Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/838

 8l8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of the habit in the societary life-process and to the com- pleteness and suddenness of the breakdown. The recuperative vigor of a society may be such that a new social coordination, adapted to the new life-conditions, will speedily be constructed, which will put an end to the reign of confusion and anarchy. Or, where a society has largely lost its power of adaptation, the effort to build up a new coordination, adapted to the new life- conditions, may repeatedly fail, as it did in the case of the French Revolution. Under such circumstances we have a series of unsuccessful experiments, extending over a longer or shorter period of time, in building up new social coordinations; hence there may be a series of revolutions, each of which may add to the confusion and anarchy already existing. For such a society often the only hope of avoiding disintegration is to find or " select " an individual who, when clothed with sovereign authority, shall be capable of reorganizing and readjusting the societary life in accordance with the new conditions ; hence the tendency to dictatorship which revolution often breeds. The phenomena of revolutions are thus susceptible of interpretation through the application of the categories and principles of a functional psychology. Such a subjective interpretation needs, of course, to be supplemented by an objective interpretation ; but the important thing we wish here to be noted is that a social psychology built up upon the facts of coordination and adapta- tion in social life has a theory of revolutions to offer. That theory is, in summary, that revolutions are caused by the break- down of social habits under abnormal conditions, such as we have noted above ; that, in other words, the phenomena of revo- lutions are all susceptible of interpretation as phenomena which in principle may arise in any psychical organism in the transi- tion from one habit to another under like abnormal conditions.

It is recognized that the theory of revolutions here proposed is not wholly new, but is implicit in the writings of many his- torians and social thinkers. Nevertheless, this is the first explicit statement of the theory that we know of. It is introduced here, in a discussion of the principles upon which a social psychology must be built up, as a theory growing out of our point of view