After setting up his "conceptual scheme" that revolution is a "fever" Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution looks at the Old Regimes of the four revolutions under analysis: British, American, French, and Russian.
Disorder and conflict are not uncommon in all societies. Brinton cites Sorokin in his Social and Cultural Dynamics who cites in England "one hundred and sixty-two 'internal disturbances in intragroup relationships' between 656 and 1921." That's one every eight years. In other words there are likely to be too many symptoms of breakdown in any society to please the analyst of revolution.
First of all, what about the economic situation? The main item of contention was government finances. In England they argued about "Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage"; in colonial America, they didn't want to pay for the Seven Years War; in France the revolution-friendly Estates-General was called because of the government's financial problems; in Russia "the Czarist regime had achieved an all-around collapse in all fields of government activity." And everyone thought their government was incompetent.
Notice it is the government that was in trouble. In all four societies, the people were doing OK economically: Stuart England was definitely more prosperous than Elizabethan England; in America "the early years of the 1770 were distinctly years of prosperity"; "France in 1789 was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government"; even in Russia, aside from the government breakdown, things were looking up.
But plenty of people thought that the government was hindering them: in America the Stamp Act and Navigation Act and the incorporation of the lands west of the Allegheny into Canada; in France tax-reform offended the privileged and the un-privileged, and tariff reductions with England increased unemployment in Normandy.
Of course, the intellectuals were all against the government. But then they usually are. Victorian intellectuals were "united apparently in nothing but a profound dislike for their environment." But no revolution. But in ancien régime France,
One has the impression of immense numbers of intellectuals... all convinced that the world, and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles.
In Russia, being a writer or teacher "meant being against the government." In America, there was no such unity. But the Enlightenment, with Locke and Montesquieu, introduced the "natural and inalienable rights of man." England in the Stuart era was drenched in pamphlets -- in an era before newspapers -- all busy discussing "religion or politics," or both.
What these intellectuals were selling was "another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes." In England they called the ruling class "Normans" after the Norman Conquest; in France they liked to brand the nobility as Franks, descendants of barbarous Germans; in Russia the nobles were all "Varangians, or Tartar or Western": foreigners.
But did the intellectuals cause the revolutions? Brinton is clear: "No ideas, no revolution." But that does not mean that the ideas caused the revolution.
What about class conflict? Such "feelings of dislike" occur in all societies, but are seldom as simple as "bourgeois vs. feudal or bourgeois vs. proletariat." But there is no question that "the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept." In a healthy society the lower orders probably "dream rather of joining them rather than dislodging them." And when members of the ruling class "begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers," etc., they are probably not long for this world.
In Russia, the nobility had been "bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia," and so on. And when they used force, "they used it sporadically and inefficiently." In France ruling class members "discussing the cause of discontented or repressed classes -- upperdogs voluntarily siding with underdogs." And in Stuart England there were the Cavaliers, "romantic even to themselves."
Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class.
Also, many in the ruling class were in a shaky economic position. They had opted for "finer houses, finer clothes" but still lived off their agricultural rents.
And the middle classes hated the upper class. They "felt morally superior to their aristocracies" and, in France by the end of the 18th century, no longer wanted to join the aristocracy, but abolish it. In England this was partly the effect of the artisan classes being "won over to Puritanism."
The lower classes seemed to hate the upper class more than usual. But "trustworthy materials... are scarce."
Was there any particular resistance to talent rising to the top? There is some indication of the French nobility "tightening its lines." In Russia, the nobility "closed the very highest social honors to plebeian talent." Still, the expanding economies permitted plenty of people to rise.
But not to the top.
[T]he countries were "run" by other, and privileged beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded.
"Where wealth... cannot buy everything.. you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution." Still, "The actual revolution is always a surprise."
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