Revolution

The first extended account of political revolution in the Western tradition appears in the eighth and ninth books of Plato's Republic, where the changes of constitutions are set out as a descending sequence. Aristocracy, the rule of the wise, gives way to timocracy when the guardians come to prize honor above wisdom; timocracy to oligarchy when honor yields to the love of wealth; oligarchy to democracy when the poor, grown numerous and resentful, prevail over the rich; and democracy to tyranny when an excess of liberty disposes a people to accept the protection of a popular leader. Each of these transitions is a revolution in the sense of a change in the form of government, and each, on Plato's showing, proceeds from a corruption within the class that rules rather than from any pressure applied from without.

Since the city is treated in the Republic as an image of the soul writ large, every constitution has its answering type of man: the timocratic man ruled by spirit, the oligarchic by the appetite for gain, the democratic by appetites acknowledging no order among themselves, and the tyrannical by the most lawless of them. The political change and the change of character proceed together. Plato also observes what later writers on faction repeat, that an oligarchical city is not one city but two, the city of the rich and the city of the poor, dwelling in the same place and plotting against one another. This division of the state along lines of property is discussed more fully under the ideas of Oligarchy and Wealth.

Whether the sequence Plato describes is a necessary order or only a likely one has been variously answered. His inquiry, in any case, is directed to the causes and the succession of constitutional change rather than to the question, prominent in later theory, whether rebellion can be justified. He suggests that the descent might be arrested by rulers who govern from knowledge rather than from interest, and by an education that forms such rulers, though he does not appear confident that either will be found. The related problems of the tyrant's origin and his methods are treated under Tyranny.

Plato's ordering of the constitutions supplied the terms in which later writers stated their own accounts. Aristotle grants that constitutions change into one another, but denies that they change in any fixed order, and in the fifth book of the Politics he examines the causes of revolution in each form of government separately. Those modern writers who conceive revolution as carrying a society forward rather than downward, Marx among them, reverse the direction of Plato's sequence while retaining his supposition that political change follows from causes within the social order itself.

The fifth book of the Politics is given over to the causes, the varieties, and the prevention of revolution, or stasis. Aristotle does not adopt Plato's single descending sequence. Revolutions, on his account, follow no fixed order and occur under every form of government, the causes differing according to the constitution in which they arise. He distinguishes, moreover, among the several things a revolution may aim at. Some revolutions seek to change the constitution itself, as from democracy into oligarchy or from oligarchy into democracy; others leave the form of government standing and seek only to place the administration in different hands; and others are directed against a single part of the constitution, as when Lysander is said to have attempted the overthrow of the Spartan monarchy and Pausanias the overthrow of the ephoralty.

The universal and chief cause of the revolutionary impulse Aristotle finds in the desire for equality on the part of those who think themselves the equals of men who have more, and in the desire for superiority on the part of those who, conceiving themselves superior, think they have no more than their inferiors. Such pretensions, he adds, may or may not be just, and his treatise deals alike with revolutions springing from real and from fancied injustice. The occasions are many: insolence, gain, honor, contempt, disproportionate increase in some part of the state, and even accident, as when the loss of many notables in battle at Tarentum turned a constitutional government into a democracy. Revolutions are effected, he writes, in two ways, by force and by fraud, the deceived citizens being afterwards held in subjection against their will or else won over to consent.

The remedies proposed are proportioned to the causes. A constitution mixing the claims of wealth and of number, resting on a numerous middle class and distributing offices so that no faction is driven to desperation, is the most enduring. Aristotle grants that an equalization of property may keep citizens from quarrelling, but he does not think economic injustice the sole cause of revolution or economic justice its cure, since the avarice of mankind is insatiable and men who have grown accustomed to a sum always want more. The beginning of reform, in his opinion, lies rather in training the better natures not to desire more and preventing the lower from getting more. The arts by which a tyrant preserves his power are examined separately, and are treated more fully under the idea of Tyranny.

Aristotle's manner of inquiry, which asks by what modes states are destroyed and by what means they may best be preserved rather than whether rebellion can be justified, set the pattern for much later constitutional thinking. His account of the struggle between the rich and the poor for control of the state, discussed also in the chapter on Oligarchy, is retained by writers as far apart as Machiavelli and Marx, though the latter holds that the revolutions of the ancient city-states were political rather than economic, since they sought to change the constitution and not the mode of production. The doctrine that stability depends upon a middle class and a proportional distribution of office reappears in Aquinas, in Montesquieu, and in the Federalist papers.

Where Aristotle asks chiefly how revolutions arise and how they may be prevented, Aquinas asks whether they can be justified, a question which comes to the foreground in medieval and modern teaching. In the Summa Theologica he treats sedition as a special kind of sin, opposed to a special kind of good, namely the unity and peace of a people. He is careful to distinguish it from the neighboring evils of war and strife. War is carried on against external foes, being as it were between one people and another; strife is between one individual and another; sedition, in its proper sense, arises between the mutually dissentient parts of one people, when one part of the state rises in tumult against another. It differs from both, further, in that war and strife denote actual aggression, whereas sedition may denote either aggression or the preparation for it.

The condemnation is then qualified in the case of an uprising against tyranny. Since a tyrannical government is directed not to the common good but to the private good of the ruler, it is not just; and there is accordingly no sedition, on Aquinas's view, in disturbing a government of this kind. It is the tyrant rather who is guilty of sedition, since he sows discord among his subjects that he may lord over them the more securely. The doctrine rests on the position, set out at greater length under the ideas of Law and Government, that authority exists for the common good and derives its title from that end.

The qualification is itself qualified. Aquinas allows the exception only when the tyrant's rule is not disturbed so inordinately that the subjects suffer greater harm from the disturbance than from the tyranny, and in On Kingship he holds that the judgment belongs to the community rather than to private persons. Whether the endurance of a moderate tyranny is to be preferred to the hazards of civil strife is thus made to depend on a comparison of evils rather than on any general principle either permitting or forbidding rebellion.

The distinctions Aquinas draws furnished much of the vocabulary in which the right of resistance was afterward argued, through the Reformation, the English civil wars, and the American founding. Locke's position that a ruler who uses force without right puts himself into a state of war with his people, so that it is the tyrant and not the people who rebels, states in the language of natural right what Aquinas states in the language of the common good. It should be noted, as against those who divide the tradition sharply into friends and opponents of revolution, that Aquinas justifies sedition against no government whatever except a tyranny, a limitation which brings him nearer than might be supposed to writers who deny the right of rebellion outright.

Machiavelli departs from the classical writers in declining to treat civil discord as simply a disease of the body politic. In the Discourses on Livy he maintains that the tumults between the Roman senate and the plebs, far from being marks of corruption, were the occasion of Rome's good laws and of its liberty. Every republic, on his account, contains two opposed humors, the desire of the great to dominate and the desire of the people not to be dominated; and where institutions bring these into open contention rather than suppressing them, liberty is the result. The class division which Plato and Aristotle regard as the standing cause of revolution is thus assigned a use.

The Prince considers the same subject from the side of the ruler who must maintain himself against usurping rivals and rebellious subjects. Machiavelli observes that there are two ways of contesting, the one by law and the other by force, the first proper to men and the second to beasts, and that since the first is frequently insufficient it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second. The prince who is compelled to adopt the way of the beast ought to choose the fox and the lion together, since the lion cannot defend himself against snares nor the fox against wolves. Force and fraud, in this treatment, are the ordinary methods of changing rulers and modes of rule, and they are the same methods by which a ruler in possession keeps his place. The choice between them appears to be one of expediency rather than of principle, guile being recommended with force held in reserve should cunning fail.

Machiavelli's rules for the prince do not greatly enlarge upon Aristotle's description of the arts by which a tyrant preserves his power, a subject taken up under the idea of Tyranny. What he adds is a distinction between the founding or renewal of a political order and its mere disturbance. Moses, Romulus, and Theseus are cited as men who used force to establish orders that outlasted them, and the difficulty of such founding is emphasized: the innovator has for enemies all who profited under the old order and for defenders only those who may profit under the new, and these defend him lukewarmly. The act is judged by what it establishes rather than by the means employed at the moment of establishment.

The view that political conflict may be a source of freedom rather than a symptom of decay reappears in Rousseau and, in an altered form, in Marx, for whom the struggle of economic classes is the moving cause of historical change. Machiavelli's frankness about force and fraud also drew the opposition of writers who deny any right of rebellion, since it seems to make the possession of power the only question at issue. Whether revolution is a matter of might or of right is the point on which the later discussion largely turns.

Writing in the years of the English civil war, Hobbes takes revolution to be inseparable from violence and identifies it with the state of war itself. Men living without a common power to keep them all in awe are in the condition called war; and those who deny the authority of the commonwealth, renouncing their subjection to the sovereign, relapse into that condition. Rebellion, in his phrase, is but war renewed. Since the covenant by which men institute a commonwealth is made among themselves and not with the sovereign they create, subjects cannot lawfully make a new covenant to obey another without his permission, nor can those who are subject to a monarch cast off monarchy and return to the confusion of a disunited multitude.

The denial of a right of resistance is drawn out further. Because every subject is by the institution of the commonwealth the author of all the actions and judgments of the sovereign, whatever the sovereign does can be no injury to any subject, nor ought he to be accused by any of them of injustice. Hobbes remarks that men differ in this from bees and ants, whose societies are never threatened by rebellion, since among men there are very many who think themselves wiser and abler to govern the public than the rest, and who strive to reform and innovate, one this way and another that, and thereby bring the commonwealth into distraction and civil war. In the twenty-ninth chapter he enumerates such causes of dissolution: the doctrine that each private man may judge of good and evil, the division of sovereign power, and the reading of the Greek and Roman authors who praise tyrannicide.

The denial is nevertheless qualified. Every subject retains liberty in those things the right whereof cannot by covenant be transferred, chief among them the right of a man to defend his own body and to resist those that assault him, together with access to food, air, medicine, or anything else without which he cannot live. This is a liberty of self-preservation in the individual and not a title in the people, considered as a body, to judge or depose the sovereign. The relation between sovereignty and the state of nature is discussed more fully under the ideas of Government and of War and Peace.

Hobbes states the question which later writers on the right of rebellion have had to meet, namely, whether the overthrow of authority can be anything but a return to the condition authority was instituted to escape. Locke's Second Treatise answers by distinguishing the dissolution of a government from the dissolution of the society, so that the people who displace a ruler do not thereby return to the state of nature. Kant and Hegel take a position nearer to Hobbes, though each qualifies it, Kant excepting resistance required by a moral duty outside the sphere of public right, and Hegel distinguishing rebellion in a conquered province from a rising in a well-ordered state.

Holding that the end of government is the good of mankind, Locke asks which is the better condition: that the people should be always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power and employ it for the destruction rather than the preservation of the property of their people. Since force is to be opposed to nothing but unjust and unlawful force, he argues that a king may be resisted when he exceeds his authority or prerogative. Such a king has dethroned himself and put himself into a state of war with his people, and there is then nothing to hinder them from prosecuting him as they would any other man who had done so. The principle is stated generally: whoever uses force without right, as everyone does in society who uses it without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it.

The consequence Locke draws from this is that the party charged with rebellion is not the one commonly so named. Men having entered into society and introduced laws for the preservation of property, peace, and unity among themselves, those who set up force again in opposition to the laws are the ones who rebellare, that is, bring back again the state of war, and are properly rebels. Strictly, on this view, it is not the people who rebel; it is they who put down the sedition of the tyrant. The right to resist extends, Locke allows, to striking and to punishing the offender, both for the breach of the peace and for the evils that followed upon it, so that even regicide differs in no way from the punishment of any other criminal.

To the objection that such a doctrine lays a perpetual foundation for disorder, and that it may occasion civil wars to tell the people they are absolved from obedience when illegal attempts are made upon their liberties, Locke replies that one might as well say that honest men may not oppose robbers and pirates because this may occasion bloodshed. He does not think governments will be overthrown upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne without mutiny or murmur, and the principle will not operate until the inconvenience is so great that the majority feel it and find it necessary to have it amended. Only a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, makes the design visible enough to rouse them.

What Locke states as a right of resistance the Declaration of Independence appears to put more positively as a right of rebellion, deducing it from the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and repeating almost verbatim his phrase about a long train of abuses and usurpations. The two formulations are not obviously identical, since a right to resist unlawful force is narrower than a right to alter or abolish any form of government; and the writers of the Federalist papers, who accept the first, do not seem equally willing to acknowledge a right to overthrow the Constitution. The distinction between the dissolution of a government and the dissolution of the society, on which Locke's answer to Hobbes turns, is considered further under the ideas of Government and Liberty.

Montesquieu turns the discussion from the question of right to the question of prevention, asking less whether rebellion can be justified than how a political order may be so constituted that the occasion for it does not arise. The answer he proposes is structural. Where the legislative, executive, and judicial functions are gathered into the same hands, whether of one man, of a few, or of many, liberty is at an end and despotic power follows; where they are lodged in distinct bodies, each restrains the others. It is a constant experience, he observes, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it and to carry his authority as far as it will go, so that power must be checked by power in the disposition of things themselves rather than by the good intentions of those who hold it.

The eleventh book of The Spirit of the Laws takes the English constitution as its example, describing a government whose direct end is political liberty, in which the crown executes, the parliament legislates, and the courts judge. Such an arrangement Montesquieu calls moderate government, meaning government by settled law rather than by arbitrary will. Moderate government does not remove political conflict; it gives conflict a form within the constitution, and by affording legal means of redress it removes some of the accumulation of grievance from which insurrection proceeds. The connection between the forms of government and the principles that animate them, honor in monarchy and virtue in the republic, belongs to the discussion of Government and of Law.

A second line of inquiry concerns the conditions on which any constitution depends. In the nineteenth book Montesquieu treats the general spirit of a nation, formed by climate, religion, laws, maxims of government, manners, and customs, and argues that laws which run against this spirit will not hold. Legislators who attempt to change manners by law, when manners might better be changed by manners, invite the disorder they mean to prevent. On this view political dissolution may follow as readily from a want of correspondence between laws and the temper of a people as from any defect in the arrangement of offices.

The Federalists adopt the separation of powers as the structural principle of the Constitution, and with it the hope that political change might be effected by legal means. Whether institutional contrivance can displace the causes of revolution, or only provide them with an orderly channel, remains in dispute. Aristotle had held that the same end is served by a numerous middle class and by laws distributing office proportionally, while Marx maintains that no arrangement of political forms can prevent conflict whose sources lie in the mode of production. The question of the conditions under which laws are obeyed is treated further under the ideas of Law and Custom.

Rousseau derives the right of rebellion from the character of the social pact itself. That pact, as he conceives it, is not an agreement between a people and a ruler but an act by which individuals unite into a collective body whose sovereign authority is the general will. Government is an intermediate body established to execute the sovereign's commands, holding its commission by delegation and not by contract. When the government usurps the sovereignty and substitutes its own particular will for the general will, the social compact is broken, and private citizens recover by right their natural liberty.

The dissolution which Rousseau considers is of a kind not much treated by earlier writers, namely the degeneration of the state into anarchy through the repudiation of the pact rather than the substitution of one ruler or one ruling class for another. He holds that every government tends toward such degeneration, concentrating power and separating its interest from the people it was instituted to serve, and that the body politic, like the human body, bears in itself from its birth the causes of its own destruction. The remedy proposed is the periodic assembly in which the people are asked whether it pleases them to preserve the present form of government and to leave the administration in the hands that now hold it.

On the resistance to a despot Rousseau is less hesitant than Locke. The contract of government, he writes, is so completely dissolved by despotism that the despot is master only so long as he remains the strongest, and as soon as he can be expelled he has no right to complain of violence; a popular insurrection ending in the death or deposition of a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which the sultan disposed the day before of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. As he was maintained by force alone, it is force alone that overthrows him. Rousseau offers no separation of powers or scheme of checks against the corruption he describes, the remedy being always the direct action of the assembled people. The related questions of sovereignty and the general will are treated under the ideas of Government and Liberty.

The doctrine that sovereignty is inalienable and cannot be transferred to any representative furnished much of the language of the French Revolution, and through it of later revolutionary movements. Rousseau's account of the dissolution of the state calls to mind no historic examples of its own, though the few instances of wars of secession, which aim to dissolve a federal state by severing ties of union having something like a contractual character, may be thought to illustrate it. Whether such a severance is an insurrection of the sort the Declaration of Independence announces, or something distinct from it, is a question the American case has been used to argue on both sides.

As against both those who identify revolution with violence and those who deny any right of resistance, the writers of The Federalist conceive the possibility of a revolutionary process at once peaceful and legal. It is because they think the Constitution affords the opportunity of achieving fundamental political change by amendment that they defend the clause guaranteeing to every state a republican form of government and promising to protect each against domestic violence. To the objection that such a guaranty amounts to an officious interference in the domestic concerns of the members, Hamilton replies that it could be no impediment to reforms of the state constitutions by a majority of the people in a legal and peaceable mode, since that right would remain undiminished, and that the guaranty could operate only against changes to be effected by violence. Toward the prevention of calamities of this kind, he adds, too many checks cannot be provided.

The right of resistance is nevertheless acknowledged. Hamilton allows that if the representatives of the people betray their constituents there remains no resource but the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government. Madison, considering an insurrection pervading all the states and comprising a superiority of the entire force, thinks such a case beyond the compass of human remedies, and holds it enough that the Constitution diminishes the risk of a calamity for which no possible constitution can provide a cure. Hamilton similarly doubts that a conflagration through a whole nation, proceeding from weighty causes of discontent or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, falls within any ordinary rules of calculation, no form of government being able always to avoid or control it. Where the whole power of government is in the hands of the people, however, there is in his estimation the less pretence for violent remedies in partial distempers of the state.

The contrivances by which ordinary discontents are given a legal outlet are drawn partly from Montesquieu and partly from the Federalists' own observation. The separation of powers, the checks by which ambition is made to counteract ambition, and the division of authority between the states and the union are supplemented by Madison's argument in the tenth paper that an extended republic, by multiplying factions, makes a tyrannical majority less likely to form. The elective process itself is described as the natural cure for an ill administration in a popular or representative constitution, namely a change of men; and the amending clause provides for changes in the constitution which in the ancient city-states, as Aristotle describes them, appeared revolutionary in the double sense of involving violence and of transforming the polity.

Two questions are left open by this treatment. The first is whether a legal and peaceable alteration of the fundamental law is properly called a revolution at all, or whether the word requires the resort to force, or at least the threat of it, which traditional discussions of revolutionary causes, strategy, and right appear to contemplate. The second is whether constitutional contrivance can displace the causes of revolution or only afford them a channel. Marx holds that it cannot displace them, since on his account the conflict of classes arises from the mode of production and is not to be composed by any arrangement of political forms. It may also be observed that the signers of the Declaration of Independence speak of a right to alter or abolish any form of government, while the writers of The Federalist do not seem equally willing to acknowledge a right to overthrow the Constitution of the United States.

The distinction between economic and political revolution appears to be peculiarly modern, and it is Marx who gives currency to the word in its economic sense. The ancients were not ignorant of the class war. Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle observe the struggle of rich and poor for control of the state, a matter discussed under the idea of Oligarchy; but the oligarchical and democratic revolutions which those classes fomented were political in the sense of seeking to change the constitution rather than the economic system itself. An economic revolution, on Marx's understanding, radically alters the mode of production. The change from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy which Adam Smith describes, and which is commonly called the industrial revolution, is an economic revolution in this strict sense. In manufacture, Marx writes, the revolution in the mode of production begins with labor power; in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labor, the first inquiry being how the instruments of labor are converted from tools into machines.

Such changes in the physical conditions of production are held to involve equally radical changes in the relations of economic classes and in their possession of political power. The modern bourgeoisie is itself said in the Manifesto to be the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange, and it cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and with them the whole relations of society. Marx and Engels accordingly apply the term revolutionary class to the bourgeoisie as well as to the proletariat, not to the bourgeoisie of the present, whom the established order of capitalism has made conservative, but to the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, which overthrew the landed aristocracy. The French Revolution, on their reading, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property, and represents a struggle between two propertied classes rather than between the propertied and the propertyless.

On the question whether economic revolutions require violence in their social and political aspects, the Manifesto is unambiguous so far as the communist program is concerned. A revolution involving the most radical rupture with traditional property relations can hardly be expected to occur without open warfare. It is precisely on the use of force that the Manifesto distinguishes communism from the socialism which rejects all revolutionary action and seeks its ends by small experiments and the force of example. Yet the dictatorship of the proletariat is presented as a temporary phase. In sweeping away the old conditions of production, the proletariat is said to sweep away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and thereby to abolish its own supremacy as a class.

In aiming at an economically classless society, with the consequent transformation of the state, the communist program seems to conceive its revolution as abolishing the possibility of or the need for any further revolutions, peaceful or violent, economic or political. Whether a classless society entails the withering away of the state, or only such changes in political institutions as would make revolution unnecessary, remains debatable even on Marx's own premises; and it is still conceivable that in such a society the equivalent of a palace revolution might substitute one ruling individual for another by the old methods of assassination or usurpation. A further question, which Marx raises without settling, is why a class whose interest is said to point toward revolution should so often be bound in allegiance to the order that exploits it. The relation of economic to political power is pursued further under the ideas of Labor and Wealth.