This idea, which is held with some variation by Sumner, Gobineau, Faguet, and Conway, is, I believe, both unhistorical and unpsychological, because it is but a half-truth. This substratum of the population does at the moment of revolution become a dangerous mob. Such people are unadjusted to any social order, and the least deviation from the routine of daily life throws them off their balance. The relaxation of authority at the moment when one group is supplanting another in position of social control, is to these people like the two or three days of interregnum between the pontificates of Julius and Leo, described by Cellini. Those who need some one to govern them, and they are many, find their opportunity in the general disturbance. They suddenly react to the revolutionary propaganda which up to this minute they have not heeded, they are controlled by revolutionary crowd-ideas in a somnambulistic manner, and like automatons carry these ideas precipitately to their deadly conclusion. But this mob is not the really revolutionary crowd and in the end it is always put back in its place by the newly dominant crowd. The really revolutionary crowd consists of the group who are near enough the dominant crowd to be able to envy its "airs" with some show of justification, and are strong enough to dare try issue with it for supreme position. Madame Rolland, it will be remembered, justified her opposition to aristocrats on the principle of equality and fraternity, but she could never forget her resentment at being made, in the home of a member of this aristocracy, to eat with the servants.
What Le Bon and others seem to ignore is that the ruling class may be just as truly a crowd as the insurrectionary mob, and that the violent behavior of revolutionary crowds is simply the logic of crowd-thinking carried to its swift practical conclusion.
It is generally assumed that a revolution is a sudden and violent change in the form of government. From what has been said it will be seen that this definition is too narrow. History will bear me out in this. The Protestant Reformation was certainly a revolution, as Le Bon has shown, but it affected more than the government or even the organization of the Church. The French Revolution changed the form of the government in France several times before it was done, passing through a period of imperial rule and even a restoration of the monarchy. But the revolution as such survived. Even though later a Bourbon or a prince of the House of Orleans sat on the throne of France, the restored king or his successor was hardly more than a figurehead. A new class, the Third Estate, remained in fact master of France. There had been a change in the ownership of the land; power through the control of vested property rested with the group which in 1789 began its revolt under the leadership of Mirabeau. A new dictatorship had succeeded the old. And this is what a revolution is—the dictatorship of a new crowd. The Russian revolutionists now candidly admit this fact in their use of the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Of course it is claimed that this dictatorship is really the dictatorship of "all the people." But this is simply the old fiction with which every dominant crowd disguises seizure of power. Capitalist republicanism is also the rule of all the people, and the pope and the king, deriving their authority from God, are really but "the servants of all."
As we have seen, the crowd mind as such wills to dominate. Society is made up of struggle groups, or organized crowds, each seeking the opportunity to make its catchwords realities and to establish itself in the position of social control. The social order is always held intact by some particular crowd which happens to be dominant. A revolution occurs when a new crowd pushes the old one out and itself climbs into the saddle. When the new crowd is only another faction within the existing dominant crowd, like one of our established political parties, the succession will be accomplished without resort to violence, since both elements of the ruling crowd recognize the rules of the game. It will also not result in far-reaching social changes for the same reason. A true revolution occurs when the difference between the dominant crowd and the one which supplants it is so great as to produce a general social upheaval. The Reformation, the French Revolution, and the "Bolshevist" coup detat in Russia, all were of this nature. A new social leadership was established and secured by a change in each case in the personnel of the ownership of such property as would give the owners the desired control. In the first case there was a transfer of property in the church estates, either to the local congregations, or the state, or the denomination. In the second case the property transferred was property in land, and with the Russian revolutionists landed property was given to the peasants and vested capital turned over to the control of industrial workers.
Those who lay all emphasis on this transfer of property naturally see only economic causes in revolutionary movements. Economics, however, is not a science of impersonal things. It treats rather of mens relations to things, and hence to one another. It has to do with valuations and principles of exchange and ownership, all of which need psychological restatement. The transfer of the ownership of property in times of revolution to a new class is not an end, it is a means to a new crowds social dominance. The doctrines, ideals, and principles believed by the revolutionary crowd also serve this end of securing its dominance, as do the social changes which it effects, once in power.
Revolutions do not occur directly from abuses of power, for in that case there would be nothing but revolution all the time, since every dominant crowd has abused its power. It is an interesting fact that revolution generally occurs after the abuses of which the revolutionists complain have been in great measure stopped—that is, after the ruling crowd has begun to make efforts at reform. The Reformation occurred in the pontificate of Leo X. If it had been the result of intolerable abuse alone, it would have happened in the time of Alexander VI, Borgia. The French Revolution fell upon the mild head of Louis XVI, though the wrongs which it tried to right mostly happened in the reign of his predecessor. In most cases the abuses, the existence of which a revolutionary crowd uses for propaganda purposes, are in turn repeated in new form by itself after it becomes dominant. The Reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resorted to much the same kind of persecution from which they had themselves earlier suffered. The Constituent Assembly, though it had demanded liberty, soon set up a more outrageous tyranny through its own committees than any that the Louies had dreamed of. Bolshevists in capitalist countries are the greatest advocates of free speech; in Russia they are the authors of a very effective press-censorship.
No, it is hardly the abuses which men suffer from their ruling crowds which cause insurrection. People have borne the most terrible outrages and suffered in silence for centuries. Russia itself is a good example of this.
A revolution occurs when the dominant crowd begins to weaken. I think we find proof of this in the psychology of revolutionary propaganda. A general revolution is not made in a day, each such cataclysm is preceded by a long period of unrest and propaganda of opposition to the existing order and its beneficiaries. The Roman Republic began going to pieces about a hundred years before the battle of Actium. The social unrest which followed the Punic Wars and led to the revolt of the brothers Gracchi was never wholly checked during the century which followed. The dominant party had scarcely rid itself of these troublesome "demagogues" than revolt broke out among the slave population of Sicily. This was followed by the revolt of the Italian peasants, then again by the insurrection of Spartacus, and this in turn by the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, the brief triumph of Julius Cæsar over the Senate, the revenge of the latter in the assassination of Cæsar, and the years of turmoil during the Second Triumvirate.
It is doubtful if there was at any time a very clear or widespread consciousness of the issues which successively arose during that unhappy century. It would seem that first one counter-crowd and then another, representing various elements of the populace, tried issue with the ruling crowd. The one factor which remained constant through all this was the progressive disintegration of the dominant party. The supremacy of the Patres Conscripti et Equites became in fact a social anachronism the day that Tiberius Gracchus demanded the expropriation of the landed aristocracy. The ideas whereby the dominant crowd sought to justify its pre-emptions began to lose their functional value. Only the undisguised use of brute force was left. Such ideas ceased to convince. Men of unusual independence of mind, or men with ambitious motives, who had grown up within the dominant crowd, began to throw off the spell of its control-ideas, and, by leaving it, to weaken it further from within. No sooner was this weakness detected by other groups than every sort of grievance and partisan interest became a moral justification for efforts to supplant the rulers. The attempt of the dominant crowd to retain its hold by repeating its traditional justification-platitudes, unchanged, but with greater emphasis, may be seen in the orations of Cicero. It would be well if some one besides high-school students and their Latin teachers were to take up the study of Cicero; the social and psychological situation which this orator and writer of moral essays reveals has some suggestive similarities to things which are happening to-day.
The century and more of unrest which preceded both the Reformation and the French Revolution is in each instance a long story. But in both there is the same gradual loss of prestige on the part of the dominant crowd; the same inability of this crowd to change with the changes of time; to find new sanctions for itself when the old ones were no longer believed; the same unadaptability, the same intellectual and moral bankruptcy, therefore, the same gradual disintegration from within; the same resort to sentimentalism and ineffective use of force, the same circle of hungry counter-crowds waiting around with their tongues hanging out, ready to pounce upon that before which they had previously groveled, and to justify their ravenousness as devotion to principle; the same growing fearlessness, beginning as perfectly loyal desire to reform certain abuses incidental to the existing order, and advancing, with every sign of disillusionment or weakness, to moral indignation, open attack upon fundamental control ideas, bitter hostility, augmented by the repressive measures taken by the dominant crowd to conserve a status quo which no longer gained assent in the minds of a growing counter-crowd; finally force, and a new dominant crowd more successful now in justifying old tyrannies by principles not yet successfully challenged.