VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION! Wait I’m not french. But I am learning about revolution. More specifically, I am learning about the theory of revolution and the man who came up with that theory. That man was an American historian named Crane Brinton. He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Revolution in 1938. He looked at 4 revolutions that all shared a similar cycle. He looked at the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian revolution, and the English revolution.

His theory states that all revolutions follow similar steps or stages. Most successful revolutions follow 4 stages that he described as similar to a disease. The stages start with the Incubation stage. In this stage the population has some government-related problem. Something like an economic crisis, government injustice, or class division and antagonism. Or a combo of multiple.

 

The next stage is called the moderate stage. In this stage moderate leaders share their opinions on the matter(s). Sometimes protests and minor violence break out, but things are generally under control.

 

The third stage, the crisis stage, is much worse. Violence is common, and the government may employ secret police. Secret police activities are usually hidden from the public. In this stage, radical revolutions break out. These revolutions usually start a civil war, and are dominated by a strongman. Though not the ones from a circus.

The final stage is the recovery stage. As the name suggests, the nation/nations are recovering from the revolution for better or worse. The economy recovers to a balanced state, the violence diminishes, and the government returns with minor alterations. The sad part is that the recovery stage ends with either war or peace. Need an example? World War 1 started as a struggle between European powers that grew to encompass much of the wider world. WW2 is similar.

So why am I telling you this when you can just google search it? Heck, I’ll do that for you. Well after researching this topic I had a wonder about this theory. Have any significant revolutions broken this cycle?

So Idid some research, and found that all my searches just brought me to the Wikipedia page about the theory itself. So I read the page and found something interesting and useful. While three of the four revolutions that Brinton talks about in his book, the American Revolution (stay tuned for more later) “Does not quite follow this pattern”. The bad news is that I have no way of getting a copy of the book, so I can’t go into full depth and read the rest of the book. If Iget more info I will either update this post or release another post with the updated info on it.
So please stay tuned for that post.

I do suppose it my be possible to stop a revolution, however. If a cause is eliminated during the incubation stage or the moderate stage, the recovery stage will start immediately, and should be rather peaceful. A revolution may even be preventable before it even begins. That would then eliminate the stage(s) afterwards and start a shorter recovery stage.