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Social revolutions are sudden changes in the structure and nature of society. [1] These revolutions are usually recognized as having transformed society, economy, culture, philosophy, and technology along with but more than just the political systems. [2]
Theda Skocpol in her article "France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions" states that social revolution is a "combination of thoroughgoing structural transformation and massive national and class upheavals". [3] [4] She comes to this definition by combining Samuel P. Huntington's definition that it "is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activities and policies" [5] and Vladimir Lenin's, which is that revolutions are "the festivals of the oppressed...[who act] as creators of a new social order". [6] She also states that this definition excludes many revolutions, because they fail to meet either or both of the two parts of this definition. [7]
Academics have identified certain factors that have mitigated the rise of revolutions. Many historians have held that the rise and spread of Methodism in Great Britain prevented the development of a revolution there. [8] In addition to preaching the Christian Gospel, John Wesley and his Methodist followers visited those imprisoned, as well as the poor and aged, building hospitals and dispensaries which provided free healthcare for the masses. [9] The sociologist William H. Swatos stated that "Methodist enthusiasm transformed men, summoning them to assert rational control over their own lives, while providing in its system of mutual discipline the psychological security necessary for autonomous conscience and liberal ideals to become internalized, an integrated part of the 'new men' ... regenerated by Wesleyan preaching." [10] The practice of temperance among Methodists, as well as their rejection of gambling, allowed them to eliminate secondary poverty and accumulate capital. [10] Individuals who attended Methodist chapels and Sunday schools "took into industrial and political life the qualities and talents they had developed within Methodism and used them on behalf of the working classes in non-revolutionary ways." [11] The spread of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, author and professor Michael Hill states, "filled both a social and an ideological vacuum" in English society, thus "opening up the channels of social and ideological mobility ... which worked against the polarization of English society into rigid social classes." [10] The historian Bernard Semmel argues that "Methodism was an antirevolutionary movement that succeeded (to the extent that it did) because it was a revolution of a radically different kind" that was capable of effecting social change on a large scale. [10]
Skocpol distinguishes her theory from psychological theories of revolution ("aggregate psychological theories"), theories of systems and values, and theories about political conflicts. [12] Ted Robert Gurr and his book Why Men Rebel is given as an example of a psychological theory with this theory explaining violence as a result of anger deriving from an inability of individuals to achieve or do the things they value a state called relative deprivation. [12] Charles Tilly with this book From Mobilization to Revolution is given as an example of a political conflict theory. He argues that groups with resources competed for political power, and that changes in access to resources could result in revolution. [13] Chalmers Johnson with his book Revolutionary Change, discusses a value-based model. Society is modeled in terms of the coordination of different values realized through socialization, norms and rules, which then legitimize the political order. Johnson argues that revolution occurs when these values become disaligned. [14] Skocpol also argues that Marxist theories can be useful for understanding revolutions but that they lack an explanation for when revolutions do and don't occur not considering the role of the organization of the state in revolutions focusing instead of the class structures. [15]
Skocpol argues that while revolutions can be explained in terms of these sociological theories, it is difficult to work out which explanation is true because the concepts are so general. She argues that a comparative historical approach informed by concepts from sociology is useful. [16]
In political science, a revolution is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's state, class, ethnic or religious structures. A revolution involves the attempted change in political regimes, substantial mass mobilization, and efforts to force change through non-institutionalized means.
A state is a political entity that regulates society and the population within a territory. Government is considered to form the fundamental apparatus of contemporary states,
Social conflict theory is a Marxist-based social theory which argues that individuals and groups within society interact on the basis of conflict rather than consensus. Through various forms of conflict, groups will tend to attain differing amounts of material and non-material resources. More powerful groups will tend to use their power in order to retain power and exploit groups with less power.
An institution is a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
Rebellion is a violent uprising against one's government. A rebel is a person who engages in a rebellion.
Modernization theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset, drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, and saw a resurgence after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory.
Michael Mann FBA is a British-born emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the University of Cambridge. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China is a 1979 book by Theda Skocpol, published by Cambridge University Press, that examines the causes of social revolutions.
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
Historical institutionalism (HI) is a new institutionalist social science approach that emphasizes how timing, sequences and path dependence affect institutions, and shape social, political, economic behavior and change. Unlike functionalist theories and some rational choice approaches, historical institutionalism tends to emphasize that many outcomes are possible, small events and flukes can have large consequences, actions are hard to reverse once they take place, and that outcomes may be inefficient. A critical juncture may set in motion events that are hard to reverse, because of issues related to path dependency. Historical institutionalists tend to focus on history to understand why specific events happen.
Comparative historical research is a method of social science that examines historical events in order to create explanations that are valid beyond a particular time and place, either by direct comparison to other historical events, theory building, or reference to the present day. Generally, it involves comparisons of social processes across times and places. It overlaps with historical sociology. While the disciplines of history and sociology have always been connected, they have connected in different ways at different times. This form of research may use any of several theoretical orientations. It is distinguished by the types of questions it asks, not the theoretical framework it employs.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1970s.
This bibliography of sociology is a list of works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of sociology. Some of the works are selected from general anthologies of sociology, while other works are selected because they are notable enough to be mentioned in a general history of sociology or one of its subdisciplines.
A political revolution, in the Trotskyist theory, is an upheaval in which the government is replaced, or the form of government altered, but in which property relations are predominantly left intact. The revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848 are often cited as political revolutions.
A counter-revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary is anyone who opposes or resists a revolution, particularly one who acts after a revolution in order to try to overturn it or reverse its course, in full or in part. The adjective "counter-revolutionary" pertains to movements that would restore the state of affairs, or the principles, that prevailed during a prerevolutionary era.
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) is a book by Barrington Moore Jr.
Historians have held that religious Revivalism in the late eighteenth century distracted the minds of the English from thoughts of Revolution.
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