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In this blog I want to compare two approaches to political crises from two people who’ve devoted a lot of time to the topic.

Peter Turchin has been the subject of the last few blog posts. He is a quantitative researcher who graduated from Duke with a PhD in Zoology and specialises in statistical analysis of historical data. He developed a structural demographic approach to understanding cycles of political crisis.

Mike Duncan is an author and podcaster who produced a series on the history of Rome, and from 2013, a history of 10 great revolutions, from the English Civil War to the Russian Revolution. Though Duncan is not a professor, there is no doubt that after 10 years of engagement with histories of political crisis, his viewpoint can act as a counterpoint to the quantitative, statistical view of Peter Turchin. This blog is an attempt to compare the views of both and see where common ground can be found between data analysis and traditional qualitative historiography.

What is a Revolution?

First, we must ask if Turchin and Duncan really are talking about the same thing. Duncan himself focused on events that are widely described as revolutions, and not on political crises in general. However, he chose to start his series with an event not widely known as a revolution at all, the English Civil War of 1643-1652. This highlights the difficulty in classifying different kinds of political crisis in general, and the answer for Duncan, perhaps for expediency’s sake, tends to opt for those events that have some pedigree being called revolutions, even if it leaves out events that could easily be considered such in hindsight. For instance, he spends no time at all on the American Civil War of 1861-1865 which has almost as much a right to be called a revolution as the American Revolutionary War. It was, after all, a huge, militarised rebellion. An apparent wrinkle here is that the rebellion was not an upswell of discontent against the old order, but a reaction to the new, Republican order on the part of the “ancien regime” of Southern semi-aristocrats.

Turchin doesn’t have to pay so much attention to what events are called, so has no trouble lumping the US Civil war, the Russian Revolution, and the Taiping Rebellion into one big “political crisis” category, or what he calls disintegrative phases. Largely, I think that this is justified. What we are interested in when we talk about revolutions is political and social unrest, and violence breaking out within one political unit. We are interested in how violent transfers of power occur, and why. However, there is merit to categorising different kinds of violent power struggles. Duncan argues uncontroversially that some crises avoid revolution by ending in limited palace coups d’etat. A revolution seems to imply the involvement of the mass of people; if the violence stops before it goes beyond the senate floor, it’s less likely to be taken as a revolution. On the other hand, civil wars seem to be named such when the violence leaves the capital city and goes on throughout the nation. It’s another obvious distinction to say that a civil war is any war that goes on within a nation’s borders, that is not an international war, but this is complicated by the fact that it could be between semi-autonomous regions that are attempting to break away.

Yet again, all of this can be going on during what is described as a revolutionary period; for instance, the Russian Revolution involved palace coups, a civil war, and attempts of autonomous regions to break away, as well as urban, peasant, and military uprisings, and reactionary insurgencies. What Duncan and Turchin agree on here is that there are non-revolutionary, non-crisis periods that Turchin calls integrative phases, and what Duncan calls periods of equilibrium; and that these regimes then ultimately fall into crisis. However, though Duncan calls these crises rare, Turchin argues that they happen regularly due to the underlying structural forces. This may be because Duncan is focusing on the grandly named, capital R, “Revolutions,” while Turchin is looking at all the moments of political crisis. In Turchin’s picture, the US has gone through several integrative and disintegrative phases; the first ended in the Civil War, the next in the Great Depression, in which revolution was short circuited by the collapse of private wealth, and the current one being likely to end soon. Duncan’s model of society is one more like a boiling pot which must be watched over in case it starts to bubble over – if the elites keep their eye on it and press the right buttons at the right time, it can be kept to a simmer rather than getting out of hand and scalding them in the process. This is a simplified view, but Turchin thinks in terms of cycles, while Duncan thinks in terms of a steady state interrupted.

Turchin is somewhat pessimistic about the ability of crises to be avoided. This is partly because it seems clear that polities tend to experience a recurrence of crises over their histories, and partly because he is somewhat optimistic about the social changes brought about by revolutions. For Turchin, moments of crisis can lead to a more equitable distribution of resources in society, however impermanent this distribution may be. Though Duncan sees progressive possibilities in revolutions, and here he specifically highlights the Haitian Revolution which freed the enslaved population, he also believes that in many cases, different choices could have resulted in progressive solutions without violence. Both agree that there are cases in which revolutions were avoided, such as in Britain during the 1830s, due to careful political management. However, Turchin thinks that the forces of unrest that build up through integrative phases can’t easily be turned back – avoiding disintegration is essentially impossible, avoiding a fight in these circumstances is a rare victory.

Who makes a revolution?

One thing that both Turchin and Duncan agree on is that national political crises begin largely as elite affairs. To put it in Turchin’s terms, escalating intra-elite competition is what causes a crisis in the legitimacy of the ruling regime. Duncan would say similarly that revolutions start when one elite faction finds itself politically marginalized and disenchanted with the current regime. Turchin argues that such people are elite aspirants, with the connections and resources to challenge power, but no legal or peaceful access to it. The more of these people there are, the more destabilized a regime will be, and the more likely it is to slip into crisis. Duncan is less interested in the raw numbers of would-be elites as he is in their ability to challenge power. The state can only continue to exist if it has an overwhelming preponderance of force, otherwise, ambitious aspirants may take a risk on taking over.

Let’s contrast this with the popular view that revolutions are revolts that come from “the people.” Both Duncan and Turchin are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the chances of a peasant revolt. That’s not to dismiss the fact that there are genuine peasant revolts, both refer to these in their work, however they hold that revolts fomented solely by the lower class never succeed. Firstly, as Duncan states, a united ruling class of elites is a difficult thing to beat. The army of a state is usually paid for by and loyal to the elites of a society first of all – well equipped professional soldiers will always hold the advantage against an unpractised and poorly armed peasant force. It’s also difficult for non-elites to keep fighting for long, as they have little in the way of reserved resources to sustain themselves in the field. They have to, at some point, go back to their fields or their job, since no-one is paying to put themselves in harm’s way.  This picture reinforces the theory of “scale economies of violence”, in which states are created and maintained by equilibrium of people specialised into productive roles, while others are specialised in maintaining the monopoly of violent force through the distribution of productive surplus. The productive class is at a structural disadvantage, and this presents a barrier to collective action, despite their larger number. Another problem is that the productive class of peasants or workers is rarely united in purpose or even politically active anyway. The default position of many is that “I just hope none of this affects me” and have no belief that politics can change their life very much for the better at all.

Before dismissing them entirely, though, I think it is important to recognize that a peasant or worker revolt IS a political crisis. The so-called “Peasant’s Revolt” in England during 1381 confronted the King in person and though it failed, influenced parliament’s willingness to enact poll taxes. Some have argued that the peasants revolt was a much more middle-class phenomenon than the name suggests, but still, it was a revolt of productive workers that had a significant political effect. Indeed, a truly significant political crisis does tend to require mass support to overcome the advantages of the incumbent regime, or at least lend legitimacy to the process.

On the other hand, when elites are dissatisfied with the political situation, their money and connections can cause all kinds of trouble for the ruling regime that a lower-class revolt can’t. They can write things in the newspapers, withdraw investments, pay to train and maintain militias and popular uprisings, and generally create rival centres of power that openly challenge the legitimacy of the current state. There’s also an informational advantage here – not only were elites far more likely to be literate, educated, and have the leisure to read the lessons of Machiavelli and other statesmen, they also have access to broader intelligence about the composition of the elite, their loyalties, the numbers and needs of their armies and subjects. They are in a better position to gauge the likelihood of success and strategize about how to achieve it.

It is this reality which prompted the development of the “elite theory” of politics. This theory can perhaps be summed up in a quote from Italian sociologist and civil servant Gaetano Mosca: “The dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable.” Mosca was not a democrat, but he was a liberal who believed in personal freedoms; and self-identified as an anti-fascist. Turchin holds to this line, but his approach to elite theory makes room for the tension between the interests of the state, the elites, and the population. Elite groups cannot maintain power if the population is mobilized and turned against them, and so to a certain extent, it is in the interest of power elites to at least consider public opinion in order to maintain legitimacy.  This is one reason that Turchin is somewhat optimistic about the progressive potential of political crises, and as mentioned above, Duncan agrees that positive social consequences can emerge from periods of revolutionary destabilization.

The two tend to disagree about what causes elite dissatisfaction in the first place. Turchin’s theory is that increased competition for elite positions is caused by more and more of the nation’s wealth being pumped towards elites, so that there are many more people with the wealth and resources to challenge the current regime; it is a theory of population pressure destabilizing a once stable system. In fact, it is the very stability of the system that increases the likelihood of future instability. The stability of the system allows the elites to plan ahead and predict flows of wealth, through peaceful competition increase their own slice of the pie, until at some point, the competition results in popular suffering and elite infighting. This is why Turchin’s idea of instability features cycles.

Duncan nods in the direction that a stable regime can be destabilized by a change in the economic base, but he doesn’t make this the centre of his theory. Instead, Duncan argues that changes to the equilibrium can be managed if there is competent leadership; and in the cases of all the revolutions he considers, there is a lack of competent leadership. This is what leads to elite dissatisfaction and frustration: when the current order either stubbornly refuses to make changes, or decides it is going to fix something that isn’t broken. He calls this the “Great Idiot” theory of revolutions. This is a counterpart to the “Great Man” theory of history, which focuses on how the acts of one person can cause sweeping social events. Great Man theories are often derided because they can write out of history the efforts of the thousands of other people who were involved, as if Napoleon could have invaded Russia singlehandedly, or they ignore the technological, economic, or social changes that made these political choices possible. Duncan makes the case we can’t rule these out entirely – for instance, he argues that the October Revolution would not have happened without Lenin; a different person would not have pushed so hard against all the forces arrayed against the Bolsheviks in 1917, and if so, the story of Russia would have taken a very different route.

Just so, he argues, if Russia had been ruled by someone more competent and decisive than Tsar Nicholas – if he’d followed the path to a truly constitutional monarchy in 1905, there is every chance the Romanovs would have lasted as long as the Windsors. I think that the great man or great idiot theory need not be dismissive of the huge political undercurrents that create the circumstances for them – to recognize that no person is “great” however talented, unless the social forces their decisions can call upon are great. Some people have great power, and with great power comes… something. In any case, both Lenin and the Tsar had great power. One wielded it effectively, and the other did not. One was good at consolidating power, the other was not.

Taking a step back though, its this great upswell of social power that seems to need an explanation in the first place. Duncan’s theory is that disequilibrium happens, societies change, technology is developed, wars begin, there is a shock to the system, and this leads to an inciting incident when the guns start firing. Turchin seeks to explain the disequilibrium through demographics, in a theory that imagines every political crisis from Ancient Rome to Medieval England and 20^th century Russia could have a common underlying cause. This gives Turchin’s theory predictive power; but it must be modified, since not all disequilibrium results in crises, as in the 1930’s great depression in the US, or the Russian and English reforms of the mid 19^th century. Meanwhile, Duncan doesn’t offer us predictive power unless we’re a little more up close and personal with events at court. This might seem to be a strike against Duncan, but it’s worth noting that though Turchin’s theory gives us some predictive power in the long term, its predictions could still be out by a decade either side. In order to work out when a crisis is likely to break out, we would still need to be paying close attention to the political machinations going on at the centre.

Having said all that, the great idiot theory doesn’t stretch too far if we are including all kinds of political crisis. For instance, did weak leaders cause the American civil war? That particular disequilibrium seemed poised to collapse however individually diplomatically skilled the leaders were. And when it comes to the American revolutionary war, it seems to simplistic, too much like Monday morning sports analysis to say, well, this wouldn’t have happened with a better leader in charge. Could England really have kept its large, dynamic, economically independent US colonies on a leash forever? Structural forces seem much more relevant to US independence than individual personalities, as it seems certain that the US would have claimed its freedom one way or another. 

The synthesis of these approaches is that perhaps a data-based, Turchin approach might identify coming moments of crisis, but that leadership can, in theory, do something about it –and this is something that I think Turchin would agree with to some extent.