Violence and revolutionary outcomes

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Tyler Cowen links to a paper that says

regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable

This reminded me of a paper published in 1963, which said that

possible links between varieties of violence and revolutionary outcomes are left unexplored

The latter paper examined Latin America, and its author had considerable influence on my intellectual outlook. Its thesis is that limited, narrow violence, as in a coup, produces less dramatic overall change than broader violence, as in the Cuban revolution.

6 thoughts on “Violence and revolutionary outcomes”

  3. Arnold, thanks for the reference to your father’s paper. I’d appreciate it if you can provide access to an ungated version.

    Concerning the new paper “Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability”, I think it’s a joke. Who cares about the durability of an evil government? The explanation of its durability is grotesque because it points to the original, violent destruction of the enemy to argue that they have been able to continue destroying their domestic enemies while containing their foreign enemies. They should have compared their successes with the failed experiences of the many that attempted to grab power by force but failed, not once but many times. Why have some succeeded and others failed? Is it because the losers didn’t kill enough enemies? Should we ask Hillary what she is willing to do to grab power after her 2016 defeat?

    Yes, there are criminal organizations that have been able to control neighborhoods or rural areas for decades by violently destroying their enemies while providing protection and some welfare to the submissive survivors (as well as to the idiots that moved there), and so what? Are we going to celebrate evil governments? Do they know how many people were killed by the evil governments after the initial victory?

    The authors have written the paper as if durability were a signal of success or something positive. Do they know how many rulers have been able to ensure that their families and descendants enjoyed life for longer than a century in the past 10 thousand years? Do they know how large has been the cost they imposed on their submissive people to enjoy their privileges? Why didn’t they ask why the submissive residents didn’t revolt against the rulers?

    Rather than reading the paper, I recommend watching Game of Thrones or Isabel or Vikings.

  4. Arnold, in the first paragraph of his paper your father wrote about the research on the French and Russian revolutions and claimed “But possible links between varieties of violence and revolutionary outcomes were left unexplored”. I assume that in the rest of the paper (written in the early 1960s) your father explored the varieties of “traditional” violence that had marked the history of post-independence LA countries and their outcomes.

    Just at that time, LA’s future was going to change. In August 1961, the prospect of Soviet (via Cuba) intervention in LA was part of a warning by Che Guevara to Argentina’s President Frondizi. After Kennedy’s “Alianza para el Progreso” (a poor Marshall plan for developing LA), there was a meeting in Punta del Este (Uruguay) to which the new Cuban rulers were invited. One day Che was brought to Buenos Aires for a meeting with Frondizi in which he warned about that prospect (I was 20 years old, studying economics in Buenos Aires and working for a new government agency in which I shared office with a woman that was the girl-friend of the man that arranged the Che-Frondizi meeting. He liked to use my office to meet with close friends to chat about politics and in one meeting he talked about that warning. Decades later he wrote about that prospect but none paid attention). It didn’t take long for Che to move into LA with a small army unit but his failure (he was killed in October 1967) triggered a “country-specific” strategy involving a mix of violent domestic groups and party-competition in domestic politics. By 1970, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, new, minor violent groups were challenging the military forces while some radical-left parties participated in elections (for example, the Chilean election of 4 September 1970, in which the post-election process led to the Congress’ approval of Allende as President despite that in 1968 his party had accepted violence as a legitimate way to grab power). Too much has been written about what happened in the 3 countries between 1970 and 1990, but the violence we observed was largely due to forces quite different from the “traditional” ones. The coups de état and the military governments were outcomes of the high tension conflicts promoted by minority parties with foreign support.

    I recommend reading the second paragraph on the first page of the link you provided to your father’s paper. It calls attention to how the U.S. has changed due to the prospect of violence in terms of political expectations, demands, and norms; the standards of recruitment of political elites; skills within the political system; and strategies for the pursuit of power.

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