Anatomy of Revolution More
Crane Brinton’s classic The Anatomy of Revolution was written in 1938 and another edition appeared in 1965. He covered the French, American, and Russian revolutions looking at the phases and outcomes (no surprise he found the American revolution superior). I am going to dig it out this week-end and take a look because I am curious how the events in Egypt do or do not follow the course Brinton traces. [MORE on Brinton in the comments.]
In the meantime, Juan Cole has posted this analysis by Philip Cunningham, headlined “Every Uprising is Different.” Are they?
This analysis gets the dilemmas the protesters face: “Attempts are being made to reassure the protesters that Mubarak and his supporters would not take advantage of any de-mobilization of the protesters to go back on his word and stay on in power after September. The dilemma before the protesters is: The increasing hardships make it difficult to maintain for long the present state of high mobilization. At the same time, any premature demobilization before there are definitive and irreversible changes in the political status quo could defeat the purpose of the revolution.” HT: Pat Lang
(I noticed a headline on FT this morning: “Cairo’s Sans-Culottes”, by Simon Schama. Haven’t read it yet.)
Cunningham claims Mubarak has amassed, I say stolen, $40 billion. This alone convicts him as a world criminal.
Every time that a revolution occurs it seems that Americans are intellectually unprepared for it. The media, especially TV, is best at reporting the passion of the people (and the horses and camels in the streets). But the media does not provide perspective, nuance, and analytical rigor. Thus in the complex and fluid situation of the developing revolution in Egypt we are vulnerable to Manichean renderings of: dictator vs. democrats, reformers vs. traditionalists, military vs. civilians, secular vs. religious, pro vs. anti-American, etc.. In turn editorial pundits, academics, members of Congress, and interest groups put pressure on Washington to do something, even though hasty words and decisions could exarcebate the situation and risk the losing the very values we uphold.
Fortunately, Juan Cole’s blog and sources such as the NY Times provide perspective and rigor. But the problem is deeper. Francis Fukuyama, political scientist and philosopher, published an article in 2004 , whose title is the thesis:”How Academia Has Failed the Nation: The Decline of Regional Studies.” (www.sais-jhu.edu/se/util/display_mod.cfm?MODULE=/se-server/mod/modules/semo). He stated: “The scandal that the media has failed to cover is the utter failure of the American academy to train adequate numbers of people with deep knowledge about the world outside the United States.”
Gabriel –
It seems to me that think takes have taken on the research function of the universities about social, historical, and economic matters. Perhaps that was inevitable because state legislatures fund the humanities only grudgingly because the humanities are less and less considered part of even a basic education. Even private school professors are dependent on government funding and funding by foundations with ideological leanings of one sort or another. So now many of the better and best historians who two or three generations ago would have specialized in contemporary history are now working for the Brookings Institute, the Cato Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, etc.
The problem is that the think tanks as an institution have no internal professional pressure to be objective, to consider all sides of controversial issues, and they often function as advocates — even lobbyists, if I’m not mistaken — for this or that special interest. Theoretically a university professor is supposed to be self-critical and to subject his thinking to the criticism of his peers, but that is not part of the culture of the think tanks — they are too often explictly ideological.
The country is suffering because of the demise of the humanities — history is only one area whose loss is now having concrete negative consequences. And we brung it on ourselves.
Ms. S. –
Years ago I heard a lecture by a man from Harvard (name of Pettigrew?) who put forth the theory that revolutions are never led by the poor, with the exception of the Spartacus rebellion against the Romans. It failed.
He his thesis was that a middle-class was necessary for successful revolutions, because the poor did not have the communication system necessary to organize a revolution, nor the money to pay for necessary arms.
Looking at Egypt, one sees that some of the poor do have a means of communication — cell phones, and in Egypt’s case perhaps the military itself can be viewed as part of the middle class, and that’s why it has mostly protected the revolutionists.
Anyway, times have changed.
There is the phenomenon called the revolution of rising expectations, that is, as economies improve people expect to do better and begin to anticipate an improved political system. I think the phrase was applied to Cuba.
Egypt does seem to have a significant middle class. Along with that it seems to have a level of education that would make more people middle class if they had decent jobs. As with Tunisia, the story seems to be that the economy is not sufficiently developed so that it can provide high school and college graduates with jobs equal to their knowledge and training.
It also has a powerful upper class that is said to have done well by us (i.e. U.S. aid and contacts); the upper echelon of the military is part of that system. Is the military then a conglomerate of upper and middle class along with conscripts? Perhaps this is one reasons the military seems to be at the center of negotiations–apart from their guns and tanks, of course!
Anne,
You make excellent points. The humanities and foreign languages have suffered in our schools, while the inattention to history is tragic. Some of the think tanks do a fairly good job, despite partisan affiliation among some of them and single issue orientation among others. My generation benefited from the largesse that supported area studies and foreign languages. Money came from the federal government and foundations.
After 9/11 many of us thought that there would be a renaissance about international education, languages, and all that. Why is that after so many years of dealing with crises and wars in the Middle East the American public and media understands it so poorly? The same could be said about Latin America, which is literally transforming American society. One of the answers is that the media, especially newspapers, has reduced foreign coverage dramatically. Another is that Americans are reading less, getting most of their information from TV.
Ms. S. ==
Here’s some evidence for your theory. An article from the NYT surmises that there is indeed a split in the military between the upper level officers loyal to Mubarak and the mid-level ones who are “harshly critical” of him.
The plot thickens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06military.html?ref=global-home
If I recall correctly, from reading (many years ago) Crane Brinton’s “A Decade of Revolution”, he argued that the French Revolution occurred in part because of rising prosperity and expectations—per Ms. Steinfels’ point above.
For those interested in the “how” of revolution, check out Gene Sharp’s essay “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, a primer in how to organize a nonviolent revolution written in 1993 at the request of Burmese democracy activists, and since translated into many languages and used around the world (including in Iran in 2009, by Serbians overthrowing Milosevic, and by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine).
From “Democracy to Dictatorship” is available on the Albert Einstein Institution’s website (www.aeinstein.org).
Where are the women in Egypt’s revolution? Half the country is missing in the newspaper pictures. Are there any women in the talks to set up the next government?
Anne,
For a very perceptive statement of our problem see Frank Rich in today’s NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html?_r=1&hp.
I haven’t read Crane Brinton’s book for a zillion years, but I think Luke Hill is right that rising prosperity helped bring on 1789 in France. Didn’t he also say that it’s a sudden check to prosperity that helps bring on revolution? And more than one historian has written of the wave of revolutionary movements that swept over Europe in 1848, that three countries were notoriously absent: Poland, ground beneath the heel of Russia, Ireland, ground beneath the heel of Britain (and suffering famine to boot), and Britain itself, which was flexible enough to contain such minor outbreaks as there were (the Chartists, for example).
But much has been studied and written about such things over the many decades since Brinton published. It’s interesting that if one takes 1949 (victory of Communism) as the decisive date in China, recent historians are beginning to point to the advances, social and economic, that were being made prior to the coming of the Japanese war in 1937.
How this all applies to Tunisia and Egypt (if at all) I can’t say.
Besides Frank Rich cited by Gabriel Marcella above, see also Lee Siegel on Morozov’s book:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Siegel-t.html
It does seem typically American somehow to believe that we, thanks to our Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc., have come to believe that there’s a technological fix for society, as well as for other questions such as death, taxes, does God exist, and what is the purpose of life?
(Somewhere on the web I ran across an article about teens and subteens absolutely glued to their e-books, reading, reading, reading all the time, but apparently completely unwilling to read printed books (they’re so yesterday).
Apropos of Nicholas Clifford on the advance of technology: The very dusty copy of Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution has just been dug out…much cheaper than an e-book, it is a Vintage Book at $1.25. As reported earlier, first published in 1938, this copy is the fourth printing (August 1960) of the 1952 edition. Will dig into after a few preliminary sneezes.
“Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers.”
Gabriel -
No doubt Rich is right that cell phones and the internet are only revolutionary tools, but no doubt they made communication much easier. Could they have communicated adquately by on the spot phone booths?
What in the world is he talking about in the text above? Americans had to “track down” the Al Jazeera English site? Nonsense. All you had to do was Google it. Methinks he’s mad because it’s easier for TV to present such news than print media — technology rearing its ugly head.
Al Jazeera is not provided on U.S. TV channels; i.e., if you want to watch it, you have to watch it on your computer.
Read Frank Rich: I think what he is saying is that although Al Jazeera is “routinely available in Israel and Canda….” and in a few places in the U.S., Americans are loath to see or hear anything that might be critical of our mid-East policy.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth. So I’ll just say it myself, Israelis carry on a vigorous debate about their situation, and they watch international news that might influence their situation. But Americans in thrall to AIPAC and the vision of an innocent and besieged Israel don’t want to watch news that might raise questions about our myopia.
Crane Brinton in “The Anatomy of Revolution” is far less formulaic than I have remembered him; maybe I have in my memory bank the short version I needed for a test!
But here is his observation about “technology,”[T]he Russian Revolution directly affected more people and more square miles of territory than any previous revolution; its sequence of events compresses into a few months what in England in the seventeenth century had taken years to achieve; in its use of the printing press, telegraph, radio airplanes and the it seems, as compared with our revolutions, definitely a streamlined affair. But again we may well doubt whether such changes of scale are in themselves really important factors. Men’s desires are the same, whether they ride toward their achievement in airplanes or on horseback. Revolutions may be bigger nowadays, but surely not better. Our prophets of doom to the contrary notwithstanding, the loudspeakers does not change the words.”
He is talking about time being compressed in later revolutions. Should we also wonder about the size of crowds.
Note his exquisite use of semi-colons!
Brinton: He is far more dispassionate about Russia than I have remembered it. But then, the book was first written in 1938 when Americans were more sympathetic to the Russian revolution than in the early ’60s when I must have first read it.
He is also at pains to discuss the “scientific” nature of historical study–an issue that was a big deal in the ’30s, but has now passed from history. Sociology and psychology were likely in the same debate as “social sciences.”
If anybody is still reading this thread, you should read today’s (February 8) issue of the Washington Post on the warnings on Egypt that the administration ignored: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/02/the_egypt_warnings_obama_ignor.html?hpid=opinionsbox1