V. Summary

To sum up, it should by now be clear that it takes almost as many kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world. It is probable that, especially in their crisis periods, our revolutions threw up into positions of prominence and even of responsibility men of the kind who would in normal or healthy societies not attain similar positions. Notably, great revolutions would appear to put idealists in possession of power they do not ordinarily have. They would seem also to give scope for special talents, such as Marat had, for yellow journalism and muck-raking of a very lively sort. They certainly create a number of empty places to fill, and give an opportunity to clever young men who may also be unscrupulous. They probably insure a bit more public attention, for a while at least, to the chronic rebel and complainer, as well as to the lunatic fringe of peddlers of social and political nostrums.

But they do not re-create mankind, nor do they even make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women. In all four of our revolutions, even in the Russian revolution, the rank and file was composed of quite ordinary men and women, probably a bit superior to their less active fellows in energy and willingness to experiment, and in the English, American, and French revolutions, even in their crisis periods, people of substantial property. These revolutionists were not in general afflicted with anything the psychiatrist could be called in about. They were certainly not riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth. They were not even worms turning. Nor were their leaders by any means an inferior lot suddenly elevated to positions of power which they could not worthily occupy. There is no question that in the turmoil of revolutions a good many scoundrels rise to the top—though they can also rise to the top without benefit of revolution, as a glance at some of the phases of either the Grant or the Harding administrations should amply prove. But the level of ability, of ability in an almost technical sense, the ability to handle men and to administer a complex social system, the level of ability suggested by names like Hampden, Pym, Cromwell, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Carnot, Cambon, Danton, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, is certainly very high.

All this by no means amounts to asserting the paradox that there are no real differences between revolutions and ordinary times. On the contrary, especially in their crisis periods, revolutions are like nothing else on earth. But you cannot altogether explain the differences between societies in revolution and societies in equilibrium by suggesting that a whole new crew operates during a revolution; by saying, if you dislike a particular revolution and all its works, that the scoundrels and the bums put it over on the good souls; or if you happen to like and approve a particular revolution, that the heroes and sages turned out the corrupt old gang. It just isn’t as simple as all that. Since on the whole the evidence would seem to show that revolutionists are more or less a cross-section of common humanity, an explanation for the undoubted fact that during certain phases of a revolution they behave in a way we should not expect such people to behave, must be sought in changes worked on them by the conditions they live under, by their revolutionary environment.