| Chapter 2: | Pattern of the Insurrection and Modernity |
symmetry between institutions and mass mobility, and when normal political processes ultimately cease to function. The malfunction occurs when there is high intensity of conflict between the competing interest groups, when resolution and mediations fail, and when the political system is consequently ripped apart in a violent manner.
There should be two necessary conditions for the above phenomenon to take place. First, the differences between the interest groups must be irreconcilable within the existing system. Second, two or more of the competing interest groups must have sufficient resources organizationally, financially, and politically to wield substantial control over the country’s military and political machine.
All second generation theorists mentioned above agree on one thing. Once a revolutionary situation becomes ripe, any incidental reversal that societies could normally absorb, such as war, wrong steps taken by those in a ruling position, a mutiny, a riot, or even crop failure and incidental famine, may trigger the final act of the revolution.
The problem with the second generation of revolutionary theorists is that they all believe that a country faces a revolution due to a variety of social changes: economic, demographic, military, cultural, technological, or organizational. But as Eisenstadt’s study has shown, the great empires of the past, such as those of Rome, Byzantium, and the Moguls also experienced these changes, and yet the empires did not end up with a revolution, but a gradual decline and decay.8 One may, therefore, rightly ask why these changes led to revolution in the case of France, Russia, or China, and yet ended in gradual decay in the case of Rome, Byzantium, or the Moguls in India? The problem with these theories is also the assumption that any society undergoing rapid change moves toward an inevitable violent revolution. But as Eckstein notes, the West has been subjected to rapid social change since the 1750s and with European contact other parts of the world since the 1850s and yet the systems have stayed in equilibrium.9 One may therefore ask why violent revolutions have actually been rare? Why a revolution did not take place, for instance, in Britain, which was subjected to rapid social change since 1700, or in Japan since 1875?