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Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution

1973; Wiley; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2504909

1468-2303

Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, Sasha Weitman,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Revolutions have fascinated moralists, political theorists, and historians for centuries. Since 1789, the prevalence of and, perhaps more important, the threat of have been pervasive forces in contemporary society. Social scientists and other students of the human condition have launched inquiries with an extremely wide diversity of objectives and methods; and we feel it necessary, in order to delineate our own approach, to distinguish among the variety of activities commonly collected under the titles of revolution or the sociology of revolution.' Some writers have attempted to discern, beneath the violence and chaos of revolutions and the diversity of revolutionary experiences, a more or less uniform pattern of development, advancing a natural of revolution. Such studies concentrate on the course of events in revolutions once they have begun, rather than, for example, on the patterns of recruitment of leaders and followers into revolutionary movements, or the conditions of social structure before revolutions break out, or the consequences of revolutionary episodes for the history of society. Such work is invariably and necessarily comparative. In the natural approach, is regarded as a species, of which the French, the Russian, and the American might be selected specimens. The object about which generalizations are desired is the class of all revolutions, whose common taxonomically defining elements are sought.2 Other theories and comparative efforts go beyond such attempts to generalize over the class of all revolutions, in order to seek common elements in such broader categories as internal war or conflicts within nations.3 While we