Understanding Society
Mosts Revolutions Fail
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Revolutions replace one ruling class with another: Napoleon followed the French Revolution, while Lenin and Stalin followed the Russian. Through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug connects Robert Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s description of representative democracy as an ‘elective aristocracy.’ Citizens may choose their rulers, the argument runs, but that is not the same as governing themselves.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“Most revolutions ultimately fail, though. No sooner is one despot brought down than a new leader stands up and develops an insatiable lust for power. After the French Revolutions, there was Napoleon. After the Russian Revolution it was Lenin and Stalin. Egypt, too, has reverted to yet another dictator. Sociologists call this the ‘iron law of oligarchy’: even sociologists and communists, for all their vaunted ideals of liberty and equality, are far from immune to the corrupting influence of too much power.
Some societies have coped with this by engineering a system of distributed power—otherwise known as ‘democracy.’ Although the word suggests it is the people who govern (in ancient Greek demos means ‘people’ and kratos ‘power, it usually doesn’t work out that way.
Rosuseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’, because the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to elect who holds power over us. It’s also important to realize this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic networks and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedy’s, the Clintons, the Bushes.