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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix Three: From Equilibrium to Disequilibrium

Before we get going, I wanna remind everybody that I’m doing ticketed live shows in October, and those dates are coming up fast. I will be talking about history and narrative building and how we situate ourselves in the world by telling historical stories about ourselves and our societies and the whole world. Historical storytelling is often treated as merely a sub genre of literature, when in point of fact it is literally the way humans organize their existence. I mean, think about it — anytime you start trying to describe your own individual life or explain the society you live in, you’re almost automatically doing historical storytelling. So I will have deep thoughts on all that, and then take any burning questions you might bring with you. It’s a great night, so I hope everybody will come to see me…

• October 3rd in Austin, Texas at the Paramount Theater,
• October 4th in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts,
• October 5th in Seattle at Town Hall, and then
• October 25th in Chicago at the Vic Theater,
• October 26th, Boston at the Wilbur theater,
• October 27th in Washington, DC at the Lisner Auditorium, and then finally,
• October 29th in Newark, New Jersey at the New Jersey Performing Art Center.

Links to the tickets are in the show notes, and I can’t wait to see you all there.

Now last week, we talked about the prevailing sovereign regimes from which our revolutions emerge. Now, the first thing to note is that revolutions are rare. They are not common events. And it’s why when they happen, we are so gripped by them and so fascinated by them. Most regimes, most of the time, do as the British are so fond of saying they do, which is simply muddle along. Sovereign regimes are typically either just responsive enough to their perpetually fluctuating socioeconomic base to remain in power via slow evolutionary transformation, or they are so tyrannically repressive that they don’t care and they don’t have to care. They successfully eliminate the slightest hint of opposition. Now, obviously the most successful sovereigns do both. They both change with the times and prevent the formation of any true threat to their power. They preside over and maintain a stable political equilibrium where all possible threats or either modified, co-opted, or repressed. And last week we noted that all of our ancien regimes achieved this kind of stable equilibrium for decades before faltering, and then failing, and then falling.

And what we’re gonna talk about today is how the faltering begins, how a regime that has achieved stable equilibrium — politically and economically and socially — enters a period of disequilibrium. Because the kind of historical event that go down as revolutionary triggers, the kinds of things we’re gonna talk about next week, wouldn’t have happened, or they would not have mattered at all in a stable political regime. It is only because the system itself has become unstable, that it has entered an acute state of disequilibrium, that a revolution can be triggered at all. So, let’s talk about the onset of pre-revolutionary disequilibrium.

Now, the thing that I have seen repeatedly over all ten seasons of the podcast is that political disequilibrium begins at the top. There is an old saw about the fish rots from the head, and I found this to be broadly true. I think in all our revolutions the opportunity for a larger revolutionary event is made possible by a significant split inside the ruling class. This split inside the ruling class matters not just in moral or psychological terms, but in material terms. The members of the ruling class are members of the ruling class because they control significant resources. They are rich, they run businesses and industries and banks. They own large tracks of productive land. They have influence and authority inside key regional blocks. They have a massive roster of clients, individuals, families, whole regions, whose fortunes are tied to some particular individual or family or faction of the ruling class, such that if the deal goes down, and we wouldn’t be here if the deal wasn’t about to go down, these defecting members of the ruling class can call on all these resources to attack the sovereign rather than defend it. And once that call comes down from the defecting wing of the ruling class, that’s when popular forces enter the equation, popular forces that will turn elite conflicts into revolutionary events. Because those popular elements are initially suborned, approved, and encouraged by a significant faction of the ruling class.

Now we start with the rotting head, not because only elite conflict matters, or that popular pressures from outside the ruling class circles don’t play any role at all — of course there’s much much more going on — but a unified ruling class is a very tough nut to crack. As long as they’re all on the same side, it’s extremely difficult to get a revolution going. It’s also, obviously not the case that the popular forces called to enter the fray on behalf of this defecting wing of the ruling class have the same objectives as their alleged leaders. I’m just saying that time and again, the door to revolution is first opened by intractable conflicts inside the ruling class, from great English lords challenging King Charles I, to pretty much every member of the Russian court challenging Tsar Nicholas, the flood of revolution rises in the headwaters of the ruling class.

Also, just to make a quick point before we move on, the equilibrium that exists in the “stable regime” is by no means about uniform harmony. As we talked about last week, ruling class groups will always be divided between those in favor and those out of favor, and there’s always gonna be people grumbling not just about the individuals in power but the whole system. So I just wanna be clear here that the equilibrium we’ve been talking about is not about everyone in the ruling class agreeing with everyone else like they share a hive mind. But rather, there exists a stable balance of competing forces, who are jockeying for power and position and influence, such that those who might be inclined to overturn the whole system are marginalized and isolated.

So when we go looking for pre-revolutionary disequilibrium, the question is not, ooh, is there conflict among the elite, because there will always be conflict among the elite. It is more properly, is the sovereign able to keep these conflicts inside the regular bounds to the political order? Can the out of favor faction be placated sufficiently to prevent them from seeking irregular solutions to their grievances, and can the in favor faction be encouraged to not dig their heels in quite so much to ensure that such irregular solutions are not contemplated by their opponents.

Now, we might be tempted to think that disequilibrium enters the picture when a reformist opposition inside the ruling class challenges the prevailing status quo with greater and greater intensity, that this is all akin to a military siege where the reformist opposition wing launches an offensive against the conservative wing, who dig in for a stubborn defense. In this telling, all the initiative is coming from the reformist opposition. But true pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is a two to tango type situation. It’s not just that the forces of reform antagonized defenders of the status quo, it’s that the defenders of the status quo themselves display greater than usual inflexibility and intolerance. Their behavior is more provocative and inflammatory than it has been in the past. Now a stable regime can grapple — if not intelligently, than at least competently — with the ever evolving nature of the society they rule, such that calls for reform and innovation can be absorbed and responded to or outright coopted. Pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes when responsible leaders in the regime, monarchs and ministers and advisors, become unresponsive and stubbornly antagonistic in new and novel ways. There needs to be pushing and pulling on both sides for equilibrium to collapse.

In the broadest and most abstract terms, what I think is going on in this push pull struggle that creates pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is a conflict between innovation and tradition, between the desire to create something new, and the desire to preserve something old. Now, again, we might tend to think, oh yes, this is easy to explain: opposition reformist forces from the out of favor wing of the ruling class launch broadsides against the defenders of the status quo. And indeed, this is often the case. There’s a prevailing system of government, an available litany of ideas and reforms and policies from which to draw critiques of the system, and a growing circle of influential people in the ruling class willing to provide those critiques. Then, when their initial reform efforts are thoroughly stymied by an unusually inflexible sovereign, they turn to our irregular solutions. This is the very familiar story of innovative outsiders challenging insiders, who are defending the traditional status quo.

But there’s a whole other side of the innovation/tradition dynamic. Because innovation is not the sole preserve of progressive reformers challenging the existing sovereign. In fact, as often as not, pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes when the sovereign itself is the one introducing innovations to enhance and entrench its own power. Think of the buildup to the English Revolution, the decade of personal rule by King Charles I is almost entirely the story of Charles and his ministers introducing innovation after innovation to the existing political system. Innovations in taxation, in religion, in administration. Whatever else Charles was up to, it was not about a conservative defense of the traditional status quo.

So too with crown and parliament before the American Revolution. The story of post Seven Years War Colonial America is a story of new taxes, new regulationsions, and new rules being introduced into the political system by the sovereign. I actually found this dynamic to hold true for all the European colonies in the Americas after the Seven Years War: the British, the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch, the Portuguese — each in their own way introduced innovative reforms that triggered, with their very newness, resentment, anger, and combativeness from the colonial elite opposed to these intolerable threats to their traditional rights and privileges. So the innovation that upsets the political equilibrium and creates pre-revolutionary disequilibrium comes from the sovereign, on behalf of the sovereign.

What this means is that concepts like innovation and tradition do not really tell you much about the lay of the revolutionary land. Obviously, there are defenders of tradition who will turn out to be staunch conservatives and reactionaries, the Comte d’Artois and future King Charles X of France leaps immediately to mind, so too obviously Nicholas and Alexandra. These are people who you would never find on a list of revolutionary leaders who are obsessed with defending the traditional order.

But there are also defenders of tradition who do wind up on the list of revolutionary leaders. Quite a lot of them. One need look no further than the colonial elite of British North America in the 1760s and 1770s. They were mostly interested in stopping innovative encroachments to their traditional rights and privileges and ways of life. It was the powers that be that launched a campaign of change in reform and innovation, not those who would wind up taking up revolutionary arms.

We can also point to, say, the Robe Nobility of pre-Revolutionary France, who use their institutional control of the parliament to resist political, financial, and administrative innovations coming down from the crown — up to and including bringing in popular forces to support them.

But on the other hand, we do of course find the forces of innovation intuitively in the revolutionary camp. In cases like the European Revolutions of 1848 or Russia in 1905 and 1917, we find advocates of new things like constitutions and bills of rights and participatory parliament in the revolutionary camp after the deal goes down. But, as we just noted, we also find the forces of innovation, trying to reform the regime in order to save it. And we’re talking here about the Turgots and the Wittes and the Stolypins of the world. None of those guys were interested in overthrowing the regimes they served. Their innovations were about putting the sovereign on sound and sustainable footing. So whether or not you’re among the forces of innovation or the forces of tradition doesn’t really tell us much about where you’ll wind up when the revolution starts.

Now in this conflict between innovation and tradition, I have observed two recurrent models for how things unfold historically, and I cannot help but laugh because these two models are totally contradictory. Not only can I not report that there is just one model of the innovation versus tradition conflict that holds true in all revolutionary cases, but I cannot even say that the two models I found are remotely similar. They are in fact, complete opposites.

In one model, revolutionary disequilibrium comes when intolerable innovations from the regime provoke resistance from a significant faction of the ruling class, and in the other model, revolutionary disequilibrium comes when innovations pushed by those outside the regime are stymied by those inside the regime, which provokes frustration amongst the significant faction of the ruling class.

So on the one hand, we can say that the arrival of something new triggers political disequilibrium. And on the other hand, we can say the obstruction of something new triggers pre-revolutionary disequilibrium.

So, sorry for anyone out there who came here looking for the master key to explain all revolutions… there isn’t one.

So let’s talk first about resistance. Many revolutions begin their life in the resistance. The sovereign introduces something new and inflammatory, and inflamed groups organized to resist. As I just mentioned, the new taxes and religious dogmas introduced by Charles I provoked Puritans and parliamentarians to organize a resistance. In the American Revolution, the arrival of the Stamp Act, the Navigation Acts, the Intolerable Acts. Triggered progressively more organized resistance efforts, mostly in the form of protests and boycotts and petitions. In pre-Revolutionary France, crown ministers like Turgot and [????] and Necker introduced revenue and administrative reforms that ran afoul of the parliament, who believed, not incorrectly, that the crown was attempting to grow its power at their expense. So the build up to 1789 was about resistance to innovations from the crown.

We even see this in Haiti, because remember, before the real revolution got going in 1791, the Big Whites of Saint-Domingue were getting annoyed at attempts by the crown to control their activities in the colonies, like new policies handed down from on high demanding they be not quite so brutal in the treatment of their slaves.

In Spanish America, the reforms to colonial administration imposed by the Bourbon Kings Charles III and Charles IV in the name of efficiency, rationality, and profitability posed a threat to the Criollo elite in those colonies, because the major connective threat of all those reforms was more centralized control by Spain.

Then, the revolution of 1830s, probably as pure a case of resistance to revolution as we’re likely to find. King Charles X tried to roll back politics to 1788, and resistance to his efforts in the late 1820s exploded spectacularly in the summer of 1830. The barricades that went up in July went up quite literally as an act of physical resistance to the Four Ordinances.

Now, before I go on, I do wanna establish that in most cases of sovereign innovation, the principle issue on the table is money. To the extent that abstractions like efficiency or rationality enter the conversation, it is invariably in the service of generating more revenue for the sovereign, more consistently and in a more sustainable way. Charles I did all his innovations because he needed money and didn’t want to call parliament. The British ministry wanted the American colonies to at least pay for themselves, so they started dropping new taxes and regulations. Then obviously everything going on in pre-Revolutionary France is about the crown trying and failing, trying, and failing again, trying and failing some more, to get its financial house in order, to somehow extract money from their very wealthy kingdom.

Now, this is not always the case — 1830 seemed to be mostly about personal pique rather than a cash grab — but resistance is very often driven by the sovereign’s attempt to extract money in ways intolerable to those who have money. When the financial innovations fail to head off a coming financial crisis, often thanks to widespread resistance, those with money now have enormous leverage over the sovereign — and, they’re also now mad as hell about ten to fifteen years of intolerable innovations. That’s where revolutions can come from.

Okay, so many revolutions come when the sovereign innovates in ways that make people mad and trigger a resistance. That makes sense. But a bunch of revolutions come about in the opposite way, when the sovereign is not innovating. Society is changing, events are unraveling, inadequacies are obvious, and yet nothing is being done, everything is staying the same. As I mentioned last week, watching a bunch of incompetent ministers run your country or your kingdom or your empire into the ground is downright offensive to members of the ruling class who consider themselves smart, wise, and capable… or at the very least smarter, wiser, and more capable than the jokers currently wrecking things. So the feeling that’s growing out there and creating pre-revolutionary disequilibrium is not resistance, but frustration. Nobody’s trying to stop anything; in fact, they’re desperate to get something started.

And what’s kind of weird but I think is just a coincidence, is that the first six series of the podcast seemed to follow the model of resistance to innovations, while the final four fit this model of frustration. I mean, 1848 was so much about mounting frustration across Europe, from nationalists and liberals looking for things like constitutions and self-rule and bills of rights and participation in government and unification of national interests, all being stymied by regimes stubbornly sticking to the reactionary spirit of the age of Metternich. The Banquet Campaign in France was driven by people who believed they deserved to have the right to vote and be heard in national politics. And it was their frustration with Guizot’s inaction that got them going more than resistance to Guizot’s innovations. Because there were none. Guizot was just sitting there, arms folded, refusing to do anything. The Third French Republic will come along and overthrow the Second Empire after an entire decade of mounting frustration with the inadequacies of Napoleon III’s imperial regime.

The build up to the Mexican Revolution is mostly a story of out of favor Mexican elites organizing themselves around the idea that Porfirio Díaz has to go, because his regime has become old and stagnant and is not keeping up with the times. This is why the Creelman interview turns out to be so important to the early run of events, because in that interview, Díaz indicated that desired changes would be coming, and then he reneged.

Then finally in Russia, we have this huge array of elites, practically everyone outside of Nicholas and Alexander’s nuclear family, craving new ministers, new leaders, and new policies. All those educated professionals and the zemstvo? They were begging to be allowed to help run Russia because they knew they could do a better job. And instead of being invited in, they were shut out, much to their great… what? That’s right. Frustration.

So pre-revolutionary disequilibrium can be stirred by one of two great emotional forces: resistance and frustration. But just as with the existence of elite conflict, I have to make the point that resistance or frustration are two very normal political feelings, even in stable systems. Those who don’t want something done, that is being done, will resist its rollout and impact. Those who want something done, but see that it’s not being done, get frustrated. The difference here is that resistance and frustration will grow beyond the bounds of the existing political system, because they’ve been building for too long, or because some kind of crisis hits the system that amplifies the political stakes. So regimes enjoying stable equilibrium will always contain elements of resistance and frustration, but they are kept at a low simmer rather than heated up to a rolling boil. And just to reiterate the point we introduced in our last appendix, one of the great ways to take things from a low simmer to a rolling boil is to have one of our great idiots of history running the kitchen.

Now, the last thing I want to talk about today that brings some unification to the different types of pre-revolutionary disequilibrium, whether in the form of resistance or frustration, is the presence of new ideas in the society, new ideas that provide a glimpse of what an alternative regime might look like, or rhetorical language that casts a political struggle in newer and more explosive terms. Without new ways of thinking, the old ways of doing will never change. A society organized around an absolute monarch can’t be challenged by new notions of rights and constitutions or liberty and equality until those ideas exist. Defending worker rights in a capitalist system, isn’t gonna happen until people articulate new critiques of that system and offer new solutions to the new problems.

These new ideas are generated from a variety of places: intellectuals, writers, philosophers, literary and artistic salons, all of which, and all of whom, are often patronized and attended by prominent members of the ruling class, who are happy to encourage the growth and elaboration of new political and social ideas. These ideas also often come from entirely different countries; this is ideas migrating across borders in that ever present international republic of letters. And the intellectual current of regimes on the verge of becoming ancien regime must, almost by definition, be flowing without effective interference from that regime. New and novel ideas that challenge the regime spread because the regime can’t stop them.

We see this in pre-Revolutionary France and central Europe in the 1840s, and especially in Russia, where the alleged smothering blanket of official censorship was always exaggerated, because if it was really true, nobody would be able to read the revolutionary denunciations of censorship, which they always could and always did. I think I’ve mentioned this, but the details of the tsar’s censorship office are hilarious with how overworked, understaffed, and hapless they were.

So, a regime that is transitioning from political equilibrium to political disequilibrium is one in which new ideas that challenge the prevailing regime cannot be stopped. And just to reiterate, this point are often being encouraged and spread by elements of the ruling class. We call this going the full duke d’Orléans.

Now, one of the most important way that new ideas can destabilize the equilibrium of a regime is not just about introducing wholly novel ways of thinking about things, but also providing rhetorical frameworks that successfully recast mere self-interest as a fight over great abstractions like justice and liberty. This is how mere annoyance with a new tax or frustration with the conduct of a particular minister transcends the particulars of the moment and becomes not just a small matter of the money at stake, but the enormous matter of rights. This rhetorical advance is a great driver of pre-revolution disequilibrium. Resistance to a new tax is not about my own pocketbook here and now, it’s about defending the rights of man always and everywhere. When this move is made, it doesn’t matter if the new tax is a single extra dollar per year, it must be resisted. I mean, it’s how all those guys convinced themselves that paying an extremely rudimentary land tax was literal slavery. Frustration can become expressed in apocalyptic terms that all but preclude the possibility of reconciliation. Revolutions are, after all, born first in the mind, and so new ways of thinking and speaking are incredibly important to growing disequilibrium in a society where all compromises and settlements will no longer feel valid.

All of this leaves us on the verge of where I will start next week: with a political regime now consumed by disequilibrium being hit by shocks to the system, which opens the door for some spark, some trigger, some flashpoint to send everyone flying in wildly different directions, opening up the possibility of a complete reformation of the political order.

And if the ruling class that has gotten all of this destabilization and disequilibrium started isn’t careful, a complete reform of the social order.