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An Economic Indicator of Socio-Political Unrest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Extract

The relationship between economic phenomena and revolution has intrigued political scientists from Aristotle2 to Zanzibar.3 As usual in political science, however, most studies of the matter have been limited to intuitive hypotheses, without any attempt at comparative empirical verification. As a result, a number of such hypothetical explanations have been proposed, each showing the persuasiveness of its own internal logic (as if convincing observers were the same thing as comprehending – let alone controlling – events) but none with any better claim on reality than the other.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

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page 294 note 2 Another group of economic hypotheses that we do not deal with here are those which are concerned with distribution, but from a static rather than a dynamic perspective. These arise out of the tradition of Aristotle which holds that a ‘mixed’ society, neither too unequal nor too equal, is the most stable. This perspective is developed by James Harrington, the English seventeenth-century writer, and by Tanter and Midlarsky, op. cit. A modification of it, focusing solely on the destabilizing effect of too much inequality, was developed by Vilfredo Pareto and, more recently by Fred, Kort (‘The Quantification of Aristotle's Theory of Revolution’, American Political Science Review, 46 (1952), pp. 486–93). The failure of these theories lies in the fact that many different degrees of distribution have appeared unjust and have generated revolutions historically and also in that they attempt to explain the dynamics of social change through the analysis of static relations of distribution. It was felt that Marx's theory, which incorporates an analysis of distribution into a dynamic and historically relative theory, was the most relevant theory for our purpose of discussion.Google Scholar

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page 297 note 3 Ibid. pp. 13, 15.

page 297 note 4 Gurr with Rutterberg, op. cit.

page 298 note 1 Ibid. p. 70.

page 298 note 2 Tanter and Midlarsky, op. cit.

page 298 note 3 See the discussion in Oscar, Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 1963).Google Scholar

page 298 note 4 Personal communication to the authors. F.A.O. has some such figures.

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