Charles Tilly: European Revolutions, 1492-1992. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993.
Fernand Braudel: On History. Sarah Matthews translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
In politics, ‘revolution’ is a metaphoric word. To understand it, one must know what it is that has revolved. The ancient Greek word for revolution, metabolē, means change, alteration; again, what has changed?
Aristotle explains that it is the regime of the polis that changes in a revolution. A regime or politeia is the organization of the most authoritative offices of the polis, the ones that shape the distinctive way of life of the polis, serving the purpose or telos of the polis. The system of authoritative institutions is founded and embodied by the politeuma or ruling body—those individuals who wield authority in the polis. [1] Aristotle famously classifies regimes into six types based on quantitative criteria (rule of the one, the few, the many) and qualitative criteria (the good and the bad).
A revolution, then, consists of a political change of rulers and institutions, a change of kind and not merely of degree: from oligarchy to democracy, democracy to tyranny, and so on.
In the ‘Europe’ of Aristotle’s time a revolution did not involve seizing something called ‘the state.’ There was little in the way of any institutional structure to seize. Typically in the Greek polis one faction would overthrow another, establishing its own institutions and replacing the previous rulers. The ancient Greeks did not conceive of anything quite like what we mean by a ‘state’; for example, ‘state’ had not separated from ‘society.’ The Latin term status in medieval times still mean ‘condition’—the status ecclesiae or the status regni. Americans still use the term in this older sense when they speak of ‘the state of the Union.’ This had nothing to do with regime, what Latin expresses as the politia or the ordo dominantum. As with the Greeks, politia refers to a ruling order, the ruler-guided and institution-guided way of life of the whole society. [2]
At a key point in his argument, Charles Tilly cites Hobbes, who fully develops the concept of the state as it became known in modern Europe. With regard to Great Britain, Hobbes saw, “the access of parliament to London’s commercial network, both internal and external, gave it crucial advantage in a world where military force had begun to depend on financial stability” (ER 135). At the same time, Hobbes was himself a monarchist, and (so to speak) rightly so: Monarchs not parliaments founded modern states, acquiring them in war, not through peaceful legislative activities States above all have been objects of conquest, of military acquisition, desired by acquisitive princes. The very process of acquisitive militarism has itself contributed to state-building.
The state complicates but does not erase classical regime theory. A state may still be tyrannical or monarchic, oligarchic or aristocratic, ‘mixed’ or democratic. But the state may persist throughout such regime changes, making for a remarkable sight: The political regime may undergo revolution but the state itself may as a consequence change or stay the same in size, strength, and degree of centralization. So, to use one of Tilly’s examples, the new, republican regime in France replaced the monarchic Old Regime, but the state did not shrink. On the contrary, both its governing apparatus and its territorial reach grew.
Moreover, when speaking of state organization, one needs a word in addition to ‘regime.’ Tilly identifies several kinds of states: city-states, federations, empires, and ‘national’ or ‘modern’ states. Unlike regimes, which (to repeat) refer to the quantity and quality of public offices, state ‘types’ (let us call them) refer to the extent of territory ruled(large, medium, small) and the relations between the periphery and the ruling center. Typically, city-states are smaller than ‘national’ states, which are often smaller than federations and empires; further, each state type exhibits a different structure with respect to the way authority is distributed throughout the regions: a federation grants considerable authority (Tilly, the Hobbesian, would say ‘power’) to the peripheries, whereas a ‘national’ state centralizes authority.
A territory and set of people(s) that are ruled, then, may be called (again, I am assigning a word) a polity. A modern polity exhibits two political forms: the regime and (what I am calling) the state type. Obviously, these classifications do not exhaust the formal characteristics of polities: there are economic orders, also—mercantilism, capitalism, socialism—crucial to the development of regimes and state types. In his discussions of the genesis of European states and of revolutions occurring within them, Tilly makes much not only of coercion but of capital, which he takes to be the two variables whose relations determine state type and, to some extent, regime as well.
This suggests that radical regime change, or revolution, becomes much more complicated with the invention of the modern state. ‘States’ are distinguishable, in a way not seen in European antiquity, from ‘societies’ states and societies influence each other. Matters are complicated still further by interstate relations. Europe is a system of many states, interacting commercially and martially in ways often conducive to revolution. These two sets of complications in turn interact with one another, complexly. It all begins to resemble the human genome project. The genesis and genetics, origins and forms, of states and states-in-system—and of state-systems with other state-systems, Europe with Asia, with the Americas—could easily spin out of conceptual control, even as the states and the systems in and with which they operate have in fact spun out of political control, resulting in catastrophic wars.
To clarify matters, Tilly distinguishes revolutionary situations—conditions pregnant with revolution—from revolutionary outcomes—the children born or aborted. Revolutionary situations result from a contending faction adhered to by “a significant segment” of citizens, a faction that the existing state apparatus cannot or will not suppress. Revolutionary outcomes result from defections from the ruling group, including military forces, and the acquisition of military force by the contending faction, leading to acquisition of the state apparatus by that faction.
Revenue and military force, operating both within states’ territories and within the state system of Europe, have combined in different ways and to different degrees, generating different kinds of states and different kinds of revolutions. Tilly outlines the principal possibilities in his case studies of the Low Countries, the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, Great Britain, France, and Russia. Both economic and military institutions are to some extent shaped by the choices made by modern rulers, ‘states-men’; throughout his career, Tilly has been a prominent advocate of ‘bringing the state back in’ to historical studies, after at least two generations of economic and social historiography. His political history differs from the political history of early moderns in several ways. He is much more sociologically sophisticated, integrating the work of his immediate predecessors into his political account. His political history is also unconnected to the nationalist and often ‘teleological’/triumphalist narratives often favored in the nineteenth century. Tilly accounts for state-building, neither applauding it nor mourning what he evidently takes to be its likely and incipient demise. He likens statesmen to protection racketeers. He quietly rejects another teleology, as well: Marxism. He shows why class struggle did not lead to international proletarian revolution (ER 246).
With respect to historiography, one should emphasize that Tilly insists on the importance of comparison. Causal explanation in history, notoriously difficult (vide Marx, again), may be attempted by using comparisons (Britain and France, Britain and Iberia) to show “what did not happen as much as what did happen” (ER 126). To explain why and how the British state formed, why and how its revolutions occurred, compare and contrast it with paths not taken, paths that, fortunately, can be seen by looking at other European polities. Just as conflict among factions on a given territory and conflicts between states organized on those territories served to form and re-form states, so too can the examination of contrasts among states and the circumstances leading to their formation build up a reliable body of knowledge about revolutions.
Tilly reaffirms the importance of politics, which Aristotle esteemed as the comprehensive, architectonic art. In this (and borrowing from his own approach) he may be compared and contrasted to the great Fernand Braudel. The scope of Braudel’s achievement, the sheer orchestration of materials, puts him beyond Tilly and (one is tempted to say) just about everyone else in the past century or two.. But the very awe-inspiring vastness of Braudel’s project makes some of his categories seem to big for careful use. The longue durée is so very long that it is hard to see just how it operates. For example: “Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations….” (On History, 126). Well, yes, things that last a long time do have long lives. A tautology explains nothing. Political authority, on the other hand, explains a lot. It in turn needs explaining, and Tilly offers explanations. His project has some of the Braudelian sweep, but he splits his problems into governable pieces. One spends less time gaping, more thinking.
In his efforts at this reconstitution, Tilly leans too heavily on the Hobbesian concept of ‘power.’ ‘Authority,’ encompassing both coercion and persuasion, and also prudential understanding, pulls closer to both Aristotle and the truth. Statesmen are (at least sometimes) more than power-hungry ‘rational-choice’ maximizers. This goes not only for the admirable ones, the Washingtons and the de Gaulles, but also for the most loathsome. Pol Pot wanted more than power; he murdered at least a quarter of the people of Cambodia for a purpose, however vile that purpose was. One was better off under a mere despot, say, Louis XIV.
Notes
- Among contemporary political scientists, Stephen Skowronek and David Plotke both use the term ‘regime’ or ‘political order’ to mean the ruling body, not Aristotle’s politeia but his politeuma. See Skowronek: The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Plotke: Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- On the status see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chapter 12.
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