Calvert - Revolution and counter-revolution

Calvert, Peter

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UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH

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Table caption Date due

and Counter-Revolution

Concepts in the Social Sciences

Series Editor: Frank Parkin

Published titles

Democracy Citizenship Welfare Freedom Bureaucracy Revolution and Counter-Revolution Socialism Liberalism The State Ideology Conservatism Race and Ethnicity Property Status

Anthony Arblaster f. M. Barbalet Norman Barry Zygmunt Bauman David Beetham

Peter Calvert Bernard Crick John Gray

John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry

David McLellan

Robert Nisbet

John Rex

Alan Ryan

Bryan S. Turner

Concepts in the Social Sciences

*

i

Open University Press

Milton Keynes

Open University Press Celtic Court 22 Ballmoor Buckingham MK18 1XW

First Published 1990

Copyright P. A. R. Calvert 1990

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Calvert, Peter

Revolution and counter-revolution. - (Concepts in the social sciences)

1. Revolution. Theories I. Title. II. Series 303.6'4'01

ISBN 0-335-15398-4 ISBN 0-335-15397-6 (pbk)

Typeset by Scarborough Typesetting Services

Printed in Great Britain by J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd., Bristol

The principal purpose of this book is to re-examine the place of revolution in modern social theory, and to reassert the need for the systematic study of the social sciences. At a time when major changes are taking place in both the intellectual and the political climate, the one thing that is certain is that the world of the twenty-first century is not going to be as good as some of us hoped twenty years ago. However, with some luck, and the application of our intelligence, it may at least not be as bad as some of us now fear.

What is to be observed?

The more important a term is, the more probable it is that it will be incorrectly used. Most of us, for example, use the term weight when we mean what the physicist would call mass (or the physician obesity). But in the social sciences the problem is particularly serious, since the words we use in everyday life have strong and well-established meanings of their own, and the attempts of social scientists to give them tightly defined meanings are seldom successful. So it is with the term revolution.

In the 1940s there was no problem. There were no revolutions, or rather, there was only one Revolution, and the question was only how soon after the War it would come. Hardly anyone seems to have paid any attention to Katharine C. Chorleys (1943) excellent book on the subject, Armies and the Art of Revolution, perhaps because of the timing of its appearance, perhaps because it included some uncomfortable truths about how people use military force to gain their own ends and how those ends are not always those the masses want.

In the 1950s the Cold War dominated all thought and battle-lines were drawn. On one side, revolution was the hope of change; on the other, it was a fundamental threat to the values of the Free World. At the edges of the conflict, in the emerging Third World, insurgents struggling to free themselves from a colonial domination already on the retreat were caught up in the ideological matrix, and the rival alliances contended to make their struggles their own.

In the 1960s revolution was very fashionable. Everyone was making revolution, or rather, defining whatever they were doing at the time as revolution. Revolution was a warm, yeasty excitement

Revolution and Counter-Revolution

which washed over quite sensible social scientists and left some of them spiritually transformed into bearded political activists. Defining revolution was counter-revolutionary, but writing about it was very fashionable, and a number of useful readers appeared as a result (Davies 1971, Kumar 1971, Mazlish, Kaledin and Ralston 1971).

In the 1990s revolution is no longer on the political agenda though it flourishes as a socio-technological metaphor. The Left has discovered the relative autonomy of the state and the class isolation of armed forces. America walks tall, rolling back the frontiers of communism, and the frontiers of communism roll back obedient to its command, as in Grenada. But in Afghanistan, as in Iran, do the beneficiaries not seem to be going to the Western civilization or the rational tradition of the Enlightenment (even the term Enlightenment has been hijacked to describe something that looks uncomfortably like pompous obscurantism). Instead we wait to see which particular faction of Islamic fundamentalists is going to come out on top. We are going to need some clear ideas about what is going to happen next, as we may well not like it all that much. From the standpoint of the 1990s we can no longer be sure whether events in Iran and Afghanistan constitute a revolution or a counterrevolution. Clearly we are going to have to clarify what we mean by each of these terms.