II. The Wisdom of the Ages

The formal study of revolutions as a part of the science of sociology is a very recent thing. But revolutions are not new, nor is serious thinking on revolutions new. From Plato and Aristotle on one can collect a very valuable set of remarks on different phases of revolution, mostly from books not primarily concerned with revolutions. We have not here attempted to do more than give a random sample of what might be done with this sort of thing. Most of the men we have chosen to cite below were not purely intellectuals in anything like the modern sense, and it would seem that, unsystematic though this section of our bibliography is, it contains more wisdom about revolutions than our fourth section, in which we list a few contemporary works formally concerned with the sociology of revolutions. Most contemporary writers on matters sociological are of course intellectuals.

Plato, The Republic, especially Books VIII and IX.

Aristotle, Politics. Book V is the famous discussion of revolutions, but the whole work, and especially Book II, is almost as pertinent.

Polybius, History. Book VI contains the well-known account of the reasons for Roman political stability, which by contrast throws a good deal of light on our subject, political instability.

Thucydides, History. Book III, 82.2 begins one of the best clinical reports ever written on what we have called the crisis of revolutions.

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Almost every chapter contains something of use for the student of revolution. Book I, Chapters XXV and XXVI, are especially recommended for the light they throw on differences between revolutions like those of England and France and those of contemporary Turkey or Italy.

Sainte-Beuve, “Le Cardinal de Retz,” in Causeries du Lundi, vol. 5, especially the passage beginning “ces pages de ses Mémoires qu’on pourrait intituler: Comment les révolutions commencent.” The interested reader may well wish to follow this up by reading De Retz’s own memoirs, which are easily available in numerous editions in French. There is an English version in Everyman’s Library.

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. This by no means dispassionate work none the less contains a good deal that no student of revolutions can neglect.

Bagehot, Physics and Politics. This book, together with Maine’s Ancient Law, sets forth a point of view about social change which denies the possibility of achieving large-scale reforms by revolution. Like the work of Burke, which they supplement and clarify, they must be met and understood before the objective study of revolutions can be carried very far.

Pareto, The Mind and Society. This is a study of general sociology, almost all parts of which are germane to our purposes in this book. Chapters IX and X deal especially with the problem of social stability and instability, but are hard to understand without reference to the rest of the work. A careful study of L. J. Henderson, Pareto’s General Sociology: A Physiologist’s Interpretation (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1935) will help get around this difficulty. Pareto is cited here as in a sense summing up, clarifying and codifying views about revolution contained in this section of our bibliography. All such views—neither “anti-intellectualist” nor “conservative” adequately describes them—are anathema to most Marxists and “liberals” in present-day America. But they have been held so long and so firmly by men who were not altogether fools nor villains that the least the liberal can do is examine them.

Le Play, L’organisation de la famille; also the volumes of Les ouvriers européens. Le Play and his school merit our attention for much the same reason as does Polybius. Le Play studied the family with great care, and came to certain conclusions about the persistence of certain sentiments and actions among men which no student of attempted social change can afford to neglect.

F. S. Oliver, The Endless Adventure. Oliver was a conservatively minded Englishman who in this volume wrote about one of the least revolutionary of statesmen, Robert Walpole. Again it is useful to us because if we do not understand social stability we cannot hope to understand social instability. Walpole himself is as perfect an example of the man fitted to preserve an old society as Lenin is of the man fitted to guide a new society.