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Gregory Young
“The hopeless don’t revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.”
-Peter Kropotkin
There have been many attempts by scholars to formulate universal theories that explain how revolutions develop and predict their success or failure, yet most have yielded disappointing results. I begin my class on revolutions by asking my students that question, “Why do Men Rebel?” An interrogative variation of Ted Gurr’s eponymous book, Why Men Rebel (Gurr, 1970). Inevitably, I am barraged with responses like, “they have no economic opportunity, they face violence or a corrupt government, or there is a democratic deficit. These environmental or structural factors the students contend are the most important independent variables to predict a revolutionary situation (a group of people engaged in protest or insurrection). But these factors do not seem to do well to predict revolutionary outcomes (the reform or governmental change that follows the revolutionary situations). Using structural explanations, revolutions are the attempts of normal people responding to abnormal situations. Any group of people faced with the same difficult circumstance would react in the same manner.
These structural or environmental factors are clearly important in predicting revolution to several theorists who occupy a lofty position in the canon of the literature. Karl Marx believed as societies advance, they compete over the control of the means of production, and that capitalist exploitation will inevitably lead to a revolution of the proletariat. The actors do not matter; they march lock-stop according to Hegel’s dialectic. Other structuralists include neo-Marxist, Barrington Moore and his PhD students Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly (Moore,1966, Skocpol, 1979, Tilly, 1992).
Later in the semesters, when the class examines the Arab Spring, and looks for causes that caused protests to erupt almost simultaneously across twelve Arab states in 2011, inevitably they cite the same litany of structural causes. When confronted with the evidence that these conditions have existed in these countries for decades, I ask these same students, “Why revolt now?” What is it that turns these environmental features into action? With that the class begins to examine the actor-oriented theories or the agency that acts within the structure. From Gurr’s “relative deprivation” which expands in scope and intensity to Trotsky’s “Vanguard of the proletariat”, students find it takes abnormal citizens to motivate the masses to react to the normal misery that the structures can bring. Was Hitler the personification of Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory (great meaning important not morally good) that persuaded the German people to respond to the depredations of the Versailles Treaty and the depression to elect him Chancellor (Carlyle 1840).
At this point those in my classes have moved to what Chalmers Johnson describes as “conjunction theories”, those that combine elements of both structure and agen