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Concept
The Anatomy of Revolution
Summary
The Anatomy of Revolution is a 1938 book by Crane Brinton outlining the "uniformities" of four major political revolutions: the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American, the French, and the Russian revolutions. Brinton notes how the revolutions followed a life-cycle from the Old Order to a moderate regime to a radical regime, to Thermidorian reaction. The book has been called "classic, "famous" and a "watershed in the study of revolution", and has been influential enough to have inspired advice given to US President Jimmy Carter by his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Iranian Revolution.
Revised editions of Brinton's book were published in 1952 and 1965, and it remains in print. Brinton summarizes the revolutionary process as moving from "financial breakdown, [to] organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown ... revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates .... power passes by violent ... methods from Right to Left" (p. 253).
According to Brinton, while "we must not expect our revolutions to be identical" (p. 226), three of the four (the English, French and Russian) began "in hope and moderation", reached "a crisis in a reign of terror", and ended "in something like dictatorship—Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin". The exception is the American Revolution, which "does not quite follow this pattern" (p. 24).
The revolutions begin with problems in the pre-revolutionary regime. These include problems functioning—"government deficits, more than usual complaints over taxation, conspicuous governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over another, administrative entanglements and confusions".
Official source
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