Document created: 3 September 03
Air University Review, July-August 1975
Social Revolutions
Thoughts toward Development of
a Generalized Model
At any one time in history a limited number of political ideas are generally acceptable as the basis for the formal institutions and policies of a government. What enables these institutions to remain viable over time? In Latin America, for example, where most governments profess “democracy” as their set of ideals, what has caused so many changes in government?
Political Stability
and Instability
Martin C. Needler theorizes that as long as the formal institutions of a
government reflect the internal distribution of power, as long as those being
governed believe that their needs are being satisfied by the government, or as
long as those being governed accept the validity of the government’s
ideological base, the system of government will remain stable. But when one of
these components changes, the government will become unstable. If those being
governed cannot or will not compromise with the change and if the change made
is not subject to readjustment, a condition of “permanent instability” can be
created. Needler points out that such a condition may last for a considerable
period before some compromise is reached and the polity begin to “evolve”
toward a new stability. Again to use Latin America as an example, with the
exception of a period of stability at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Latin America has generally been “permanently unstable.”1
Manifestations of this instability in Latin America have occurred in varying
ways, but generally three patterns emerge: replacement of one ruling social
group by another similar group with minimal or no policy difference of
significance, replacement of one ruling group by another that seeks to secure
the gratification of limited demands, and replacement of one group by another
“good government group” that seeks a return to observance of legal and
constitutional norms.2
While most changes in governments in Latin America during this century fall into one of these categories, several obviously do not: those that have experienced social revolutions, such as Mexico, Cuba, and possibly Bolivia, Peru, and Panama. What caused these revolutions to be different? Do the reasons for their deviation from one of the three general categories have a common basis? If so, what is that basis? Can it be described by a generalized model applicable throughout the world?
This article examines these questions, giving particular attention to the
applicability of the theory of revolution discussed by James C. Davies in his
classic study, “Toward a Theory of Revolution.”3
Factors that Distinguish
the Social Revolution
El Gobierno Revolucionario is a phrase used by almost every government that comes to power in Latin America through an extraconstitutional process. But are they in reality revolutionary governments in the sense that they advocate radical social reform? Seldom. What then are the criteria to be used in defining a revolution? Leiden and Schmidt feel that it is not possible to give a conceptually concise answer acceptable to all who study revolution.4 But perhaps some minimal ingredients of any revolution may be identified in such a way that any change of government not possessing those ingredients cannot qualify for the title “revolutionary government” in the sense of being a social revolution.
First and foremost, a social revolution is, in effect, a social movement. As
such, it must meet the tests used to define such movements. Herbert Blumer
defines social movements as “collective enterprises to establish a new order of
life.”5 Social movements may be classified in three types: (1)
general social movements, such as labor movements; (2) expressive social
movements, such as religion; and (3) specific social movements, which include
reform movements and revolutionary movements.6
The specific social movement has a well-defined objective or goal that it seeks to reach. In striving toward this objective or goal, it develops an organization and structure and in so doing becomes essentially a society. A leadership is recognized and accepted, along with a definite membership, which is characterized by strong individual identification with the movement. Traditions, values, philosophy, sets of rules, and a general body of expectations are formed. Its members form allegiances and loyalties. A social structure develops, complete with status positions.
The specific type of social movement is not born fully grown. It must evolve. Rex Hopper suggests a scheme of four stages: social unrest, population excitement, formalization, and institutionalization. But more important than the stages of growth, at least from an identification criteria viewpoint, are the mechanisms used to enable the specific social movement (e.g., the social revolution) to develop.7 Blumer classifies these mechanisms under five headings: agitation, development of an esprit de corps, development of morale, the formation of an ideology, and the development of operating tactics.8 While all five of these mechanisms are necessary to a specific social movement, ideology plays a very significant role in the life of a movement. It is essential to the durability and the development of a movement. The ideology consists of a body of doctrine, beliefs, and myths that define the movement’s objective, purpose, and premises, that condemn the existing structure which the movement is attacking, and that defend and justify the movement and its objectives; and, last, it has a body of beliefs dealing with the policies, tactics, and practical operation of the movement. It is this ideology which provides the movement with its philosophy and psychology. But, most important, as an identification criterion for specific social movements (e.g., social revolutions), the ideology must have popular appeal. Accordingly, it must be visible and easily usable as an identification criterion. If no such ideology is visible, presumably a specific social movement and therefore a social revolution does not exist.
In short, specific social movements are societies in miniature, with
organized and formalized collective behavior. In them, new social organizations
develop, and new values are formed. Their end results, if they survive long
enough, are new institutional structures, new bodies of functionaries, and new
views. Unless a change of government possesses these characteristics, it cannot
be said to be a social revolution, nor can it be said to be a reform movement,
since, as was pointed out earlier, a specific social movement encompasses both
reform movements and social revolution. On the other hand, if the change of
government does possess these characteristics, how may one differentiate the
reform movement from the social revolution? Lenin said: “The transfer of State
power from one class to another class is the first, the principal, the basic
sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical
political meaning of the term.”9 Sigmund Neuman, in discussing
revolutions, emphasizes the social factor: revolution is regarded as a sweeping
basic change in political, social, and economic structures.10 Needler
speaks of revolutionary social innovation that rejects all inhibitions to rapid
social change imposed by pre-existing legal and constitutional norms.11
In an attempt to synthesize these definitions into one statement, let us say
that the social revolution is characterized by a transfer of political and
economic power from one social class to another, with an accompanying rejection
of existing legal and constitutional inhibitions to rapid social change. This
definition provides a means of differentiating the social revolution from the
reform movement, since revolutionary innovation without regard to existing
legal and constitutional institutions is characteristic of social revolutions
but not of reform movements.12
Using the criteria that describe a specific social movement, together with the criteria that differentiate reform movements from social revolutions, a set of standards is now available to test a so-called gobierno revolucionario to determine if it represents a social revolution.
Elements of a
Social Revolution Model
With the criteria established to determine if a social revolution has occurred, the next question appears to be, Why did it occur? Why was it different from previous changes in governments?
One of the approaches frequently used to study social movements has been the typical life-cycle approach. Hopper did this, based on a historical study of Latin American revolutions.13 His approach acquires significance in causal analysis when each stage is regarded as containing some preconditions for the development of the following stage. Under this theory the progression from stage to stage is not inevitable, since each stage contains only a portion of the preconditions necessary for movement to the subsequent stage. The special value of the life-cycle approach is to permit discovery of the additional conditions that have to be present if a movement is to proceed from one stage to the next.
In another approach to determining what causes a social revolution, John Davies relates the causes of revolution to the government’s ability to satisfy the needs of the population. His model (Figure 1) does not necessarily conflict with Hopper’s earlier model. Rather, it can be argued that Hopper’s additional conditions, which have to be present at each stage in the life cycle in order to move to the next cycle, can be equated to the unsatisfied needs in Davies’s model. Because the Davies model appears to represent a more elegant approach, it will be examined further.14
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Davies alludes to the writings of Marx and Tocqueville to establish the
theoretical basis of his model—that “revolutions are most likely to occur when
a prolonged period of economic and social development is followed by a short
period of sharp reversal.”15
As shown, Davies’s model is predicated on the difference between actual need satisfaction and expected need satisfaction. This generalized classification of needs appears to be somewhat unsatisfactory, however, because of the wide range of differing needs that people experience. Abraham Maslow has developed an interesting framework that helps explain the relative strengths of certain needs.16 According to him, there appears to be a hierarchy into which human needs present themselves and which can be used to explain behavior. Possibly Davies’s model can be further defined by use of Maslow’s classifications.
Maslow classifies human needs into five categories, in descending order according to the relative strength of the need: physiological, security, affiliation (acceptance), esteem (recognition), and self-actualization. (Figure 2)
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The physiological needs are shown at the top of the hierarchy because they have the highest strength until they are at least partially satisfied. These basic needs are the basic human needs necessary to sustain life itself—food, clothing, shelter. Until these are satisfied, all the person’s activity will be at this level. Davies obliquely infers this when describing the Minnesota starvation studies made during World War II. As he points out, these studies demonstrated that enduring concern over fulfillment of the physiological needs is a force strongly militating against rising expectations and the community-sense and consensus of joint political action necessary to a revolution. If this is so, the vertical axis of Davies’s model (needs), when used to explain or as a predictive device, can be amended as shown in Figure 3.
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According to this model, as long as physiological needs are not met, a revolution will not occur regardless of how irregularly those physiological needs are filled.
Once physiological needs are gratified, the security or safety needs become predominant, as illustrated in Figure 4. These needs are basically the need to feel free from physical danger and deprivation of the basic physiological needs. In addition to the cares of today, there is the concern for the future. Will an individual have food and shelter tomorrow? Will he be able to maintain his property? When an individual’s safety or security is threatened, other things seem unimportant. Davies’s model appears to recognize this fact. Indeed, the cause of revolutions, according to the model, is a sudden, unacceptable gap between expected need satisfaction and actual need satisfaction, which causes, in Maslow’s scheme, the security needs to become paramount.
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Once the physiological and security needs are fairly well satisfied, the affiliation need, or the need to belong, will emerge. As an individual begins to satisfy his need to belong, he then feels the need for esteem, both self-esteem and recognition from others. Once the esteem needs begin to be adequately satisfied, the self-actualization need—the need to maximize one’s potential—becomes dominant.
These last three needs may never be completely met in any society, on either an individual or a societal basis. But because people have more things, tangible and intangible, as each need in the hierarchy is met or partially met within a society, there will be an accompanying and equal increase in security needs. Each individual will feel that his security is threatened if there is a danger he might slip back down the hierarchy, if some needs presently met will not be met in the future.
On these bases, one may theorize that the needs Davies is speaking of, those which are basic to the implementation of a social revolution, are in effect the same as Maslow’s security needs. The other Maslow needs of affiliation, esteem, and self-actualization do come into consideration after the social movement or revolution begins; however, these needs can be actually satisfied within the structure and society of the new movement.
If Maslow’s “security needs” and Davies’s “needs” are synonymous, Davies’s model may be amended as shown in Figure 5.
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The model so amended does not appear to conflict with the original Davies
concept, for, as he said, “. . . the necessary additional (revolutionary)
ingredient is a persistent, unrelenting threat to the satisfaction of these
needs: not a threat which actually returns people to a state of sheer survival
but which puts them in the mental state where they believe they will not be
able to satisfy one or more basic needs.”17
Neither does the revised Davies model necessarily conflict with Hopper’s lifecycle model. The additional conditions Hopper mentions, which have to be present for a movement to move from one stage of the life cycle to the next, can be equated to the appearance of new security needs at each stage in the cycle. These new security needs are the combined results of rising expectations, failure of the government in power to meet past security needs, and doubt as to the government’s future ability to meet security needs.
In short, the revised Davies model (Figure 5) appears to be a more exact one, at least from the standpoint of a more specific definition of what needs are being referred to.
Predictive Possibilities
of the Model
As Davies points out, for his model to be predictive, an assessment of the state of mind, the mood of a people, is required. He cites several instances—West Berlin in 1948, for one—where interviews ascertained the sense of security that people felt. But he concludes that we are still not at the point of being able to predict social revolution.
But work has been done in another discipline that perhaps could be useful in assessing the state of mind of people. George Katona, at the University of Michigan, has done extensive research in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, attempting to relate a population’s state of mind to its economy.18 Using multivariate statistical techniques, he produced models that explain much of the fluctuation in a nation’s economy as a function of anxieties about the future.
On the theory that anxiety in a population is a reflection of how well their security needs are being met, it is felt that a similar technique, drawing on Katona’s research methods, might prove useful in predicting a population’s propensity for a social revolution. Various measures of anxiety could be incorporated into the development of a model that would have the form
Y=B1 X1 + B2X
2 + . . . Bn Xn + C
where Y is the dependent variable indicating the propensity for revolution in a country, and X1. . . Xn are the independent variables (mainly anxieties) within the country. The anxieties about the economy, type of government, length of period of rising expectations, etc., are a result of unfulfilled security needs, and consequently they affect the population’s propensity for revolution. B1 . . . Bn are the weights given to each independent variable, and these are statistically derived. C is a constant.19 This or a similar model could provide a relative approximation of the propensity of a population to revolt.
Substantiation of such a model would have to be developed for a given country, with Y computed over time and compared to actual changes in government within the country. Although to make such a test is obviously beyond the scope of this article, it is hypothesized that the factor which would indicate if a movement is to be a social revolution would be the sharpness and depth of a drop in Y. The sharper such a drop and the longer it drops, the more self-reinforcing the propensity for revolution would become. Anxieties would beget anxieties. Within such an environment, radical solutions leading to social revolution would find ready listeners.
The technique discussed here does not contradict Davies’s theory but in fact reinforces it and provides a possible approach to the development of quantitative measures approximating a population’s relative propensity to revolt.
Conclusions
The examination of the distinguishing features of a specific social movement, together with the factors that distinguish a reform movement from a revolution, has enabled us to assemble a working definition of a social revolution: to identify criteria against which a new government can be checked to see if it does represent a social revolution.
The models for revolutions proposed by Hopper and Davies were examined and found to complement each other when considered together with Maslow’s research into human needs. Maslow’s work provides a basis for further refining Davies’s model so that the needs Davies speaks of are, in fact, identified as security needs. I feel that this model, together with work done by Katona in the field of market research, could be the basis for developing a sophisticated model (based on multivariate statistical analysis) that would indicate a population’s relative propensity to revolt. The specialized psychological theories used in marketing research, which deals in large part with attitudes, opinions, social movements, and the needs of people, could be useful in developing explanations of why social revolutions occur.
The form of the model suggested is admittedly simplistic, but this is felt to be a necessary step in the formation of a more sophisticated model along the line of contemporary national econometric models. The compilation of the data base necessary to the development of such a model will be a major difficulty that must be overcome. The effort should prove to be worthwhile, however. For example, even in the simplistic model proposed
Y=B1 X1 + B2
X2 + . . . Bn Xn + C
the predictive potential of the weight B1 through Bn would identify factors that a government could influence to prevent or preclude a social revolution. Last, it should be emphasized that the proposed general model would be equally applicable to social revolutions of the left and of the right, to a communist or to a fascist social revolution.
If the model suggested here is valid, then one might logically assume that the current world energy and food crises are causing the populations of many of the world’s nations to feel that their security needs are threatened. Since the threat to security needs appears in many cases to be beyond the control of the governments in power, one may expect an ever increasing gap between the security the populations need and the security they get. The resultant increasing anxieties can be expected to be accompanied by an ever increasing propensity for social revolution in the nations most threatened by these two crises. Under such circumstances a social revolution would appear inevitable. The question is, Will the United States adequately anticipate the advent of such revolutions?
8 SOSq, Hulburt Field, Florida
Notes
1. Martin C. Needler, Political Development in Latin America: Instability Violence and Revolutionary Change (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 157.
2. Ibid., p. 158.
3. John C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,’’ American Sociological Review, vol. XXVII, 1962, pp. 5-l9.
4. Carl Leiden and Karl M. Schmidt, The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 3.
5. Herbert Blumer, “Social Movements,” in New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, A. M. Lee, editor (New York: Barnes and Noble), pp. l99-200.
6. Ibid.
7. Rex D. Hopper, “The Revolutionary Process: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Revolutionary Movements,” Social Forces, 28 March 1950, pp. 270-79.
8. Blumer, op. cit.
9. Jack Woods, New Theories of Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 17.
10. Sigmund Neuman, “The International Civil War,” World Politics, vol. 1, pp. 335-36.
11. Needler, pp. 120,158.
12. In fact, as Needler indicate, a reform movement can be transformed to a social revolutionary movement by the introduction of revolutionary innovation from above. (page 120).
13. Hopper, op. cit.
14. Davies, op. cit.
15. Ibid., p. 6.
16. Abraham H. Maslow, Eupsychian Management (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin and the Dorsey Press, 1965); Motivation and Personality (New York; Harper and Row, 1954); New Knowledge in Human Values (Scranton, Pennsylvania: Harper and Row, 1959).
17. Davies, p. 10.
18. George Katona, Measurement and Predictive Value of Attitudes and Expectations, and Dankelberg, Schniedeskemp, and Stafford, 1960 Survey of Consumer Finances (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, distributed for Social Research, The University of Michigan, 1969).
19. For a complete explanation of the statistical techniques and research designs involved, see Paul E. Green and Donald S. Tull, Research for Marketing Decisions (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970).
Major Joel D. Creel (M.B.A., Florida State University) is a navigator, 8th Special Operations Squadron, Hurlburt Field, Florida. He has served as aircrew member and staff officer in Special Operations units in CONUS and Canal Zone; as provincial psychological operations adviser, Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, Republic of Vietnam; and as plans and programs officer, U. S. Air Forces Southern Command. Major Creel is a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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