A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF REVOLUTIONS
PROFESSOR CHARLES A. ELLWOOD, PH.D. The University of Missouri
Among the phenomena of social evolution there are none more striking to the student of history and sociology than those commonly called revolutions. I do not use the word in a loose sense, to designate any sudden political or social change from coups d'etat or "palace revolutions" to rever- sions in fashions and industrial changes due to great inven- tions; but I refer to those convulsive movements in the history of societies in which the form of government, or, it may be, the type of the industrial and social order, is suddenly transformed. Such movements always imply a shifting of the center of social control from one class to another, and inwardly are often marked by a change in the psychical basis of social control; that is, a change in the leading ideas, beliefs, and sentiments upon which the social order rests. Outwardly such movements are char- acterized by bloody struggles between the privileged and the unprivileged classes, which not infrequently issue in social con- fusion and anarchy. Revolutions in this sense are best typified in modern history, perhaps, by the Puritan Revolution in England and by the French Revolution. Less typical, but still in some sense revolutions, were our War for Independence and our Civil War.
The objective explanations of revolutions which have usually been offered by historians and economists that is, explanations in terms of economic, governmental, and other factors largely external have been far from satisfactory, inasmuch as they have lacked that universal element which is the essential of all true science. These explanations have, to be sure, pointed out true causes operating in particular revolutions, but they have failed to reveal the universal mechanism through which all revo- lutions must take place. In the mind of the sociologist, there-
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