Lend Press; idem. 1989.
Europe and the Mystique of Islam. London: 1.B. Tauris.
* Raynaud, P. 1988. Revolution Francaise et Revolution Americaine in F. Furet
L?Heritage de la Revolution Francaise. Paris: Hachette, pp. 35-55.
> Walzer, M. 1974. Regiwide and Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
® Tilly, C. 1993. European Revolutions, 1492-1992. Oxford: Blackwell.
7 Hobsbawm, E. 1964. The Age of Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
® Klishlansky, M. 1996. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714. London: Allen
Lane; idem. 1980. Rise of the New Model Army. Cambridge University Press.
° Merleau-Ponty, M. 1969. Humanism and Terror. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
10 On the Islamic order of Assassins see: Lewis, B. 1973/1993. Islam in History: Ideas,
Men and Events in the Middle East. London: Alcove Press.
'! Yack, B. 1986. The Longing for Total Revolution: philosophic Sources of Social Discontent
from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2 Van der Lieuw, G. 1957. Primordial Time and Final Time, in J. Campbell, (ed.).
Man and Time: Papers for the Eranos Yearbook. New York: Bollinger Foundation, pp.
324-353.
'3 Cochin, A. 1924. La Revolution et la libre pensee. Paris: Plon-Nourrit; idem. 1979.
Lesprit du Jacobinisms. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
1 Walzer, M. 1998. Intellectuals, Social Classes, and Revolutions. In T. Skocpol (ed.).
Democracy, Revolution and History. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, pp. 127-145;

28 © Chapter Two
Furet, F. 1970. French Revolution. New York: Macmillan; idem. 1981. Interpreting the French
Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Haller, W. 1955. Liberty and reforma-
tion in the Puritan Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press; Nahirny, V.C. 1983.
The Russian Intelligentsia: from Torment to Silence. New Brunswick, Transaction Books;
Klishansky, M. 1980. Rise of the New Model Army. Cambridge University Press.
' Furet, F. 1970. French Revolution. op. cit.; idem. 1981 Interpreting the French Revolution.
op. cit.; Cochin, A. 1924. La Revolution et la libre pensee. Paris: Plon-Nourrit; idem. 1979.
Lesprit du Jacobinisms. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
'© Eisenstadt, S.N. 1988. Transcendal Vision, Center Formation, and the Role of Intellectuals.
in L. Greenfeld and M. Martin (eds.). Center: Ideas and Institutions. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, pp. 96-112; Walzer, M. 1998. Intellectuals, Social
Classes and Revolution, op. cit., pp. 127-143.
'7 On the Meiji Ishin Restoration and its background among others see: Eisenstadt,
S.N. 1996. Japanese Ciwilization: A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Craig. A.M. 1961. Chos/m in the Meyi Restoration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press;
Arnasson, J. 1988. Paths to Modernity—The Peculiarities*of Japanese Feudalism in G.
McCormack and Y. Sugimoto (eds.). The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Haroutounian, H.D. 1989. Late Tokugawa
Culture and Thought in M. Jansen. Cambridge History of Japan. vol. 5, The Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 168-258; White, J.W. 1988. State.
Growth and Popular Protest in Tokugawa Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies. vol. 14.
no. 1, pp. 1-27; Huber, T., M. 1981. The Revolutionary Origin of Modern Japan. Stanford:
Stanford University Press; Jansen, M.B. and G. Rozman, 1986 (eds.). Japan in Transition
from Tokugawa to Mey. New York: Princeton University Press; Jansen, M.B. 1989. The
Meiji Restoration. in The Cambndge History of Japan. Vol. V, The Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge, pp. 308-67; Dims, P. 1976. The Rise of Modern Japan. Boston: Moughton
Mifflin; Cluck, C. 1985. JFapan’s Modern Myths—Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. :
'® On Tokugawa Shogunal regime see: Webb, H. 1968. The Japanese Imperial Institution
im the Tokugawa Period. New York: Columbia University Press.
' Idem. =
~

PART TWO
THE “CAUSES” AND HISTORICAL—CIVILIZATIONAL
FRAMEWORKS OF REVOLUTIONS

——— a ; eo
= ° » _ = 7 =
me Bae Li vedo a
> FF so a 7 - ~ 7 imi Fe Ghat
7 AN @ ar a ie SeASey ie we.
My Pu ~~o = - Nipighet sl, fjate io A eed
7 . P mp: Te f ad
> 4 _ pts amphiiny My (hart Gataies
/ _ al = 7 Pos Cue: ~OG¥s aa
. ie
2 ae a ae a f e
¢ q ie ‘VS
- i
i " é
ie es ad = aa
a
ca ig a> « = 6we
= eT ’ => ae
> — A = ie TS
| 7 a=» @ a a19 (ee
i oe @ ®
LT D> we 7 A= een eee
i. Ms t A SNiLey We fcr tattr a, 74? a ‘ “ie
Barat ait F) GR ip-add a
= “eon O¢
2a & Geb 109. Cel Pie
ae ~

Structural and Social Psychological Causes ¢ 31
Ill. Structural and Social
Psychological Causes
XIV
The Great Revolutions constituted some of the greatest, most dramatic
events of human history. For many they epitomized the very essence of
modern times. But they occurred in very specific situations, in very
specific periods. What were the conditions or causes which gave rise to
them?
The literature on such conditions is immense, ranging from detailed
case studies of each of the revolutions through comparative studies up
to more general studies.
Three broad types of explanations are predominant in the literature.
The first deals with different types of structural conditions, the second
with socio-psychological preconditions of revolutions, and the third with
specific historical causes.
Several types of structural conditions have been singled out. The first
deals with the various aspects of internal struggle leading to revolutions.
Among the more important aspects which have been singled out, with
different emphases in different works, have been class struggles between
the major classes predominant in the pre-revolutionary societies—be it
between aristocratic and urban classes, or between landlords and peas-
ants—and of course, above all, in respect to the first revolutions, between
the “ancien regime” and the rising bourgeoisie. Second, there was a very
strong emphasis on inter-elite struggle—struggle between different com-
ponents of the ruling or upper class—be it between different echelons
of the aristocracies, between them and the more professional elements
of the bureaucracy or between each of these and the monarchy.
A special subtype of this kind of analysis, to be found in the work of
Theda Skocpol' and of other scholars building on the earlier work of
Barrington Moore,’ has been the emphasis on the relations between the
state and the major social strata, especially the aristocracy and the peas-
antry, on their relative strength vis-a-vis one another.
Closely related to this type of explanation were those which empha-
sized the weakening or decay of the pre-revolutionary political regimes,
either through internal causes such as various economic or demographic

32 © Chapter Three
trends, or under the impact of international forces—such as international
economic trends—wars or some combination thereof.’ This emphasis on
the importance of international factors became especially pronounced in
the literature of the last two decades with the growing sensitivity to the
study of the international system or systems.
The correct and salutary emphasis on the importance of international
conditions in the genesis of these revolutions, should not blind us to the
fact that the importance of such international influences lay above all
in the way in which they impinged on the internal forces and constel-
lations. The international forces did not, in contrast to the many “left-
ist” revolutionary movements of the second half of the twentieth century,
impose a distinct revolutionary vision or model.
Earlier studies were also devoted to the analysis of broad economic
factors or trends, economic fluctuations and rising inflation with the resul-
tant impoverishment of large sectors of society——not only of the lower
strata but also of large sectors of the middle and even of the upper sec-
tors—and to the analysis of their influence on the development of the
revolutionary situation. In some of the Marxist literature such economic
explanations, taken together with those of class struggle, were transformed
into the ineluctable contradictions between old modes of production and
new emerging forces of production.
Such studies were often connected with the second type of explana-
tion, the socio-psychological one. ‘These studies, often following ‘Tocqueville’s
brilhant analysis, have emphasized the importance of processes of rela-
tive deprivation and frustration coming in bad times following good
ones—when the aspirations of large sectors of the population were raised —
in generating widespread dissatisfaction, which could give rise to rebel-
lions or revolutionary predispositions.*
Thus it was the interclass and inter-elite struggles, the demographic
expansion, the internal and international weakness of the state often
caused especially by fiscal crises of the state, economic imbalances and
socio-psychological frustrations attendant on the worsening of economic
conditions that constituted the most important items in the list of causes
of revolutions.
The literature on revolutions has also pointed to some of the most
important psychological and attitudinal aspects of the revolutionary process,
especially the widespread dissatisfaction with the regime, the crystalliza-
tion of a situation in which the dissatisfied sectors of society are ready
not only to engage in isolated protests or outbursts, but also to become
mobilized into some continuous frameworks, and the existence of lead-
ers with the organizational capacity to organize such mobilization, bear-
ing ideologies which can help in this process.°

Structural and Social Psychological Causes * 33
XV
The literature on revolutions is full of controversies, as to the relative
importance of each of these factors or constellations thereof in causing
revolutions. A critical perusal of this literature indicates that it is only
some combination of frustrations which generate rebellious attitudes, with
successful political mobilization and organization that gives rise to con-
tests over sovereignty—to use Charles Tilly’s expression—which may
effectively topple the pre-revolutionary regime.°
The literature also indicates that the key to crystallization of such
movements is the development of some relatively autonomous new social
and economic forces, which are blocked from access to the center.
At the same time a perusal of this literature quite clearly indicates
that the exact constellation of these factors varied from case to case, and
that no generalization about the relative weight of these components can
be made.
The concrete constellation of these different causes, their relative impor-
tance in each of these revolutions, constituted—and continues to con-
stitute —foci of historical and social science research. Yet some general
patterns can indeed be identified, as has been lately very succinctly done
by Jack A. Goldstone.’ In his work he analyzes the crises, in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, of four states, England, France, Ming
China and the Ottoman Empire. He identifies a set of common course,
of basic common process in their decline:
“The periodic state breakdowns in Europe, China, and the Middle
East from 1500 to 1850, were the result of a single basic process. ‘This
process unfolded like a fugue, with .a major trend giving birth to four
related critical trends that combined for a tumultuous conclusion. The
main trend was that population growth, in the context of relatively
inflexible economic and social structure, led to changes in prices, shifts
in resources, and increasing social demands with which agrarian-bureau-
cratic states could not successfully cope.”
“The four related critical trends were as follows. (1) Pressures increased
on state finances as inflation eroded state income and population growth
raised real expenses. States attempted to maintain themselves by raising
revenues in a variety of ways, but such attempts alienated elites, peas-
ants, and urban consumers, while failing to prevent increasing debt and
eventual bankruptcy. (2) Intra-elite conflicts became more prevalent, as
larger families and inflation made it more difficult for some families to
maintain their status, while expanding population and rising prices lifted
other families, creating new aspirants to elite positions. With the state’s
fiscal weakness limiting its ability to provide for all who sought elite posi-
tions, considerable turnover and displacement occurred throughout the

34 © Chapter Three ;
elite hierarchy. This gave rise to factionalization as different elite groups
sought to defend or improve their position. When central authority col-
lapsed as a result of bankruptcy or war, elite divisions came to the fore
in struggles for power. (3) Popular unrest grew, as competition for land,
urban migration, flooded labor markets, declining real wages, and increased
youthfulness raised the mass mobilization potential of the populace. Unrest
occurred in urban and rural areas and took the various forms of food
riots, attacks on landlords and state agents, and land and grain seizures,
depending on the autonomy of popular groups and the resources of
elites. A heightened mobilization potential made it easy for contending
elites to marshal popular action in their conflicts, although in many cases
popular actions, having their own motivation and momentum, proved
easier to encourage than to control. (4) The ideologies of rectification
and transformation became increasingly salient.”
The exploration of how these various causes coalesce into specific pat-
terns, and their relative importance does and will continue to constitute
foci of continually ongoing research. But in themselves such analyses,
important as they are, will not provide an adequate answer to the search
for “the causes” of revolution.
It is not that the answers to the questions posed in this literature are
sometimes unsatisfactory or controversial. This is, of course, given in the
nature of any scholarly enterprise. What is more important is that they
are not sufficient for the analysis of some of the mast important aspects
of the problem.
This is for a very simple reason: most of these causes are not specific
to revolutions. The same causes, in different constellations, have been
singled out in the vast literature on the decline of Empires—the Roman,
Byzantine, Ottoman, Chinese, and other Empires—or, as Jack Goldstone
has shown, in the crises of the Ottoman and Ming Empires in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.®
This should not be surprising. Revolutions are, after all, first and fore-
most synonymous with decline or breakdown of regimes and with results
thereof. Hence the causes of decline and breakdown of regimes, espe-
cially, as we shall see in greater detail later, of Imperial or Imperial feu-
dal ones, are necessarily also causes or preconditions of revolutions. But
they do not explain the specific revolutionary outcome of the breakdown
of regimes. These causes do not tell us what “happens the morning
after,” after the breakdown of the regime. The same causes, or rather
different constellations of such causes, necessarily differing in details,
explain the downfall of the Abbasid, Roman or Byzantine Empires, the
decline of the Ming dynasty in China. Hence by themselves they can-
not explain the revolutionary outcome. Without a doubt they constitute

Structural and Social Psychological Causes ¢ 35
necessary conditions of revolutions, but by themselves not sufficient ones,
if we use these rather problematic terms. For the sufficient causes we
have to look beyond them.
NOTES
' Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia,
and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
> Barrington, M. 1960. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon;
Skocpol, T., G. Ross, T. Smith, J.E. Vichniac 1998 (eds.). Democracy, Revolution, and History.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
* Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. op. cit.
* De Tocqueville, A. 1955. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Garden City, NY:
Anchor, Doubleday.
° On the analysis of these aspects of revolutions see: Foran, J. 1997. Theorizing Revolutions.
op. Cit.
® Tilly, C. 1993. European Revolutions, 1492-1992. Oxford: Blackwell.
’ Goldstone, J. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion. op. at.
® Idem; Eisenstadt, $.N., 1993 (1963). The Political Systems of Empires. New Brunswick:
Transaction Pubbshers.

» ice Aetna
veh eindthe clirerd teen
Pie Chine WrweT |
Wien? = DWN: & Vier anls dab.
Ria 6) uP abil, oP WS cake ails
nr ie a oo
= He - ey wel
ar, oe | atalteteulane a ; ;
ott. amma (at a= ieee Bf the V ped Aw
au ‘ ea in arr i ate
- Ls GSS rei ha }
Toca ten Sha: rans ap aay J pa
Udi Ry siet oe: 1S Ae setts NS iP INS
ayer Vict Ory). Ve an Ges veal my
Narn Fir per atte oe ee
dove, Ga) Qe“ cand ee ee
ate. aia ates Ae oun ore Ws yk ued
eee _ » oe iA aehreld & a) We *
we Ne are jpehasad ;
aves % One 4 iris feb wo “en Water
byte ee ee ie) °s ae Airy iv © af citer ae
“anes ~-— 40g) antSs VY 45a- © Qi fh quart e 22.6
<te (itn >: ed ¢ = S ae we cet tre he UU
Pkt ia
= : z oa »% i Ma? (0 (oem @ 7 te | = cert
, ¥
i’ ew! &
1 ayareres # a A> pe) em ~ ee Tey
> a ‘ ‘ e hed 4. Tgtive ey A -—
o
pit ee ‘ ' ql mage 8, a Ae
i ae a Toe Clnes onl Si Say phi le thas
TF wy ow” OF in = wi? es aif fort an?
7 wn LS OS Adland 0 egies ae uns
Tre
_s re. @ Piers as
wh @ * Sires stp! OP iter Mal ar ingeeet He
i) im : 7 _ ee Ci Gand & v= Uernee, ink
i ‘ Rings : nar De ieary> Pan enr bee ee =
v= ; ‘ oe Te id BY his Karten oe ENS T
, a . “Cy @aliz “314 clint tare of :
Se ee = S* lee Teepe Thin bias
‘ia
or a 7 7 7 etal Tate Oy. 84 Deeg
” ae .? y : ea thenge Yq ‘dime a =]
ena ie bee 10: Witkae a Goulet eed pxmgitie
.
- | : i, Ot

Contradictions of “Early Modernity” ¢ 37
IV. The Historical Settings—
The Contradictions of
“Early Modernity”
XVI
Where are we, then, to look for some of these possibly sufficient con-
ditions? An answer can perhaps be found in the specific historic “tim-
ing” or context of these revolutions, or, in other words, we have perhaps
to start from the fact that all of them have taken place in the early
modern periods of their respective societies. The term early modern
period is not a chronological term. It does not imply that the different
pre-revolutionary societies of the different ancient regimes and the rev-
olutions developed in the same chronological period. Rather, the term
connotes a certain constellation of specific social and cultural trends and
characteristics, which may occur in different chronological periods in
different societies.
The major characteristic of early modernity which is of special rele-
vance for our analysis, as R. Kosellek has so brilliantly analyzed,’ is the
confrontation between a (usually absolutist or semi-absolutist) political
regime with its own legitimation and new social forces.
These regimes were legitimated in a combination of semi-traditional
terms and some vision of “enlightenment,” and promulgated many mod-
ern “rational” administrative orders and economic innovations and mod-
ernization. At the same time, these regimes were confronted with new
social, economic and cultural forces, which called attention to the inter-
nal contradiction in the patterns of legitimation and policies of the regime,
and which demanded for themselves first a wider scope for cultural and
social activities, later on for autonomous access to the centers.
The relations between earlier stages of modernity and the revolution-
ary processes and outcomes seem indeed to be very strong. ‘These revolu-
tions were not the initiators of modernity, however defined. ‘They all devel-
oped within the framework of modernizing autocracies, of the different
modern absolutist regimes which created the early modern territorial,
often bureaucratic states, and which provided great pushes or impetus
to economic modernization, to the development of early mercantile

38 © Chapter Four
economies (even to the beginnings of industrial capitalist economies), and
to the development of a political economy based on the market.
It is in these historical situations that many new social and economic
groups—some of which generated by the very policies of the modern-
izing absolutist regime—developed and found themselves blocked from
the centers of power and prestige, sometimes together with older tradi-
tional ones which had enjoyed such access in earlier periods.
The internal contradictions in the political systems of early absolutism
between semi-traditional monarchical legitimation and more modern
“enlightened” premises and the new economic, cultural and ideological
developments which challenged such legitimation, as well as between
these latter groups and the more traditional ones, provided the specific
motor forces of the breakdown of these regimes. The specific ideologi-
cal or symbolic components of revolutions were to no small degree fed
by these contradictions in the ideological bases of the legitimation of the
absolutist states, especially between traditional or semi-traditional legiti-
mation and different components of Enlightenment bearing within them-
selves the seeds of a new cultural program.
In this context the major difference is, of course, between the first
“Western” revolutions—the English, American and French ones—on the
one hand, and the later revolutions—the Russian, Turkish, Chinese and
possibly Vietnamese ones—on the other. The first revolutions developed
against the background of the major cultural and ideological trends which
ushered in the cultural program of Western modernity, a program which
became crystallized through these revolutions. The latter (Russian, Turkish,
Chinese, and Vietnamese) revolutions developed with the expansion of
modernity beyond its origins in the West. In all these respects all these
revolutions, “first” or “early” and “late” alike, were distinct from the
breakdown of other imperial or semi-imperial regimes, be x the Roman,
Byzantine, Abbasid Fatimide or Sassanid ones, as well as from the many
dynastic changes in China.
Of special importance in the crystallization of the specific modern rev-
olutionary process has been the development of communication, espe-
cially political communication. The new modes of political organization,
mobilization and leadership, which have characteristics of the modern
revolutions, would have been inconceivable without the invention of
printing, the concomitant immense expansion of political pamphleteer-
ing, and the closely related growth of means of transportation, which
greatly facilitated the spread of the printed political literature. All these
became even more visible in the later revolutions.
In more general terms: the combination of the specific social and eco-
nomic formations characteristic of the early stages of modernity, together

Contradictions of “Early Modernity” ¢ 39
with the revolutions in communication technology, gave rise to the poten-
tial for relatively autonomous civil society—autonomous not only from
the state, but also in its demands for participation in the states—that
provided a strong impetus for the revolutionary outcome of the break-
down of the absolutist states.
XVII
Thus it can perhaps be claimed that when the more general causes of
breakdown of regimes—such as class and elite struggles; economic and
psychosocial trends; weakening of the international standing of regimes—
occur within the historical framework of early modernity, they give rise
to the revolutionary outcome. Thus, it is the combination of these two
sets of conditions that constitutes the necessary and sufficient causes of
revolution.
And yet, even this combination does not yet constitute the end of our
exploration of the causes of revolutions. The reason for this is very sim-
ple: not all such combinations of the causes of decline of regimes within
the historical framework of early modernity have generated revolution
and revolutionary outcomes. India, in a somewhat different mode Thailand,
and many of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire—with the possible
exception of Turkey itself where the establishment of the new, Kemalist
regime was sometimes designated as a revolution (even if a revolution
from above)—are among the illustrations of non-revolutionary outcomes
in situations of early modernity.’ It may, however, be claimed that in
those societies which were under colonial-imperial regimes, there devel-
oped mostly wars of independence which deflected most of the revolu-
tionary energies in a “nationalistic” direction. This may be to some
extent true, but only to some extent. The case of Vietnam, in which a
colonial war of independence evinced almost from its beginning the dis-
tinct characteristics of a revolution, and in which later a revolutionary
regime was instituted, indicates that in some cases, under some condi-
tions, wars of independence and the regimes constituted by them may
indeed become revolutionary.’
Latin American countries, where the wars of independence were not
revolutionary, in the sense that they did not promulgate an entirely new
socio-political order, and where many of the crucial aspects of revolu-
tionary process, especially the continuous interweaving between different
political actors and the liminal characteristics of the central revolution-
ary struggle, were very weak, do provide yet another such “negative”
case.”
But perhaps the most important such single case of far-reaching, but
non-revolutionary changes in the context of “early modernity” is indeed

40 © Chapter Four
again Japan, the downfall of the Tokugawa regime, and the Meiji Ishin,
the so-called Meiji Restoration.”
As we have seen all the major causes of the decline of regimes specified
above—insurrection, struggles——can be identified in the last decades of
the Tokugawa regime, almost in a laboratory form, reinforced by the
direct impact and imprint of international forces. The Tokugawa regime
was also characterized by some of the major structural features of early
modernity, by the development of vibrant new economic (merchant and
peasant) forces, by the undermining of older aristocratic “traditional”
forces; by the breakdown of the regulatory economic policies of the older
regime. It was also characterized by a very wide spread of education
seemingly making Japan, as we have seen, the most literate pre-indus-
trial society in the world, and by the development of a very intensive
political discourse.
The Tokugawa regime faced also a crisis of legitimiation, but this cri-
sis was not couched in the ideological terms that were characteristic of
the revolutionary “ancien regimes” of Europe and China. And indeed
the Meiji Ishin developed, as we have seen, with respect to its basic ideo-
logical format and symbolism, and with respect to its overall cultural
program, in a different direction than the Great Revolutions.
Thus all these cases—especially perhaps the Japanese one—attest to
the fact that an explanation of the causes of revolutions in terms of a
combination of the causes of breakdowns of regimes with the historical
frameworks of early modernity is not enough. Although it is true that
such combinations provided the contexts in which all these revolutions
developed, yet in other cases, referred to above, in Japan, as well as in
India, and in Latin America, there developed within such context, non-
revolutionary types of “modern” political and social change.
True enough, in all these situations new cultural programs of moder-
nity crystallized. But not only did such programs of modernity differ
from the “original” Western one, although they had developed in response
to it, but they crystallized in conjunction with socio-political processes
that differed greatly from the revolutionary ones.
Thus, the combination of the causes of breakdown of regimes with
the historical framework of early modernity is yet but another necessary,
but not sufficient cause or condition explaining the revolutions. That
means, we have to look beyond it for the “sufficient” causes of revolutions.
NOTES
' Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society.
Oxford: Berg; Brunschwig, H. 1947. La Crise De L’etat Prussien: A la fin du XVIII* siecle et
la Genese de la mentalite romantique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; Gillis, J.R. 1970.

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

Orlando disse: L'eterna giustizia
Non sempre dorme; e quando un men sel crede,
Allor punisce la nostra malizia.
In quell'isola io voglio or porre il piede.
Il nocchiero ripieno di tristizia,
Non far, grida, signor, prestami fede.
Ma giacchè lo conosce così fermo,
Monta, gli dice, sopra il palischermo.
117
Almeno fuggi la parte del bosco;
Chè all'aperto farai maggior difesa;
E poichè tanta in te virtù conosco,
Se vuoi por fine a così grande impresa,
Scendi sul lido all'aer bruno e fosco;
E quando tutta di porpora accesa
Appare in ciel l'Aurora, e tu t'accosta
Colà, dove vedrai la tenda posta.
118
Egli verratti incontro disarmato;
Ma avrà tra mano qualche abete o pino,
E cento tigri condurrassi allato,
Che nel vederle resterai meschino.
Se tutte tu le uccidi, o te beato!
Ma pur non fuggirai lo tuo destino;
Perchè verranno i draghi e l'altre bestie,
Che ti daranno l'ultime molestie.
119

Ma se queste tu vinci, oimè! ti resta
L'impresa più difficile e tremenda.
Quel negromante si pone una vesta
Cui spada esser non può che rompa o fenda;
Di maglia così dura ella è contesta.
Orlando ride, e dice: Vo' s'intenda
Urlar questa bestiaccia sì lontano,
Che l'oda il Franco e l'oda il lido Ispano.
120
E così detto, salta d'ardir pieno
Sul palischermo, ed al lido s'accosta;
E vôlto il viso inverso il ciel sereno,
Rammenta a Dio il sangue che a lui costa
L'uomo sanato dal mortal veleno;
E dice che sa ben come disposta
È sua pietade a chi glie la domanda;
E a quella, quanto sa, si raccomanda.
121
E mentre così prega, eccolo giunto
Alla crudele e spaventosa sabbia.
Io non ti sono amico, nè congiunto,
Orlando mio; e mi treman le labbia,
E il sangue mi si gela in questo punto,
Pensando a tanto strazio e a tanta rabbia
Cui tu ti esponi di quel traditore.
Ah! torna indietro, e frena il tuo valore.
122

Ma i' canto a' sordi, e mostro a' ciechi il Sole:
Eccolo sceso in su la trista arena.
Per verità ch'io perdo le parole;
Tanto di lui mi prendo affanno e pena;
E so che ancora a voi, donne, ciò duole,
E ritenete il largo pianto appena.
Ma non ci disperiamo così presto,
Ancorchè sia il periglio manifesto.

CANTO UNDECIMO
ARGOMENTO
Sen fugge via con la testa tagliata
Per man d'Orlando il re degli stregoni:
E lo scolar con la pietra affatata
Scopre gli occulti ipocriti bricconi.
La gelosa Climene addolorata
Altrui dicendo va le sue ragioni.
Ancor Dorina a lei narra le trame
E l'opre inique della vecchia infame.
1
Ciascun si duol perchè deve morire;
E n'ha ragion; che il vivere diletta:
E quel dovere ad un tratto basire,
E star sepolto in una fossa stretta,
E presto presto tutto inverminire,
E in poca ritornar polvere schietta,
Ell'è mutazion sì dolorosa,
Che fa perdere il gusto ad ogni cosa.
2

Ma vi è di peggio, che dopo la morte
Bisogna render conto alla minuta
Al tribunal di Dio, che giusto e forte
Al fuoco eterno i malvagi deputa,
E chiama i buoni a sua celeste corte.
Ond'alma che quaggiù male è vissuta,
Esce di trista voglia; chè ha timore
Di giù piombar nel sempiterno ardore.
3
Io però volentier mi sottoscrivo
A questa legge: e quando non ci fosse,
Me ne dorrebbe; chè mi vedrei privo
D'un gran piacer: che le tombe e le fosse
(Quando accolgono in loro un uom cattivo,
Che per amici, o per oro, o per posse
Facea tremar qualunque era men forte)
Mi danno gusto che ci sia la Morte.
4
E così facess'ella il proprio offizio
Com'ella deve; e dèsse in capo a quelli
Che sono la sentina d'ogni vizio;
E non aprisse, che tardi, gli avelli
Agli uomini dabbene e di giudizio;
Ch'io le vorrei con marmi e con pennelli
E con inchiostro farle elogi tali,
Che uscirebbe dal numero de' mali.
5

Ma ell'è una secca stravagante e pazza,
Che va menando la sua falce in giro:
Onde senza saperlo i buoni ammazza;
E color che di sangue e pianto empiro,
E di lussuria ogni albergo, ogni piazza,
Lascia invecchiare: ond'io ne vo deliro,
E attaccherei per rabbia e impazïenza
Un pocolin la santa Provvidenza,
6
Se non vedessi in quale uso gli adopre,
Mostrandoci ad ogn'or ch'ella li serba
In vita, e spesso da morte li copre,
Perchè a pena più cruda li riserba:
E con le infami loro ed indegne opre,
E con la naturaccia lor superba
Raffinan degli eletti il santo coro,
Come per fuoco si raffina l'oro.
7
Nè sempre è vero ancor, che lor capelli
Veggan canuti gli uomini tiranni;
Ch'io n'ho veduti molti ne' più belli
Morire, e ne' più freschi e più verd'anni:
Perchè costoro son come i flagelli
Che il padre adopra de' figliuoli a' danni;
Che corretti che sono, egli li frange
Avanti agli occhi del fìgliuol che piange.
8

A questo fine ei diede il memorando
Valore e il cuor magnanimo e feroce
Sopra ciascuno al valoroso Orlando,
Di cui non morirà giammai la voce,
Nè del fatale suo terribil brando,
Dall'onda Caspia alla Tirintia foce;
Perchè gl'iniqui togliesse di vita
In loro età più ferma e più fiorita.
9
E se al mondo fu mai sopra ogni esempio
Un uomo scellerato, un uomo infame,
Fu senza dubbio quel negromante empio,
Che chiuso aveva il fiore delle dame
In una torre, e di lor feane scempio,
Gettando delle oneste il bel carname
Alle tigri, e sfogando brutalmente
Con le men caste la sua brama ardente.
10
Ma l'ora è giunta che fia posto fine
Alla tua crudeltà, mostro nefando.
Come io vi dissi, nell'onde marine
Già il biondo Sol s'era tuffato, quando
Pose il piè su le spiagge empie e ferine
Dell'isola ch'io dissi, il conte Orlando;
E si moveva a passo grave e lento,
Sempre con l'occhio e con l'orecchio attento.
11

Ma la notte si fece oscura tanto,
Che pensò di fermarsi in su la spiaggia;
Quand'ei s'accorse che lontano alquanto
Per angusto forame un lume raggia:
Onde in quel verso egli si muove; e intanto
Ch'egli guardingo e tacito viaggia,
Vede una face, e vede la gran torre,
E lo stregon che in lei vassi a riporre.
12
Egli spedito allor corre, e si porta
Alla torre medesima, e si pone
Dal destro canto della stretta porta,
E qui sta fermo con intenzione
Di far la lunga bestia a un tratto corta,
Quando esca fuor del chiuso suo grottone:
E mentre ei sta così, sente di drento
Un doloroso femminil lamento.
13
Crudele (udiva dir da una donzella).
Strazia pur queste membra, e fammi in brani;
Ch'opra non farò mai sì brutta e fella:
E tutta pria mi mangeranno i cani,
E mi trarranno i corvi le cervella,
Ch'io mai secondi i desir tuoi villani.
E il negromante le dicea: Tra poco
Su la tua pelle io drò principio al gioco.
14

E quindi un grido, un misero lamento
S'udìan dell'altre sventurate donne.
Orlando pieno allora d'ardimento.
Quale Sanson le filistee colonne,
Scosse l'uscio, l'aperse, e v'entrò drento;
E vide in mezzo a femminili gonne
Lui, che nudata aveva una donzella,
Di cui certo non fu mai la più bella;
15
E distesala sopra un rozzo banco,
Le voleva la pelle trar di dosso;
Quando sopra lui viene il baron Franco,
E gli si serra in un attimo addosso.
S'intimorì quell'empio, e fessi bianco;
Ma dal timor non s'era alcun riscosso,
Quando il buon conte con molta tempesta
Gli tira un colpo, e gli taglia la testa.
16
E o nova, o fiera, o strana maraviglia!
Non cade il tronco busto, anzi si china,
E la recisa testa in mano piglia,
E le scale discende, e s'incammina
Verso la porta. Stupide le ciglia
Orlando tiene, e dietro lui cammina.
Così fuor della torre al verde piano
Esce quel mostro con sua testa in mano:
17

Indi si ferma, e dalle labbia fuora
Il mozzo capo un sibilo tramanda;
E si veggon venire in men d'un'ora
E serpi e tigri e mostri d'ogni banda.
Il tronco busto scaglia in alto allora
La testa, e forse un miglio in su la manda:
Quindi egli cade; e le tigri e i serpenti
Gli van sopra, e lo laceran co' denti.
18
Intanto torna giù l'orribil testa;
E quasi fosse un giuoco di pallone,
Come in Siena talor fassi per festa,
Per l'aere vano la fanno ir girone:
Poi nojati del giuoco ognun s'arresta
De' fieri mostri. Orlando non s'oppone
A quelle bestie, e riguarda con ozio
Come abbia a terminare quel negozio.
19
Quand'ecco d'improvviso che si rompe
La terra, ed esce fuora un fumo nero
Misto a gran fiamma che l'aer corrompe.
Indi Pluton, che men dell'uso è altero,
Senza l'usate sue deformi pompe
Quasi lieto s'accosta al cavaliero,
E gli dice: Signor, grazie infinite
Ti dà dell'opra il Regnator di Dite.
20

Tu col dar morte al brutto negromante,
Tornato m'hai al mio supremo soglio;
Perchè costui avea virtù bastante,
Che non valeva il mio dirgli: Non voglio.
Me stesso ei si facea venir davante;
E pien di tirannìa, pieno d'orgoglio,
Or mi cangiava in pianta ed ora in sasso,
Ora in cane, ora in volpe ed ora in tasso.
21
E senza spirti quasi era rimasto:
Perchè questa isoletta, come vedi,
Tutta colmò quell'animal da basto
Di spiritelli; onde da capo a piedi
Tutta quanta è di diavoli un impasto:
E queste stesse ch'esser tu ti credi
Tigri, son diavoletti; e i pini e gli orni
Sono pur tutti demonj coi corni.
22
La torre ancora di demonj è fatta:
E quanti sassi son, quanti mattoni,
Tutti son spirti della stessa schiatta;
I gangheri e le porte son demoni,
Demonj i topi e demonia la gatta,
Demonj i palchi, i tetti e i cornicioni,
Demonj i chiodi, demonj il solajo;
Or vedi se n'aveva più d'un paio.
23

E intanto possedea questa divina
Virtude, a cui per forza era io soggetto,
In quanto la mia dolce Proserpina,
Venuta un giorno al mondo per diletto,
In quest'isola scese alla marina;
E slacciatasi un poco il bianco petto
Per prender aria, le cadde dal seno
Un mio biglietto scritto in pergameno;
24
In cui io m'obbligava strettamente,
E più che in forma cameræ i Romani,
D'ubbidire alla cieca, immantinente
A' suoi comandi; e fossero pur strani:
E sì il cervel m'avea tratto di mente
Amor, ch'anco i demon fa sciocchi e insani,
Che qualor nominasse ella il mio nome,
Tosto farei per lei e rome e tome.
25
Or non s'accorse la mia bella moglie
D'aver perduto quel mirando scritto:
E mentre erra pel lido, e che raccoglie
Chiocciole e nicchj, da un porto d'Egitto
Questo stregon le vele sue discioglie,
E con la prora appunto dà diritto
In quel luogo ove il breve caduto era
Alla mia troppo semplice mogliera:
26

E perchè sapeva egli molto bene
Le nostre cose, ne fu sì contento,
Che saltò per piacer su quelle arene.
Poi mi comanda che il porti qual vento
Colà, dov'era il mio unico bene
(Ch'il breve avea il suo nome, e fuora e drento);
E vistol, se n'accese, e in mia presenza
Tentò l'infame farle vïolenza.
27
E perchè non voleva per niun patto
La giovin compiacerlo, egli in vigore
Di quel mio troppo misero contratto
M'astrinse a fargli agevole il favore;
Ond'ei rimase appieno soddisfatto,
E in me doppiossi l'affanno e il rossore:
Chè, benchè nell'inferno io peni assai,
Come quel dì non fui misero mai.
28
Ed allor fu, signor, la volta prima
Che m'apparver le corna in su la testa,
Le quai subito rasi con la lima,
Perchè l'opra non fosse manifesta.
Ma il mondo egli n'empì da fondo in cima;
Onde pensa se ognun ne fece festa;
E quindi fui, di corna il capo cinto,
Sculto ne' marmi ed in tele dipinto.
29

Quindi egli sempre più resosi certo
Della virtù che il breve nascondea,
Ad ogni infamia il varco s'ebbe aperto,
E nessuno resistergli potea;
Chè altrimenti da lui era diserto,
Nè nuova più di lui se ne sapea,
Onde grazie ti rendo, o baron forte,
C'hai data or a costui condegna morte.
30
Nè ti maravigliar, se tu l'hai visto
Andare in giro con la testa in mano;
Perchè un folletto il più malvagio e tristo
Gli misi addosso; ed in modo sì strano
S'era con esso avviticchiato e misto,
Che non l'avrìa scacciato alcun Piovano.
Or morto lui, rimase quel folletto.
Che dell'anima in lui facea l'effetto.
31
Ciò detto, trema il suolo, il ciel s'oscura,
S'apre la terra, e le tigri e Plutone
Vi cadon dentro, e ogni altra bestia impura.
Fuggon le piante, e dispare il torrione,
E l'isola riman senza verdura:
Le donzelle che stavano in prigione,
Si trovano disciolte e liberate;
Di che altamente son maravigliate.
32

Quei della nave, al comparir del sole,
Veggendo il lido d'alberi spogliato,
Persero i sensi e perser le parole;
Tanto restò ciascun di ciò ammirato.
Ogni donzella intanto adora e cole
Con laudi ed inni il cavalier pregiato;
Ed ei fa cenno con un bianco lino
Al legno che si faccia a lui vicino.
33
Viene il naviglio colmo di piacere,
E d'udir vago il fin di tanta impresa:
E sceso il duce con ciascun nocchiere,
Ebbero appena la grand'opra intesa,
Che commendato il forte cavaliere,
Mostrò ciascuno la sua voglia accesa
D'andare in Inghilterra, e là far chiaro
Un fatto così bello, inclito e raro.
34
Ed Orlando restò con le donzelle,
Le quai rivolte umilemente a Dio
Giurâr di conservarsi verginelle
In chiuso loco, onesto, santo e pio.
Le loda il conte infino all'alte stelle,
E dice lor: Sarebbe il parer mio
Che vi chiudeste in questa isola stessa;
Ed io vi troverò breviarj e messa:
35

E scelse il luogo presso alla marina,
E disegnovvi un orto grande grande,
Dove fossero erbette e insalatina,
E varj fiori da intrecciar ghirlande:
E perchè sien sicure da rapina,
Vuol che il convento da tutte le bande
Con torri, con fortezze e baluardi
Da gente armata sempre si riguardi.
36
Ed ecco intanto che biancheggia il mare
Per le gran vele che vi corron sopra;
E d'Irlanda e di Scozia e d'Anglia appare
La flotta, che il mar sembra che ricopra.
Sul viso delle vergini compare
Tanto piacer, che le manda sossopra;
E batton palma a palma, ed alla riva
Corron veloci, e gridan tutte: Evviva.
37
Chi il padre abbraccia, chi il dolce fratello;
Chi discorre del mago e chi del conte:
Chi narra il colpo fortunato e bello,
Che privò il mostro dell'altera fronte:
Chi dell'amica l'orrido macello;
Chi descrive le tigri al mal sì pronte;
Chi le serpi, chi i draghi e chi gli affanni
Che soffersero in carcere molti anni.
38

Poi rïavute da tanta allegrezza,
Scoprono ai lor parenti il buon desire
Che han di sacrare a volontaria asprezza
La vita loro, e di voler servire
Al sommo Dio in verginal mondezza.
Questo parlar li fece impietosire,
E piansero un tal poco; ma alla fine
Disser ch'eran di sè donne e regine,
39
E ciò facesser che a grado lor era:
E chiamati ferraj e legnajuoli
E muratori, e tutta quella schiera
D'uomini che non possono oprar soli,
Dieron principio ad una mole altera,
Che uguale non fu vista fra i due poli;
Chè lungo trenta miglia, e largo venti
Fu quel convento, gloria de' conventi.
40
Fui da tremila e più le monacelle:
Vestivan lana bianca e lana negra;
Nè lino più toccava lor la pelle.
Giovani tutte, e con la faccia allegra,
Vaghe, gentili, grazïose e belle,
Che in sol vederle il cuore si rallegra.
La più vecchia fra lor fecer prïora,
Che a diciotto anni non giungeva ancora.
41

Questo convento fammi uscir di via,
E tralasciar la storia incominciata;
E fammi ritornar a casa mia,
Dove ho di nipotine una brigata,
Che mettono al pan bianco carestìa:
E mi ritrovo una certa cognata
Che ogni anno ne fa una: onde, se dura,
Vo' là mandarle a tentar lor ventura.
42
Perchè in Pistoja noi stiamo a quattrini,
Siccome San Cristofano a calzoni.
Ma il mal è, che sebben siam poverini,
Vogliamo fare da ricchi Epuloni:
Vogliam giuocare, vogliamo festini,
Vogliamo vesti belle e buon bocconi;
E spesso spesso facciamo in un mese
Anticipate d'un anno le spese.
43
Il maladetto lusso da per tutto
Entrato è sì, che un angolo non resta
Del mondo, il più meschino ed il più brutto.
Che messo non si sia in gala e in festa:
Onde ciascuno ne riman distrutto;
E chi ha da dare, si gratta la testa;
Ma per contrario quegli che ha da avere,
Si può a sua posta grattar il messere.
44

Ma nelle gran città quest'atra peste
Fa maggior male e più rovina assai.
Lo stato d'una casa una sol veste
Costa talor, chè son banditi i sai:
E tra nastri, tra maniche e tra creste
Si van spendendo piastre e doppie a stai,
E tra svimeri, sterzi, stufe e cocchi
I poveri mariti spendon gli occhi.
45
Le stalle piene e gli argenti infiniti
Non per la mensa sol, ma per lo cesso,
E per gli sputi marci e inverminiti
Chi può narrare? E raccontare appresso
Le perle ed i diamanti, onde guarniti
I membri sono del femmineo sesso?
Ah sciocchi noi, ed esse pazzarelle,
Che godono esser più ricche, che belle!
46
Ma ritorniamo all'isola del mago;
Chè mia mogliera non darammi spesa;
E s'io sarò di spender punto vago,
Non ho timor di ritirarmi in chiesa,
Ed isfogar con qualche sacra immago
Quell'apra doglia che m'aggrava e pesa.
Con una chierca mi sono aggiustato,
Tanto c'ho in tasca la Fortuna e il Fato.
47

Fatto il convento, e cinto intorno intorno
Di forti rocche e d'afforzate mura,
Stiè con loro alle grate più d'un giorno
Il conte Orlando contro sua natura;
Chè monache non mai volle d'attorno:
E rammentando loro la clausura,
La castitade e l'uffizio divino,
Su la sua nave riprese il cammino.
48
Ma tempo è omai che torniamo a Climene,
Che non veduta col padre favella;
Ed a Guidone che pur mille scene
Or fa con questa dama, ora con quella.
Ad una batte bel bello le schiene,
Ad una il mento, ad una una pianella;
Ma questo giuoco a lungo andar non piace
A Climene, e perturbale la pace;
49
Perchè tra l'altre dame della corte
Una ve n'era bella a maraviglia:
Onde Climene, ingelosita forte,
Se la tocca lo sposo, si scapiglia,
E le viene il sudore della morte.
E appunto appunto con questa si piglia
Il suo busto Guidone; ma non crede
D'offender punto la giurata fede.
50

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

The Great Revolutions And The Civilizations Of Modernity S N Eisenstadt

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

The Great Revolutions And The Civilizations Of Modernity S N Eisenstadt

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide 7

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Tags

Categories