Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Eth ...

A third group of non-Marxist revolutionary theorists has also sprung up almost simultaneously with the second generation. The new group, unlike the first or the second-generation theorists, consider four variables to be crucial for an understanding of the anatomy of a revolution. First, they feel that the above-mentioned theorists have neglected to analyze the structure and priorities of the status quo state as a distinct variable. For example, Eckstein posits that only a particular kind of state that he dubs “feudal-imperial” may inevitably face a revolution.¹⁰ This kind of state is prone to revolution, according to him, because it extracts resources from the society, permeates and mobilizes it for the benefit of a specific elite, which monopolizes the political, cultural, and religious institutions. Skocpol, who tried to understand in her own words “the logic of social revolu­tionary causes and outcomes from France in the 1790s to Ethiopia in the 1970s,” points out that revolutions are enhanced in societies where the goals of a state, for example, industrialization or modernization, come into conflict with elite class privileges and resource capabilities.¹¹ Trimberger concurs with this stand.¹² Skocpol also suggests that revolutions take place in “agrarian-bureaucratic” societies, where a centralized machine, and powerful landlords reap the benefit of a predominantly agrarian economy.

Another variable the third generation theorists consider important in deciphering the causes of a revolution is the linkage with inter­national political and economic forces. Neumann, Moore, Wolfe, Kelly, Miller, Rosenau, and Paige thus posit that revolutions are triggered by foreign military conflicts, or by the intrusion of inter­national capitalist markets on domestic agriculture and trade.¹³

Political linkage as a theoretical framework of political analysis has increased in importance since the 1960s. But the study has been almost wholly confined to an explanation of the impact of external variables on domestic politics or of internal politics on foreign policy. Rosenau’s Linkage Politics is the keynote of this move.¹⁴ He distin­guished between nine types of linkage, six aspects of international political behavior, and twenty-four features of domestic political processes. This is all the more important because there is no lack