Parsons, especially Charles Tilly (1978, 2006), William Gamson (1975), Jeffrey Paige
(1975), and Mayer Zald (David et al., 2005), showed that revolutions were just a
type of social movement, rationally planned, with mobilization strategies, grievances,
and specific goals in mind.
But Marx was also wrong—especially about which groups will revolt. It is not
people with nothing left to lose, but people who are thoroughly invested in the social
system and have something at stake. Don’t expect a revolt from the homeless and
unemployed but from the lower middle classes in the cities and the middle-rung peas-
ants in the countryside. Political scientist Ted Robert Gurr (1971) coined the term
relative deprivationto describe how misery is socially experienced by constantly com-
paring yourself to others. You are not down and out: You are worse off than you used
to be (downward mobility), or not as well off as you think you should be (rising expec-
tations), or, perhaps, not as well off as those you see around you.
Revolutions do not take place in advanced societies where capitalism has had time
to create huge gaps between rich and poor. The major revolutions of the twentieth
century occurred in Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam—that is, in peasant
societies where capitalism was vestigial or nonexistent (Paige, 1981; Skocpol, 1979;
Wolf, 1979).
Sociologists typically distinguish among different types of revolutionary events,
along a continuum from the least dramatic change to the most. A coup d’étatsimply
replaces one political leader with another but often doesn’t bring with it any change
in the daily life of the citizens. (Some coups do bring about change, especially when
the new leader is especially charismatic, as in Argentina under Perón.)
Apolitical revolutionchanges the political groups that run the society, but they
still draw their strength from the same social groups that supported the old regime.
For example, the English Revolution between 1640 and 1688 reversed the relation-
ship between the king and aristocracy on the one hand, and the elected Parliament on
the other, but it didn’t change the fact that only property owners were allowed to vote.
Finally, a social revolutionchanges, as Barrington Moore (1966) put it, the “social
basis of political power”—that is, it changes the social groups or classes that
political power rests on. Thus, for example, the French Revolution of 1789 and the
Chinese Revolution of 1949 swept away the entire social foundations of the old
regime—hereditary nobility, kings and emperors, and a clergy that supported them—
and replaced them with a completely new group, the middle and working classes in
the French case, and the peasantry in the Chinese case.War and the Military
In Hebrew and Arabic, the standard word for helloandgoodbyeisshalomorsalaam,
meaning “peace.” War was so common in the ancient world that the wish for
peace became a clichéd phrase, like the English goodbye(an abbreviated version of
the more formal “God be with you”). By some estimates, there were nearly 200 wars
in the twentieth century, but they are increasingly hard to pin down. The old image
of war, in which two relatively evenly matched groups of soldiers from opposing states
try to capture each other’s territory, has become increasingly meaningless in the days of
long-range missiles, smart bombs, and ecoterrorism. However, war still occurs as a
standard, perhaps inevitable characteristic of political life: In his classic On War
(1832), Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is not an independent phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means.”
Worldwide, there are 19,670,000 soldiers. Every country has an army, navy,
or air force, with the exception of some small islands, Panama, and Costa Rica.
The percentage of military personnel is often very high, often as much as 1 percent476 CHAPTER 14POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT