Political Decay and the European Revolutions, 1789–1848

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Abstract
Until very recently social interpretations of revolution have enjoyed a position of virtual orthodoxy among both historians and social scientists. Sociologists and political scientists concerned with the problem of revolution have been mainly of the structural-functional school. They describe a revolutionary situation as one of “multiple dysfunction” in the relations between the political system and the society it serves. Revolution thus interpreted is a violent redress of imbalance among functionally interrelated and historically synchronous social and political parts of one total system. It is commonly assumed that it is the social process, including economic change, that is the dynamic element in any revolutionary event, and that political institutions play a causative role only in so far as they fail to provide mechanisms for resolving the state of disequilibrium. Historians of revolution, many of them strongly if not consciously influenced by Marxist traditions of interpretation, have taken much the same position. If they tend to think more in terms of trends than of equilibrium systems, nevertheless they agree with the social scientists that revolution is primarily the result of accumulating social and economic pressures, with politics playing only a secondary role in shaping the course of events.

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