Social Revolutions

Causes of Social Revolutions

Social revolutions and social problems are closely knit to one another. All the same, even the most critical social problems do not ipso facto lead to social revolutions. As Alexis de Tocqueville aptly noted, relative, and not absolute, deprivation—occasioned as a result of a gap between groups' experiences for an improved future and the means of attaining perceived expectations—fosters revolutions. More important, only a constellation of political and cultural opportunities, resource mobilization, organizational dynamics, and ideational processes have led to social revolution. Karl Marx was among the first modern social scientists to think of the cause of social revolutions along this line, although some political philosophers before him, such as John Locke, provided the ideological justification for political revolutions. According to Marx, social revolutions emerge when there is an intense dialectical tension between the productive forces and the production relations of a given society that ultimately manifests itself in the heightened tension between the contending classes.

Unlike Marx, who considered the state as a concentrated reflection of the mode of production that hardly sustains its self-dependence, Theda Skocpol, in her analysis of the Great Revolutions, viewed the state as an administrative apparatus with an independent logic of its own. This simple but important view of the state allowed Skocpol to provide what some call the most revolutionary view of social revolutions. On the basis of her structuralist approach, she noted that revolutions are caused by state breakdown; that is, the state's inability to manage the affairs of society induced by fiscal crisis or international pressures. Moreover, according to Skocpol, the state needs to be considered in an international world-historical context. From this geopolitical perspective, state breakdown comes in part as a result of the competition of multiple states working within the constriction of imbalanced world development. States less hampered by internal forces in their access to the resources requisite to resist the challenges posed by other states are less vulnerable than those states that have overextended themselves and encounter pressure from the dominant classes. Skocpol, accordingly, contends that social revolutions take place when the state is weakened by its inability to deal with extranational load effectively, when the dominant classes are capable of exerting their influence on the state that desperately seeks to maintain the compass of its authority, and when the lower classes are capable of mobilizing themselves and act accordingly. Only the combination of these three factors leads to social revolution.

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