I. The Diagnosis of Preliminary Signs

From France, which has long carried out a kind of linguistic Free Trade, comes the phrase “old regime.” Applied to the history of France, it covers roughly the society of the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the generation or two preceding the revolution of 1789. We may reasonably extend its use to describe the varied societies out of which our revolutions emerged. Following our conceptual scheme, we shall look in these societies for something like a revolutionary prodrome, for a set of preliminary signs of the coming revolution.

Such a search must not be undertaken without one important caution. Disorder in some sense appears to be endemic in all societies, and certainly in our Western society. The historian turned diagnostician can find evidences of disorders and discontents in almost any society he chooses to study. If a stable, or healthy, society is defined as one in which there are no expressions of discontent with the government or with existing institutions, in which no laws are ever broken, then there are no stable or healthy societies. Not even the totalitarian state, one suspects, can live up to this standard.

Our normal or healthy society, then, will not be one in which there are no criticisms of the government or the ruling class, no gloomy sermons on the moral decay of the times, no Utopian dreams of a better world around the corner, no strikes, no lock-outs, no unemployment, no crime waves, no New Deals. All we can expect of what we may call a healthy society is that there should be no striking excess of this sort of thing, and perhaps also that most people should behave as if they felt that, with all its faults, the society were a going concern. Then we may look about for the kind of signs just described—discontents expressed in words or deeds—and try to estimate their seriousness. We shall, of course, very soon find that we are dealing with a large number of variables, that for given societies studied in their old regimes these variables combine variously and in different proportions, and that in some cases certain variables are apparently absent altogether or nearly so. We are surely unlikely to find in all the cases we study one clear, omnipresent symptom, so that we could say: when you find x or y in a society, you know that a revolution is a month, or a year, or a decade, or any time in the future. On the contrary, symptoms are apt to be many, varied, and by no means neatly combined in a pattern. We shall be lucky if, to borrow another medical term, they form a recognizable syndrome.