Looking at Social Revolutions

Alan Knight’s Social Revolutions: A Latin American Perspective provides an interesting approach to thinking about revolutions.  This article sets out to challenge prominent revolutionary theories, as they do a poor job of accounting for Latin American Revolutions. Typically, dominant theories concerning revolutions regard certain pre-revolutionary processes as key to defining a revolution.  They also tend to consider a strengthened national state as the most important revolutionary outcome.  Latin American revolutions, as Knight explores, challenge these definitions on various grounds.

Knight’s piece examines Skocpol’s asserted theory of revolutions, which emphasizes state-building and international systems as the important causal and functional factors and outcomes of a revolution.  However, the case in many Latin American revolutions as actually the opposite; a state breakdown was not a causal factor in these cases.  In fact, in the instance of several Latin American nations, the revolution was actually the cause of the state’s downfall.  To address this theoretical flaw, Skocpol offered another explanation that situates ‘economic dependency’ in place of ‘international-state conflict’, effectively shifting causal emphasis from the state to socio-economic factors.  However, as Knight explains, even this amendment is not applicable to countries that experienced a social revolution. 

Skocpol’s amendment is still inadequate in regards to Latin American Revolutions.  Though it shifts focus from the state to social causes, it is weak in that it continues to focus on individual components of the revolutions.  Knight raises a good point in the need to distinguish causal factors of a revolution.  While social circumstances in two different countries may be comparable, the way they come together vary greatly between nations and do not necessarily follow the same path and exhibit similar patterns.  Skocpol’s theory condemns all revolutions to a particular pattern, leaving no room to appreciate Latin American countries’ disparate paths to revolution, “narratives that depend on a peculiar concatenation of events” [181].  

Social revolutions are defined as such because of their social revolutionary outcome, defined in this piece as substantial and irreversible socio-political changes.  They do not follow the typical patterns of revolutions as put forth by prominent theories that focus primarily on “the great revolutions”.  Following the standard theoretical approach overlooks the important lasting outcomes of social revolutions.  I think it is important to challenge the lens through which we define revolutions.  Accepting prominent theories of revolutions could not possibly express the successes (or failures) of Latin American revolutions as the standards do not regard important aspects of these revolutions in their focus. 

Knight briefly talked about how revolutionary successes often do not correspond to the intentions of their participants, but that the revolutionary projects are purposefully planned.  Particularly interesting to me was the assertion that, even when a revolutionary regime fails to maintain power, a revolution may still be successful if it has brought about “substantial and irrevocable socio-political change,” because, in the end, long-term structural changes are the key to social revolutions.  This point better orients me in deciphering successful and unsuccessful aspects of revolutions.  I expect to continue my studies on revolutions and reforms with this notion in mind.  Is a revolution successful if it achieves only some structural changes?  What revolutions do we consider more successful than others, why?