Comment by wesleychen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wesleychen | Hacker News Reader

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It's difficult to say that the chapter "Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare" was proven wrong by history. Tocqueville isn't saying that revolutions will become rare period. He says that in societies with social equality (that is, without a caste system), revolutions will become rare, even when other forms of equality exist such as wealth/income inequality. All the revolutions you talk about in this thread are in societies with social class delineation. In countries like America, we can witness first-hand how extreme wealth inequality has not produced revolution in the same way that social inequality has in the past.

He also argues that there are great incentives against revolution in societies when people possess things they could lose in a revolution (his main example is property). I think an example of this is May 68's failure to bring political change due to the Communist Party's nonviolent stance/cooperation with the Gaullists. We can debate back and forth why they took an antirevolutionary position but consensus seems to be that they at least did not want to surrender what political power they had won through elections.

He also makes other predictions about how equality in social conditions causes people to be more individualistic and less communal, but at the same time less unique. Again, I think we can witness this first hand in America. Maybe he's wrong about other claims, but I wouldn't say this essay is wrong based on the title alone, since the actual essay reads spot on.

Plenty of societies with castes had no revolution, plenty of societies without castes had some.

Post-revolution America also had Black slavery, which made it a caste society. Even if we restrict ourselves to America, Tocqueville betrays zero awareness of the impending Civil War.

1848 also happened all over Europe in places that had already largely departed from caste, to say nothing of the Paris Commune.

I find all of this excessive charity towards an incorrect prediction ultimately unconvincing.

I would not characterize my comments as excessive charity. It’s an accurate summary of Toqueville’s essay and a rough comparison of his claims to the way history unfolded.

The 1848 revolutions you talk about occurred in different ways, but a way to generally characterize them is that they were all democratic with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures (regardless of the actual participants). This aligns with Toqueville’s claim that revolution stems from social division (which liberalism eliminates) and not other forms of inequality. The same is true of the Paris Commune; the third republic was initially dominated by monarchists and the Paris Commune as government was organized as a rival to the national government in Versailles/Bordeaux.

The American Civil war is another example that supports Tocqueville. The social stratification of slavery led to war but not the extreme inequality of the 1920s. Neither has the inequality of the present.

Tocqueville’s observation of the connection between social class and revolution also explain why the 20th century movements in Europe played out the way they did. Communist revolution occurred in Russia but not Germany. The fascist movements in liberal Germany and Italy took power without bloody revolution but the movement in Spain was tied to monarchists and thus there was civil war.

His main point is that liberalism provides off-ramps from violent revolution because people have other ways of wielding political power. In societies with strict social classes, the classes without political power have much greater incentives to fight. I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with this claim.

You can spin it however you want, his prediction was abysmally wrong, both in Europe and America and everywhere else.

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