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• Revolutions are most likely when a long period of economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.
• This leads people to subjectively fear the loss of the gains they have made, resulting in a revolutionary mood.
• Evidence from Dorr's Rebellion, the Russian Revolution, and the Egyptian Revolution supports this idea.
• Statistics on rural uprisings, industrial strikes, unemployment, and cost of living can serve as indicators of popular mood.
• Direct questions in cross-sectional interviews are more useful, though harder to obtain.
• The goal of predicting revolution is conceived but not yet born or matured.

Marx and Engels

• Succinctly presented a theory of revolution that progressive degradation of the industrial working class would reach the point of despair and inevitable revolt.
• Marx described a precondition of widespread unrest as improvement in workers' economic condition that didn't keep pace with capitalist welfare, causing social tension.
• A noticeable increase in wages presupposes rapid growth productive capital.
• Rapid growth productive capital brings about equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments.
• Although workers enjoyments have risen, social satisfaction has fallen compared to the increased enjoyments of the capitalist.
• Desires and pleasures comes from society and are measured by it, not the objects that serve for their satisfaction.
• They're of a social nature, and therefore relative.
• Marx also qualified his belief that degradation produces revolution, expressed this qualification as the main thesis by de Tocqueville in study of the French Revolution.

de Tocqueville

• After a long review of economic and social decline in the seventeenth century then dynamic growth in the eighteenth, concluded that the French found their condition more unsupportable in proportion to its improvement.
• Revolutions aren't always brought about from a gradual decline from bad to worse.
• Nations that patiently endured and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression often burst into rebellion against yoke when it begins to grow lighter.
• The regime destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor.
• Evils endured become intolerable once escape is suggested.
• Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.
• The effect on people's minds in a particular society produces the expectation of continued ability to satisfy needs in the former period.
• During the latter a mental state of anxiety and frustration occurs when reality breaks away from anticipation.
• Socio-economic development is less important than the expectation that past progress can and must continue.

Stability

• Political stability depends on a state of mind.
• Satisfied or apathetic poor remain politically quiet, as correlates, dissatisfied poor revolt.
• It is the dissatisfied state of mind rather than "adequate" supplies of food, equality or liberty that produces revolution.
• There must be joining of forces between dissatisfied people who differ in welfare/status.
• Well-fed, educated, high-status individuals who rebel face apathy among the objectively deprived can accomplish at most a coup.
• The objectively deprived, faced with solid opposition of people of wealth, status, and power, will be smashed in their rebellion

Impoverishment

• Revolutions don't occur when society is generally impoverished because physical and mental energies are employed in staying alive.
• Minnesota starvation studies demonstrated the constant pre-occupation of hungry people with thoughts of food.
• In extremis, the individual withdraws into a life of his own unrelated to staying alive.
• Nazi concentration camps indicated the same preoccupation.
• Less extreme circumstances mitigate staying alive.
• Social action is local, face-to-face.
• In such circumstances the family is the major solidary unit and the local community exists because families need to act together to secure separate survival.
• Similar to life on the 16th-19th century American frontier.
• Mitigated form is rural life today.
• Related to a low level of political participation.
• Preoccupation with physical survival is a force militating against a sense of community and consensus when joint political action is necessary to induce a revolutionary state of mind.
• Far from making people into revolutionaries, enduring poverty makes for concern with one's solitary self or family, and resignation or mute despair.
• When it is a choice between losing their chains or their lives, people will mostly choose to keep their chains.
• It is when the chains can be cast off without a high probability of losing life that people are put in a condition of proto-rebelliousness.

Proto-rebelliousness

• Mood of discontent that may be dissipated before outbreak.
• Can be dissipated by natural or social causes.
• A bad crop year threatening return to chronic hunger may be succeeded by natural abundance.
• Recovery from sharp economic dislocation may remove rebellion.
• Slow, grudging grant of reforms been political history of England that effectively continuously prevents frustration that produces revolt.
• A revolutionary state of mind requires dynamic expectation of opportunity to satisfy needs that may range from physical to social to equal dignity and justice.
• A persistent threat to needs, not sheer survival, but puts them in mental state of inability to satisfy basic needs.
• Physical deprivation may be threatened on the eve of revolutions, and need not be prime factor.
• Fear that ground gained will be quickly lost is crucial.
• Fear does not generate if there's opportunity to satisfy emerging needs; it generates if government suppresses opportunity.
• Dorr's Rebellion (1842), the Russian Revolution (1917), and the Egyptian Revolution (1952) fit the J-curve pattern.

J-curve Theory

• Revolutions are "progressive" revolutions in behalf of greater equality and liberty
• An open question is whether pattern occurs in retrogressive revolutions (Nazism in Germany, 1861 Southern rebellion).
• Necessary to examine other progressive revolutions before judging how universal J-curve is.
• Necessary to examine cases of serious civil disturbance that fell short revolution like Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 in India, Pullman Strike of 1894 in America, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in China, and the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.
• The explanation for why revolutions might have occurred but did not is more complicated for those that come to term in the "normal" course of political gestation.

Dorr's Rebellion of 1842

• one of the first disturbances to occur in America as result of the Industrial Revolution.
• Three years after outbreak in England, the Chartist agitation.
• Machine-operated textile industry in Rhode Island grew from domestic/international demand and domestic/international demand stimulant, notably Napoleonic Wars.
• Jefferson's Embargo Act of stimulus and high tariff in 1816 further stimulated American industry.
• Industrial growth led to movement of people from farms to cities.
• Massachusetts hired the wives and daughters of farmers, to supplemented, not displaced income.
• Rhode Island whole families moved to cities, committed factory system.
• In good times, industrialized families earned two or three times gotten from soil; when mills idle, not enough money bread.
• From 1807 to 1815 textiles, a prosperity; from 1834 to 1842, a depression.
• Prosperity raised expectations and depression frustrated them.
• Resistance suffrage demands stirred in 1790, recurred in extension in Connecticut/Massachusetts.
• Associations met in 1841, called constitutional convention.
• Suffragists held election where adult males voted and constitutional convention delegates elected. In December 1841, People's Constitution was submitted the electorate that approved call for election state officers following April under it.

Conflict with government

• State supreme court stated in March 1842 that new constitution was "of no binding force" and any act "to carry it into effect by force will be treason against the state."
• Legislature passed Algerian law, making voting in April election punishable by jail, office under People's Constitution by life.
• Rebels went ahead with election, May 3, 1842 inaugurated new government. May 4, People's legislature requested sheriff to take state buildings that violence broke out in. A.M.
• Sporadic violence continued in arrest, mostly textile workers, mechanics/laborers.
• Legislature called new convention by manhood suffrage, new constitution in January 1843.
• Only one person killed, violence rebellion, failure, success in months.
• Experience of rising expectations in Rhode Island can't separate American generally.
• Historically shared struggle stubborn ultimately rewarding frontier where self-confidence from tilling soil/harvesting crops also improved skill government.
• Americans continued want more.
• Facilitated by domestic/foreign trade establishment of industry.
• Without struggle, by suffrage reforms states, equalitarian satisfied politics North.

Rising expectations

-Rising expectations goods, equality, self-rule were countered series of containing forces head steam boiler cracked little of contained.

• Consequences aggravated textile 1835 and hit hard with Panic 1837.
• In addition seeing other states peers vote, poor beset industrial dislocation in and never disaster they was bring prosperity and enjoyed before brought economic disaster.
• Machines converted food convert, RhodeIsland went back Machine tenders farm.
• Turned to demands earnestly with reform.
• Hostile increasingly state intransigence government part representing property hostile and supreme class action by with Algerian law after legislation just proved break constitutional enough briefly structures absorbed society resilient that in action which has enough had absorb the power and.

Russian Revolution

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