Hello there everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be answering a question that I came up with involving revolutions. The assignment was to get a question that involved revolutions and Crane Brinton’s theory on revolutions. Now I know most of you won’t know ship crane Brenton is so that is why I’m going to write a bit about him now.

CRANE BRINTON

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Crane Brinton was a historian who was born in 1898 in Connecticut in the United Staes of America. He was most well known for his theory on revolutions. He published a book in 1938 called “Anatomy of Revolution”. This is the main reason why he was famous. In this book he explored four revolutions and what made them similar. These revolutions were the French Revolution, the English Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the American Revolution. In his book he explained the process of a revolution and found out that they were mostly the same.

 

CRANE BRINTON’S BOOK

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His anatomy said that a revolution started out as a disease slowly growing among the people. After that the symptoms start to show, which in this case would be small protests and unease within the people. Then comes the crisis stage. This would be like the stage in a disease where you start to feel really bad and weak. In a revolution this would be the part when there would be some kind economic crisis going in the government like taking to much taxes off the people. Then there is the stage where most of the people start to feel unjustified by the government and get angry that they are being wronged. This stage his helped along by the fact that most revolutions had a very weak ruler to fight against.

 

WEAK RULER

 

The weak ruler is normally very greedy and takes the money from the people and not surprisingly that makes them very mad. It is then that some of the people start to stand up against the government and speak out against their actions. This gave more confidence to other people and more and more people stand up against the government.

 

STAND UP AND FIGHT

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Next comes the stage where all the different groups of people start to argue and fight each other, these groups are mostly a higher class of people against the lower class. Next in his anatomy is the defeat of the current governments military. This is important because if the government doesn’t have an army than it will be a million times easier to overthrow them. After this stage radicals take control of the government and the violence increases greatly and high ranking government officials are usually killed in public places.

 

ARMY

 

Then the radicals start to form a new sort of government with the new rules that the people want. The violence diminishes and a new order of peace is established in the people. Then after that the government returns and is now changed by the effects of the revolution.

 

CHANGES

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So now that you know what Crane Brinton’s theory is I can now get into the question that I am going ask which is “Do Crane Brinton’s theories still influence new one that are being made today? The answer is no, I could not find any new theories that were based on Crane Brinton’s. In fact I could not find many new theories at all on revolutions.

 

NO NEW THEORIES

 

I have to admit I was surprised when I could not find any new theories never mind any based on Crane Brinton’s. The only thing I could find that Crane Brinton had influenced was something called collective behaviour theorists. These people found his work very helpful in developing their own theories. They found his work helpful because it helped them better understand peoples behaviour in groups that lead to a revolution or civil unrest, and because that is what they study and look at they found it easy pickings.

 

EASY PICKINGS

 

Now why I think there aren’t any new revolution theories. I think there are no new ones because what Crane Brinton said in his book still stands as nearly 100% accurate. Every revolution that has taken place since then has pretty much followed his theory. Why would anyone need to make a new theory if the old one still stands as the most accurate. I think that Crane Brinton was well ahead of his time when he wrote the book and explained revolutions because no one today that I found can come up with a better theory.

 

An example of a revolution since his theory is the Cuban revolution. It started with a man named Batista making a power grab and becoming dictator. Then the people started to get very unhappy with what was happening. A man named Fidel started speaking out against the dictator and staging attacks in his men. The army eventually gave up or joined the rebel army to fight against Batista. The people started to get angry with the dictator and started joining the rebels, soon there was a massive movement against the dictator. Batista fled with a couple of his high ranking officials and a democracy was created. This follows Crane Brinton’s theory almost through the entire process. So in the end I think his theory will stand for a long time until some new sort of revolution kicks in, if one ever does.