Strategic Shock in North Africa

Thursday

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Some time ago I was reading a list of potential strategic shocks to the world geopolitical system. One of the items on the list was the democratization of China. The democratization of the Arab World was not on the list. This, however, is the strategic shock that the world has witnessed. We call them “strategic shocks” because they are unpredicted, and recent events in North Africa were definitely unpredicted. A year ago no one would have guessed that there would be a civil war in Libya, which is what is essentially happening as I write this. As I wrote in The Geography of Revolution, I do not think that Gaddafi can long endure, but he is putting up a fight.

The definitive work on strategic shocks is Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development by Nathan P. Freier. There is also Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics, edited by Francis Fukuyama. I have used both terms — “strategic shock” and “blindside” — in several posts.

It is difficult to define strategic shocks in anything other than phenomenalistic terms, since strategic shocks are by their very nature unpredicted and unpredictable. Since they are unpredictable, strategic shocks cannot be confined to a single definition; if we could precisely define the parameters of strategic shock, we would be that much closer to predicting them, and if we could predict them, they would not longer be shocks. However, even if we can’t define strategic shocks in any detailed manner, we can observe that strategic shocks sometimes manifest themselves in patterns, and one pattern of strategic shock is a revolutionary wave.

It could be argued that the “color revolutions” that successively swept through the ‘stans of Central Asia were simply a delayed response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which latter was a true strategic shock of grand proportions (or, if you’re Vladimir Putin, it was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century). Whether or not the “color revolutions” represented a revolutionary wave, recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya suggest a revolutionary wave that may yet encompass more of the Arab world before it is spent.

Freier makes a rough distinction between strategic surprise and strategic shock:

“Shock” and “surprise” are not necessarily synonymous. Surprise is only half of the equation with respect to defense-relevant shocks. They are distinct from other unexpected strategic contingency events in that they are unanticipated and inadequately accounted for to such an extent that their occurrence triggers fundamental strategic and institutional disruption across the defense enterprise. There is no scientific break point between strategic shock and strategic surprise. The boundary separating the two is a function of an event’s strategic impact, the extent of disruption it causes, and the degree to which the defense enterprise anticipated its occurrence in strategy development and planning. High impact contingency events that promise fundamental disruption and occur without the benefit of adequate policy-level anticipation are more likely than not to be strategic shocks.

Tunisia alone might have constituted a strategic surprise, but Tunisia followed by Egypt and Libya together constitute a strategic shock, regardless of what the outcome is in Libya.

Each stage of the North African strategic shock has constituted a new proof of concept for popular revolt in the Arab world. Tunisia demonstrated the mere possibility of successful popular and non-violent revolt in the context of the institutions of North African society. Egypt demonstrated that what happened in Tunisia can happen in a nation-state of much larger size and population, and indeed in a bastion of traditional Arab culture. Libya has demonstrated so far that a popular revolt in the same civilizational milieu can be sustained in the face of armed resistance by an entrenched autocrat, and if the revolution against Gaddafi succeeds, it will prove that popular revolt can be successful against a resisting autocrat willing to hire mercenaries to spill blood to retain his rule.

One of the signs that the events in North Africa constitutes a strategic shock is the demonstrable worldwide response to these events. There have been several stories of Chinese harassing of dissidents and a preemptive security crackdown to put any potential protesters on notice. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has decided to shower even more money on a population already laboring under a nearly crippling sense of entitlement. In Zimbabwe there was a show of force, Zimbabwe police, military put on show of force, again to preempt protesters. And in Venezuela, Chavez says he won’t condemn Libya’s Gadhafi. Entrenched autocrats who have systematically insulated themselves from their immiserated populations are alarmed and taking action. In same cases, perhaps in most cases, these actions will forestall revolutionary protests; in some cases, these reactionary measures will be too little, too late. And every potential venue of revolution is seething. There was an interesting story on the BBC, Syria: Why is there no Egypt-style revolution?, in which Lina Sinjab wrote:

“The government has taken several measures in the wake of Tunisia and Egypt to reduce the cost of basic goods, especially food. There have been grants for the poor, and reports that civil servants have been instructed to treat citizens with respect. But Syria suffers from corruption that goes all the way up the system.”

Thus far in Syria, this combination of half-measures has kept the populace mostly quiet.

A strategic shock sets up shockwaves, and as these shockwaves break against fragile and brittle regimes, these regimes suffer, react, and — at times — collapse. We are seeing the strategic shock from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya ripple outward, and while we cannot say what will happen next, we can say that the consequences have not yet played out, and more regimes will be shaken by the shockwave.

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The Geography of Revolution

Tuesday

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Being alive in the winter of 2011 is a bit like being alive when the Berlin Wall came down, although at that time I remember watching events on television news, whereas now I learn everything from the internet, and if I watch anything, I watch it on Youtube not on television. I remember so well how the nation-states of the Warsaw Pact fell like dominoes. Today another dictator of many decades duration is tottering on the edge of political survival. I do not think that Gaddafi can last, although he does have seven sons and they ought to be both young enough and vigorous enough to beat back a challenge to their rule (something obviously not the case with Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak) if only they are able to maintain the loyalty of police, military, and security services.

In the map above I have colored nation-states that have not yet experienced significant protests in orange, those that have experienced regime change through popular revolt in pink (Tunisia and Egypt), and those that have experienced significant protests in Red (Yemen, Jordan, Iran, and Libya; Bahrain is too small to appear on this map). It should come as no surprise that Libya, which now looks like it will be the next domino to fall to popular revolt in North Africa, is sandwiched between Tunisia and Egypt. While I have never been to North Africa, one can surmise that the trade links and population transfers between these neighbors will be fairly robust, even if they are confined to smuggling routes. Ideas move with populations, and it is to be expected that Libyans have been in and out of Egypt and Tunisia since the successful revolutions in these countries, and that Tunisians and Egyptians have crossed in and out of Libya. Even if the travelers are only local businessmen with no particular sympathy for youthful revolutionaries, they will have had stories that will not have been in the press, and one assumes that the Libyans would have been a rapt audience.

I suggested above that Gaddafi’s sons ought to be able to enforce their rule if they have the cooperation of the security services. Earlier when I was writing about Egypt, I suggested that the thing to watch for is whether security services switch sides or withdraw. In Egypt, the police withdrew, and the army enforced enough civil order to keep the transition relatively peaceful. While Egypt has not yet fully returned to normalcy, it was quite telling that once the central demand of the Egyptian protesters was met — the exit of Mubarak — the army “cleared” El Tahrir Square. It is pretty obvious that the army could have “cleared” El Tahrir square earlier, and if they had done so while Mubarak was still in power, he could have survived. I suspect that Mubarak is a little bitter about this, but somewhere along the way he lost the loyalty of the army. He retained some loyalty among the police, but the police were an unpopular institutions, and they made themselves scarce either due to the hostile crowds or the presence of the army or both.

Already in Libya there have been instances of security services making themselves scarce or switching sides and making common cause with the protesters. This tells me that the political rule of Gaddafi and his sons is doomed. There have even been reports that Libyan airforce pilots have defected rather than carry out orders against the protesters, and, most recently, a report that a Libyan warship has defected to Malta. I remarked elsewhere that when Romanians revolted against Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1989, even though Ceauşescu retained the loyalty of his private army, the Securitate, this was not enough to save him. Pitched battles were fought in the streets between regular army units and units of the Securitate. Ultimately, its a numbers game: numbers of guns, numbers of soliders, numbers of people, numbers of police, and numbers of sacrifices. The contemporary territorial nation-state is in most cases much too large for a population to be ruled against its will; if a people make a country ungovernable, often at considerable cost to themselves, the government has little choice but to leave. The only question is how many they will kill before they leave. And we have seen in Bahrain that even a small nation-state can be made ungovernable.

What more do we see when we look at a map of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula? Sudan and Ethiopia have their own issues and their own conflicts. Now that the North of Sudan is consolidating itself as an independent nation-state, it is less likely to see protests rather than more likely. Iran has had significant protests. I predicted earlier that these will not go far. I stand by this prediction, although that does not mean that there will not be protests, and it doesn’t even mean that Ahmadi-nejad will remain in power. But I continue to predict that Iran will remain an Islamic Republic with its constitution more or less intact: faces may change, but interests and strategic trends will remain consistent. Algeria is the next obvious venue for revolution, especially if Libya falls. The sooner Libya goes, the more momentum there will be for action in Algeria.

Saudi Arabia is the 500 pound gorilla as well as being the elephant in the room that we pretend not to notice. So far, things are quiet and the House of Saud seems as complacent and implacable as ever. But Saudi Arabia has a youthful, restive population, although also a youthful population with a staggering sense of entitlement. This sense of entitlement may be enough to retain Saudi exceptionalism in the region. I don’t know. Winston Churchill famously said of Russia, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” I will say the same for Saudi Arabia: I cannot forecast to you the action of Saudi Arabia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But I will not go on to paraphrase Churchill for the second part of his claim: Saudi national interest is as murky as its actions. There is the interest of the royal family, there is the interest of the oil wealth of the families in charge of the oil, there is the interest of the Islamists who understand the Kingdom only in terms of its stewardship of the holy places of Islam, and there are the interests of a youthful and restive population. These interests do not necessarily converge, and in some ways they radically diverge. Therefore there is no one Saudi national interest, and therefore no key to the mystery.

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Regime Change: Proof of Concept

Friday

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The central demand of the protesters in Cairo’s El Tahrir Square has been met: President Hosni Mubarak has resigned his office. Thus according to this limited definition of success, we can call the Lotus Revolution a “success.” But we all know that this is not really the end — that it is, in fact, only the beginning of a process that will eventually define the future of Egypt’s political identity.

Just as we can distinguish long term causes, short term causes, and triggers in the lead up to an event (an historical etiology, if you will), so too we can distinguish long term consequences, short term consequences, and triggers in the aftermath of an event. Mubarak’s departure from office is a trigger for the end of the Lotus Revolution, but the occurrence of a triggering event is not the same as short term consequences or long term consequences.

While the short term consequences will be revealed to us over the coming weeks and months, and the long term consequences will be revealed over the coming years and centuries, there are certain observations that can be made. The more knowledge one has of a given society, the more accurate one’s observations will be. Since I know almost nothing about Egyptian society, I can only speculate in the most general way about the outcome of events triggered by the departure of Mubarak.

One thing that I know holds good across all societies, and which often makes revolutions disappointing, is that there is, in every country, a small group of elite and privileged people who are the ones prepositioned to assume prominent roles in any newly formed government. It is common for a government formed from privileged elites in the wake of a popular uprising to cherry pick a few of the ringleaders of the popular uprising to participate in the government. This gives the masses the impression that their voice has not only been heard, but that they now have a voice in the highest councils of state, and it gives “street cred” to the members of the government who did not earn their street cred on the street. Such appointments are usually symbolic, and they remain symbolic unless the arriviste is exceptionally brilliant and talented and is able to engineer his or her own Machtergreifung.

It is because of the stability of privileged elites across changed regimes that it was possible for a Bourbon monarch to sit on the throne of France and have it said that he had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” since the revolution. The French Revolution was far more radical than the recent events in Egypt, and even the French didn’t decisively rid themselves of their aristocrats, despite their best effort during The Terror to cut off as many aristocratic heads as possible. Therefore I suspect that the Egyptians will not easily or readily rid themselves of the behind-the-scenes power-brokers who are much much responsible for the condition of the country as was Mubarak.

Institutional continuity almost always trumps discontinuity, and in so far as a revolution is an attempt to engineer historical discontinuity, these attempts at social engineering come to grief due to the friction of institutional stability. Institutions can be a social lubricant, and the primary ways of getting things done, but institutions, when opposed, are sources of social friction. That is to say, institutions on the whole possess macro-resiliency in contradistinction to the micro-fragility of particular individuals who people them and represent them. We could call this political symmetry by analogy with the use of the term “symmetry” in physical theory: regardless of political transformations (regime changes), certain things remain true, and among these things that remain true are the influence of the influential, the wealth of the wealthy, and the privilege of the privileged.

Already in Tunisia there has been grumbling on the street that the newly installed government is too close to the ousted Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Such things are to be expected, and they are to be expected because they are largely true. People want change, and when people agitate for revolutionary change they want revolutionary change. When a revolution is followed by the same-old-same-old, those who sacrificed for the revolution become frustrated and angry. And we already knew what they did when they were frustrated and angry with the previous regime.

The short term consequences of the Lotus Revolution will be worked out in the power struggles to create a new government. This power struggle will take place between privileged elites, the military, protest leaders like Mohamed ElBaradei, and powerful social institutions within Egyptian society like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is likely that several coalitions will be tried and tested, the fittest will survive, and go on through descent with modification to evolve into a government.

The long term consequences of the Lotus Revolution will be worked out regionally and internationally, as various nation-states and institutions vie to define the future of the region. As I attempted to put across in Popular Revolt in the Arab World, Egypt matters. Egypt has social capital. It has ancient universities with enormous intellectual appeal and authority.

What happens in Egypt resonates in the region. Thus even the narrow sense of the success of the Lotus Revolution is symbolically important. It will certainly lead to some consequences outside Egypt, putting great pressure on autocratic regimes. Here we are at great risk to listening too much to Western commentators who fail to make the correct distinctions between the players in the region. The popular discontent, for example, will not spread to Iran. Iran is an Islamic Republic. It may have repressive policies, but it is nothing like Egyptian society. Iran has a minimal degree of responsiveness to its people. And in Jordan, the Hashemite Dynasty has just enough social capital that the king’s dismissal of his government is not seen in the same light as Mubarak’s dismissal of his government. The events in Egypt will resonate most in the Arabian Peninsula itself, for it is there that we find repressive, unresponsive governments that have in the recent past been producing terrorist malcontents, as did Egypt. If the social malcontents should turn their attention from hatred of the West to hatred of their own oppressive governments (now that regime change in the Arab world has received its proof of concept), then dominoes may begin to fall.

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The Dialectic of Democratic Aspiration

Monday

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retrograde and reactionary regimes often create the very forces that lead to their overthrow.

The recent Popular Revolt in the Arab World, which in at least one case — Tunisia — has led to Regime Change through Popular Revolt, is a good reminder that the spirit of democratic aspiration is alive and well in the world today. The advanced industrialized democracies seem to be so trapped in a self-understanding based on a declension narrative that one might suppose that the spirit of the democratic ideal had ceded its place to more aggressive alternatives.

There is a very good reason for the outburst of democratic (or, if you prefer, popular) sentiment in those regions of the world that have been deprived of the institutions of popular sovereignty even while those regions of the world that have enjoyed the benefits of popular sovereignty seem to have lost faith in their own ideals. The reason may be explicated in the form of a distinction between nascent democracy and decadent democracy. (I could formulate the distinctions in terms of the relative maturity of democratic institutions, but I rather like expressing myself in terms of nascent democracy and decadent democracy.) Here I will be using the term “democracy” in the widest possible sense to indicate democratic institutions including but not limited to elections, a universal or nearly universal franchise, a written constitution, guarantees of individual liberties and the status of minority populations, the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, observation of due process of law, civilian control of the military, freedoms of the press and assembly, and the like.

In decadent democracies, the process of institutional maturation has run its course and a full complement of socio-economic institutions has evolved under the political selection pressure of popular sovereignty. Under these conditions, democracy has come into its own, and democratic processes proceed through the channels of democratic institutions. Not surprisingly, this makes the political establish extremely sluggish and unresponsive — ironically, the very political mechanisms put into place to guarantee the responsiveness of a government to its people have a self-limiting threshold when these mechanisms become too unwieldy because they become too comprehensive, i.e., too democratic.

In nascent democracies, the process of the institutional formation has only started, or it may be only a twinkle in the eyes of those agitating for the establishment of democratic institutions. The idea of what is possible is more central to events in nascent democracies than the day-to-day grind of actual democratic processes, which may well prove to be an anticlimax. Nascent democracies inherit socio-economic institutions that have evolved under the political selection pressure of autocracy or oligarchy or aristocracy, therefore there is a tension between the practical institutions whereby ends are attained and the impractical desire to dissolve them or reform them.

In a comment on this forum, Thomas P. M. Barnett wrote, “…young democracies tend to be the most warlike — more than mature democracies and more than authoritarian states.” In the context of the distinction between nascent democracies and decadent democracies it is relatively easy to see why this is the case: the young, nascent democracies do not yet possess democratic institutions, and there is great internal tension within the society over the inadequacy of legacy institutions to the recently instituted ideal. One way to discharge these tensions is to pick a fight. Nation-states, like individuals, can suffer from hysteria and neurotic misery.

Furthermore, decadent democracies, in possession of fully democratic institutions, because of their comprehensivity come to tolerate even profoundly anti-democratic sentiments within the body politic. There is no mechanism for the removal of an opinion that is counter-productive to democracy, and so fully democratic institutions incubate the reactionary forces that will attack it from within. It is important to remember that anti-democratic sentiment is not likely to be initially expressed in a vulgar form intended to appeal to an mass audience. Anti-democratic feeling can be as privileged and erudite as, for example, Amy Chua’s attack on democratic institutions in her book World on Fire.

Even as decadent democracies are incubating the forces that will destroy it from within, nascent democracies — which, in their earliest stages are non-democracies — are incubating the forces that will destroy the old socio-economic order. Tottering decadent non-democratic regimes often resort to ham-handed attempts to oppress and repress the social demonstration of frustration and anger, but, tottering as they are, they lack the vitality to prosecute their persecution with sufficient fervor to stamp out the nascent democratic sentiment. This persecution short of the threshold of annihilation becomes a surmountable challenge that strengthens the democratic movement. This is a Toynbee-like challenge and response cycle in which just enough hardship is a spur to greater things. As Nietzsche wrote, that which does not destroy me, makes me stronger. This is precisely how the early Christians triumphed in Rome.

At this point it should be obvious that decadent democracies and nascent democracies are two separate points on the continuum of the democratic life cycle, and in some rare cases in history the cycle becomes a perfect closed political cycle in which a decadent democracy falls to reactionary elements, the reactionary elements take power and remain in power long enough to become the decadent establishment in turn, at which point they cannot suppress the democratic aspirations of the people, who overthrow their autocratic regime and install a democratic regime that, in the fullness of time, also becomes decadent and ripe for overthrow. We could call this perfect closed historical cycle the Cycle of Revolution (or, by analogy with the Cartesian Circle, we could call it the Revolutionary Circle).

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Regime Change through Popular Revolt

Thursday

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In Revolutionary Violence I attempted to explain the difference between revolutionary violence in the strict sense and a mere riot, thus:

“…in the case of true revolutionary violence, not something engineered from above but a movement growing from below that spills over suddenly and unexpectedly into violent insurrection, a mass of people swarms over, around, and through any technology… designed to stop a riot. One could define the difference between a riot and a revolution such that a riot can be checked and stopped by riot police, whereas in a revolution the numbers of those involved overwhelm police and security services, and in fact the police and security services may join the revolution and turn on their leaders.”

We have seen, in just the past few days, an authentic instance of revolutionary change in Tunisia. Although the violence was not nearly as acute as might have been the case, the sequence of events was a textbook case of an incident — in this case, a young man who immolated himself in protest — that sparks an escalation that is beyond the ability of state and security officials to stop. In fact, during the course of recent events in Tunisia, the security services issued a statement in support of the rebellion, just as I wrote above.

In light of these events I realize that in my characterization of revolutionary violence that “violence” needs to be understood very broadly, or that I ought to employ some term in place of violence that is more general, including all manner of civil strife that might destabilize a regime to the point that a regime decides that it cannot maintain its power and must withdraw. (Perhaps “revolutionary action” would be the appropriate term, although “action” implies agency, and it is often precisely the lack of agency that defines cataclysmic political change.)

The revolution in Tunisia is now being called the “Jasmine Revolution,” in keeping with naming revolutions thematically over the past few years, as in the case of the Velvet Revolution, the Rose Revolution, the Tulip Revolution, the Orange Revolution, and the Cedar Revolution. I do not think that it is likely that a bloody and violent revolution would be named in this way. While the recent Jasmine revolution was not so bloodless as the Velvet Revolution, it was not so violent that it appeared to belong in another class of revolutions entirely. For example, the Romanian Revolution of 1989 (the same year as the Velvet Revolution) was much more violent, resulting in the summary execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, and is consequently viewed in a different light and is not referred to by a thematic name.

At some point between Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and Romania’s not-so-velvet revolution, there is a threshold of violence that is passed. It would be arbitrary to attempt to name a number of deaths at which this threshold is crossed, but among recent revolutions we can mostly place them on one side or the other of this threshold of violence. The Jasmine Revolution belongs on the relatively non-violent end of the spectrum defined by the threshold, while revolutions such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, successfully put down by Warsaw Pact forces, belongs at the violent end of the same spectrum.

A distinction can then be made in revolutions between civil instability that escalates in a manner precisely analogous to revolutionary violence, but which remains relatively non-violent, and civil instability that escalates into open revolutionary violence, and it is the violence itself, and the threat of further violence, that displaces the regime. It is to be expected that whether or not a revolution crosses this threshold of violence is a function of the degree to which the regime is embedded in power and cannot see any alternative to itself, as well as a function of the degree to which the civil populace has endured oppression.

Regime change through popular revolt is a difficult proposition. It turns out badly at least as often as it turns out well. One thing that can be said in favor of recent revolutions with themed names, from the Carnation Revolution to today, is that through some inscrutable process of social convention, the violence has been kept to a minimum and the death toll has been relatively low. Given how little has been accomplished by these revolutions, and how little the revolutionized societies have changed, the low level of violence and the low death toll is fortunate for the societies concerned. High levels of violence and bloodshed in a revolution followed by little actual change in circumstances means disproportionately high levels of disappointment and bitterness that the sacrifice was for nothing. Lower levels of sacrifice mean lower levels of disappointment and bitterness. High levels of disappointment and bitterness, on the other hand, often lead to further revolutions.

Given the appropriate conditions and the appropriate trigger, levels of violence no greater than a riot can issue in regime change, making such escalating civil instability decisively distinct from a riot, though the civil costs are not much more than a riot. This points to a crucial difference between revolutionary violence and non-revolutionary violence (where “violence” is understood in the broad sense mentioned above), though I cannot yet define what this difference is any better than I did earlier in my post on Revolutionary Violence. To put it in a phrase, revolutionary violence is the political analogue of what in a tactical context B.H. Lidell-Hart called the “expanding torrent.” Revolutionary violence is a popular expanding torrent; a riot is not an expanding torrent.

Being able to locate the difference between the two would be quite a feat. The opinion columns of newspapers around the world are now filled with those who see a coming domino effect throughout the region, with the Egyptian regime threatened by similar escalating protests, and those who equally stridently maintain that no such domino effect will be felt in the region. Looking at the Jasmine Revolution from this perspective, we can see that the expanding torrent of revolutionary change (or, if you prefer, revolutionary violence) can be understood as an event confined to one nation-state or as an event in a regional context. Thus we can further distinguish between revolutionary violence that is contained by a single political regime and one in which the expanding torrent engulfs other nation-states. One could argue that Communist revolutions in the early twentieth century and color revolutions in the late twentieth century represented trans-national revolutionary change, in which the expanding torrent of revolutionary action engulfed multiple regimes beyond the regime targeted by the revolutionary action that was the trigger.

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Why Revolutions Happen

Monday

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A few days ago in Fairness and the Social Contract I wrote regarding Joseph de Maistre’s Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (“Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,” 1809) that its formulations, “invite alternatives if not refutation.” I offered a formulation parallel to Comte de Maistre in terms of fairness or justice being the approximation of the explicit social contract to the implicit social contract.

Another way to formulate this would be to say that it is Nietzsche’s “morality of mores.” (In German: “die Sittlichkeit der Sitte”, also translated as the “morality of custom,” which I discussed in The Totemic Paradigm) allowed to grow, to mature, and to evolve into a formal legal system. That is to say, beyond the morality of custom lies legal precedent and the legislation of custom. One could argue that the English common law tradition embodies precisely this gradual accumulation of custom, which, by being rendered in formal legal judgments, is then transformed into a legal norm. This common law tradition is law outside the constitutional paradigm, though a similar process can occur in the context of the constitutional paradigm.

In an earlier discussion of the law, Exaptation of the Law, I argued that, “…the law is intrinsically conservative, or, perhaps better (as that ideological word invites misunderstanding), law has an intrinsic bias in favor of the past.” I made this claim primarily based upon the role of precedent in law: “A ruling in the past establishes a convention that is followed in later rulings and preserves the past into the present.” And when a traditional system of law is overthrown in a revolution, “Laws and constitutions are not written in a vacuum,” so that the past remains a consistent point of reference.

Even the absence of law can establish a precedent. In the cases of tyranny, in which political authority is exercised without legal precedent, tyranny often becomes the rule rather than the exception in a society once conditioned to tyranny. I believe that the record of history demonstrates that tyrannies cannot long endure, but I will admit without hesitation that when a tyranny is deposed the power vacuum is often filled by a regime that is in no sense better and is often worse.

Tyranny is the illegal exercise of political authority. The idea of political tyranny is a familiar one, but there are also intellectual forms of tyranny that are no less invidious. Either through socio-political repression of alternatives or through social inertia or through lack of imagination, some ideas come to dominate societies to the exclusion of other ideas. Some of these ideas can be remarkably one-sided and unbalanced. In so far as an insitution is an embodiment of an idea, if it is the embodiment of a one-sided idea it is a form of intellectual tyranny and it will not long endure.

In the above-mentioned post Fairness and the Social Contract I claimed that a formulation of political society that was obviously extreme (like Comte de Maistre’s) invites a critique precisely because alternatives are schematically suggested by the structure of the ideas in the initial formulation. I also maintain that an idea that invites a critique in this way will eventually be faced with its other. If socio-political factors prevent the timely reckoning of an institutionalized idea with its other, that institution will grow corrupt and decadent. What happens with a corrupt and decadent institution? It is eventually overthrown, even if it is not confronted by its other.

One socio-political force that militates against a timely reckoning of an institutionalized idea with its other is what I have called acculturation to absence of change. I introduced this idea in my Political Economy of Globalization, where I wrote:

Proto-economic activity on the cusp of transformation into commercial economic activity has been the common condition of the bulk of human history. It constitutes the whole of our much longer pre-history, and is a powerful acculturation to absence of change. One engages in the same activities that engaged one’s ancestors since time immemorial, and the very idea of change, competition, or adaptation is foreign. The world is what it is, has always been so, and always will be so, world without end, Amen Thesis 28

When an entrenched, established, and institutionalized idea grows corrupt and decadent, but continues to cling to power through socio-political inertia and acculturation to absence of change, revolution becomes the only possible mechanism of change.

In several earlier posts I discussed the possibility of formulating intelligent institutions. An intelligent institution would be capable of adapting itself to changed circumstances. The kind of ideas embodied in institutions that I have described above have not fostered intelligent institutions. Among its other adaptive behaviors, an intelligent institution would be open to the revision of the idea upon which it is based. An idea open to revision does not become a form of intellectual tyranny. If change is possible — that is to say, if reform is possible — revolution is no longer the only expedient of change.

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The Fractal Structure of Exponential Growth

Sunday

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In his Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution, Part I, T. Greer of Scholar’s Stage proposed what he called a growth revolution in conscious contrast to earlier historiographical attempts to identify periods of revolutionary change in history. For example, in reference to the Industrial Revolution, Mr. Greer says that it has been, “grossly mischaracterized,” and furthermore, “The industrialization of the world economy was the result, not the cause of modernization. The nature of this radical transformation is captured better by a different title: The Growth Revolution.”

I was thinking about this today and I realized that there are several periods of exponential growth in history of which our current world can be considered a consequence, that these occur at different orders of magnitude of history, and as such we can identify a self-similarity across different orders of magnitude of history that gives to this history a fractal structure.

At the level of history where geological time meets biological time — that is to say, the longest horizon of biological time — there is what is called the Cambrian Explosion. Most of the multi-billion year history of life on earth is little more than pond scum. For billions of years the earth was essentially covered in blue green algae and stromatolites, and the development of more complex forms of life was painfully slow. Then the Cambrian explosion occurred and suddenly there were seas teaming with an astonishing variety of life. Since that time, the earth has seen increasingly complex forms of life emerge, and, with the exception of periodic mass extinctions, growing numbers of species and biodiversity. It would seem that, once having passed a certain threshold of complexity, life’s capacity of grow exponentially was actualized.

Now we move in closer to history, thinking not in terms of millions of years of tens of millions of years, but thinking of terms tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. Here we find the first exponential growth spike in specifically human history, and this is the agricultural or neolithic revolution. Colin Renfrew in his Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind, emphasizes that this cannot be connected to the evolution of the genotype or the emergence of anatomically modern human beings. It would seem that our speciation event occurred somewhere on the horizon of 150,000 years ago, more or less (give or take some tens of thousands of years), but for most of this time modern human beings lived as hunter-gatherers with no larger social structure than the tribe or the clan. Then the agricultural revolution occurs, cities emerge, social differentiation and hierarchy emerge, settled societies emerge, human beings live in much greater density and organized state societies emerge. This occurred between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, i.e., about a tenth of the total history of our species. Once again, it looks like we idled along for a long time without much happening, and then — Bang! — suddenly things started happening with much greater rapidity. As the Cambrian explosion saw life passing a threshold of complexity, the agricultural revolution saw human societies pass a threshold of complexity.

Now we move in even closer to history, approaching to the point where we look not at hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of years, but only at hundreds of years. We are now considering a far shorter portion of time than that between the Cambrian explosion and the agricultural revolution. History at this level of magnification reveals to us another period of exponential growth, this time the growth represented by the Industrial Revolution. Just over two hundred years ago, beginning in England, spreading to Europe, and eventually making its way even today to Asia and Africa in the twenty-first century, societies that had had a stable form for thousands of years began to change much more rapidly. The Industrial Revolution uprooted stable societies and replaced them with something radically different. But this process, rather than taking hundreds or thousands of years, tends to transform traditional, stable societies within a period of decades, turning an acculturation to absence of change into a way of thinking when individuals expect to see dramatic changes within their lifetime and we say that “change is the only constant.”

Move in closer to history once again and look only at the last few decades. The oldest societies that had experienced the industrial revolution developed a pattern of stability. It is stable growth to be sure — the populations of industrialized nation-states have grown so accustomed to increasing standards of living that they rebel when the economy does not grow several percentage points per year — but it is a kind of stability within the chaotic growth and breakneck change that is the industrial revolution. Just in the past few decades even this stable growth has been given another jolt forward. The twin developments of high speed global transportation (the passenger jet) and high speed global communication (telecommunications and the internet) mean that human lives are changing at an accelerated rate of growth — yet another growth revolution in which a threshold has been crossed that allows growth across a number of other sectors.

What more could follow in this fractal structure of exponential growth? Will we need to consider the changes that will take place in human life — and, more generally, in life on earth — at a level of months, weeks, days, hours, or seconds? While I have written several posts that were highly skeptical of the so-called technological singularity (and I retract nothing that I have said in these posts), this is about the only thing that I can imagine that could once again spike the growth chart and produce yet another exponential growth curve, this time on an even shorter time scale corresponding to an extrapolation of the fractal structure of previous growth revolutions.

Human beings, however, live at a particular level of time consciousness and historical consciousness. We cannot perceive the vast periods of time studied by cosmology, though we can come to understand them through science, and we would not be able to perceive a fractal structure of exponential growth that disappeared into ever smaller periods of time. Thus one possibility is that something like the technological singularity could occur, but it would just as rapidly disappear from our view. We would go on devoting an hour to a leisurely lunch, even while at far higher magnifications of time further revolutions of exponential growth were going on unseen by us. We might come to understand these smaller periods of time through science, but they would mean as little to us in the present as the ultimate fate of the cosmos as contemplated by cosmology.

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The Revolution Without the Revolution

Thursday

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This is the illustration that accompanies Codevilla's essay on the American Spectator website.

Usually I wouldn’t deign to lower myself to discuss a frankly partisan rant, as this is typically a waste of time and attracts the wrong sort. People shouting in each other’s faces (or doing the contemporary equivalent of this on the internet) is not my idea of intellectual stimulation. Yet there has been a lot of recent discussion of Angelo Codevilla’s essay in American Spectator (July 2010), America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, and now it’s time for my two cents’ worth. But I must confess I did not read this piece through; I can think of better ways to spend my time. I have relied upon summaries and comments at the Scholar’s Stage blog and Zenpundit.

Codevilla’s essay seems to be a classic of tragic vision and declension history: the world (more particularly, the US) is going to hell in a handbasket, and (since Codevilla is a conservative) the nefarious agents responsible for this decline are liberal elites. Yawn. We’ve heard this before. But, since the essay has garnered so much attention, I guess Codevilla has a few things of his own to add to this well-worn story line.

I have repeatedly posted against apocalyptic and declension scenarios. I find them tiresome, even when I agree with them. I am put in mind of a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II:

My Lord, wise men ne’re waile their present woes,
But presently preuent the wayes to waile:
To feare the Foe, since feare oppresseth strength,
Giues in your weakenesse, strength vnto your Foe;
Feare, and be slaine, no worse can come to sight,
And fight and die, is death destroying death,
Where fearing, dying, payes death seruile breath.

Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III, lines 1538-1544, 1623 First Folio Edition

Wise men don’t wail their woes. In contemporary language, they are proactive. So why is Codevilla wailing the woes of contemporary industrialized society and its technocratic elite? I beg the reader’s indulgence for a series of digressions that may well each seem progressively farther from the mark, but I must speak my piece because this is a subject that has not a little personal meaning for me.

Not long prior to this Codevilla-inspired discussion of elites, last June there was a fascinating post on Zenpundit about a prominent blogger who was contemplating throwing in the towel, The Truth About Blogging. The pretext of this discussion at Zenpundit was Dr. Bernard Finel considering whether blogging was worth the harm his honesty had done to his career, especially in view of the fact that his blog had not won him fame, fortune, or a large audience. The discussion following that piece was particularly interesting to me, since I too sometimes wonder why I bother, writing day after day, and often getting no more than a single comment every week or two, and am frequently disappointed by the low number of readers I get. But ultimately I write because I feel the need to express myself. I get no fame, no money, and no perks, but I still must express myself. I consulted no manuals and got no advice prior to writing a blog, I just started writing. It is in my nature. Some many years ago someone said to me that he wanted to write, but he didn’t yet know what he wanted to write about. This statement struck me as odd at best, impious at worst. I wanted to shout back at him, “If you don’t know what you want to say, then you certainly shouldn’t be writing.” But I was charitable, and said as little as possible.

Zenpundit’s author wrote of Finel’s cri de coeur, “…in the broad, public intellectual world of academia and think tanks there’s a lot of brittle egos with weighty credentials who are manning the last gates worth keeping — that of aristocratic sinecures to read and write.” True, very true. But “aristocratic sinecures to read and write” are nothing but the ideological infrastructure of the elites that Codevilla’s essay takes to task.

Both T. Greer of Scholar’s Stage and Zenpundit note Codevilla’s “conservative” agenda, but still find value in his critique of an emerging US elite cut off from the people. I suspect I would feel similarly if I took the trouble to read it through. I did, however, peruse Fred On Everything‘s post Commentator’s Disease, which similarly treats of the Culture Wars and the emerging isolation of the US ruling class, through Fred writes without a chip on his shoulder and is funny to boot. In Fred’s amusing rant, one can hear through the humor the bitter truth that he is discussing. This is something he knows from personal experience; he is writing from the heart. And, as my little personal anecdote above ought to make plain, I value writing from the heart, and indeed if someone is not writing from the heart they should not be writing. Codevilla, on the other hand, may well be writing from the heart, but in the sections I skimmed he seems also to be writing a critique of the ruling class from within the ruling class. In other words, he is a self-hating occupant of one of those “aristocratic sinecures to read and write.”

I always get a funny, uncomfortable feeling when card-carrying members of the elite begin criticizing the elite. Codevilla has been published in a major opinion journal, receives nation-wide attention, and has a daunting CV that includes being a professor, a “fellow,” and an editor. This is not a man who is eating Top Ramen to save money. He is way past his salad days.

If any readers have taken the time to glance at my profile page, they will find a longish rant against institutionalized scholarship. Everything that I wrote there can be generalized to include institutionalized sinecures of all kinds: editorships, fellowships, and the like. No doubt it was the visceral understanding that such sinecures are invidious to free and open inquiry, that they represent a compromise of the first order, that led Sartre to reject the Nobel Prize and to publicly state that no man should allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

The institutionalized individual either lacks Sartre’s visceral response to scholarship compromised by its symbiotic relationship with officialdom, or perhaps they even feel the opposite (I must engage in mere speculation here, because I don’t know any species of the genus personally). Perhaps the institutionalized individual is like the man who puts on a suit and starts to stand a little straighter and hold his head high. And what is a suit but an institutionalized garment? It is, as Matthew Crawford wrote, the livery of the executive suite. (He quit the executive suite because he preferred to repair motorcycles, a career decision of rare honesty and one for which I have the highest admiration.)

Elites who launch into a critique of elites are, simply put, dishonest. If they really believed what they were writing, if they were really writing from the heart, then they would follow Sartre’s advice and they would abandon their comfortable sinecures. Needless to say, few do. On the contrary, being denied tenure in one’s “aristocratic sinecure to read and write” is sometimes portrayed as an abridgment of academic freedom, as though such a sinecure were an entitlement.

There are options. I have pointed out elsewhere that Spinoza ground lenses for a living and that Schopenhauer was a businessman. Oswald Spengler wrote his influential Der Untergang des Abendlandes (the modern classic of tragic vision and declension history) while living in genteel poverty from a small (very small by today’s standards) inheritance. Who, among the institutionalized scholars, would be willing to live modestly in order to devote their life to honest and independent scholarship? No one wants to give up the good life once they’ve experienced it. I know whereof I speak. I have stayed at a Relais & Châteaux hotel; I know what the good life is like, and it is a pleasant life indeed.

Opting out is as simple as following Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss.” I have tried to talk to people about this on occasion — it is advice as hoary and as perennial as “follow your heart” or “do what you love,” so you’d think that people would be at least a little familiar with the concept — and I find that I am almost always met with incomprehension. For a few people, following their bliss is lucrative. For most of us, myself included, it means leading a compromised life in which one’s living must be earned through alienated labor in order that one might do what one loves in complete freedom.

During the Cold War, Eastern Europe suffered under the heavy-handed oppression of Soviet power, which was an explicitly ideological power, and thus exercised correspondingly heavy ideological control. From this milieu emerged the idea of the “parallel polis” and even that of a “parallel university.” Since state-sanctioned institutions were so deeply compromised that there was ultimately no hope for them, those who cared passionately about the integrity of their calling formed parallel institutions with their own charters and credentials and associations. These parallel institutions lacked the backing of a nation-state, but they had the saving grace of being real and honest about the things that really mattered.

Why blog? Because in doing so, one contributes to the on-going creation of a parallel world in which uncompromised intellectual honesty is possible. There is a sense in which this is a revolutionary act, but it is a revolution without a revolution.

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Revolution and Human Agency

Saturday

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In day before yesterday’s Three Conceptions of History I recounted three distinct attitudes one might take toward the role of human agency within the world. These three attitudes are 1) the political, which explicitly recognizes the role of human agency in the world, 2) the cataclysmic, which explicitly denies the role of human agency in the world, and 3) the eschatological, which subordinates human agency in the world to non-human agency. I derived these three attitudes to history from Anatol Rapoport’s three conceptions of war as given exposition in his introduction to Clausewitz, and which I earlier discussed in More on Clausewitz.

If we understand the political conception of history to be predicated upon the presumption of human agency in the world, the cataclysmic conception of history to be predicated upon a presumption of the lack of human agency in the world (i.e., human non-agency), and the eschatological conception of history to be predicated upon the presumption of the agency of non-human agents in the world (i.e., non-human agency), then there remains the possibility of non-human non-agency. This latter possibility could be identified as an Epicurean conception of history, since Epicurus maintained that the Gods were utterly indifferent to the deeds and fates of men. However, Epicurus did not maintain that the Gods were unable to intervene in the world, only that they were uninterested in doing so. There is also a sense in which non-human non-agency can be identified either with naturalism or Stoicism. This is a very interesting question, but I will not pursue it further at this time.

I concluded day before yesterday’s post with the observation that:

…the very idea that there can be such a thing as grand strategy implies that human beings have at least some degree of agency in the world, however compromised and limited. However, we certainly could formulate conceptions of grand strategy based on alternative conceptions of history, to whit: political grand strategy, cataclysmic grand strategy, and eschatological grand strategy… A little more thought might furnish further interesting (and unfamiliar) examples of Weltanschauungen and the grand strategies that follow from them.

Sometimes I think of interesting instances in the world and wonder how to categorize them within some conceptual schematism; in this case the conceptual schematism — viz. the distinction between political, cataclysmic, and eschatological conceptions of history — came first, and with that initial conceptualization I lacked any clear examples, and had to search my mind a bit to find some initial examples so as to make my point slightly less opaque. Thus I have continued to think about examples to illustrate this way of conceptualizing history.

In that post I referred to my own attempted definition of grand strategy (integral history subordinated to human agency) as an obvious example of the political conception of history, assuming, as it does, the efficacy of human agency in the world. I also cited the example of Byzantine history as an instance of the eschatological conception of history, since Byzantine armies had the reputation of conceding victory to the side that seemed to have the blessing of divine providence (as evidenced by success on the battlefield). It would be difficult to find a more eschatologically permeated society than that of Byzantium; the Byzantines acted concretely upon their views of the hand of divine providence in human affairs. (I also discussed this when I quoted Gregory Nazianzen.)

I did not, however, offer an instance of the cataclysmic conception of history, although a particularly interesting example occurs to me now, and that is the example of Marxism. I have previously quoted a humorous passage from Bertrand Russell in which he compares Marxism to Christian eschatology (in Mythologies of Industrialized Civilization), and it is many times be remarked that communism is a substitute for religion. Russell wrote that it is, “…this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx’s eschatology creditable.” This is really quite a remarkable statement to make, and I agree with it. For many, then, Marxism is clearly an eschatological conception of history, and I do not dispute this. But there is more to Marxism that this.

Marxism is a complex historical phenomenon. Like other great intellectual traditions (for example, as in Christianity), there are aspects of all three conceptions of history to be found in the many strains of Marxism. Any great historical tradition that endures and influences the lives of countless peoples around the world, eventually draws into its orbit men of diverse temperaments, attracted for different reasons to the core message (mere Marxism, if you will, like C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity). Such men of diverse temperaments give expositions and contribute developments to the movement that go beyond the core message, sometimes taking the doctrine in directions that are alien to the spirit that initially motivated the whole enterprise. Thus while Marx’s historical schema, according to Russell, gets its credibility from an eschatology parallel to Christianity and Judaism, it has other aspects as well.

I derived this tripartite division of conceptions of history from Anatol Rapoport's discussion of Clausewitz.

Clearly we can single out aspects within Marxism that exemplify the political, the cataclysmic, and the eschatological conceptions of history. I mentioned above the theme of Marxism as a secular substitute for religion, and the Christian eschatological background of its tenets. And we have this from Marx himself regarding the political nature of communist revolution:

“Every revolution dissolves the old order of society; to that extent it is social. Every revolution brings down the old ruling power; to that extent it is political.”

Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,” Karl Marx, Vorwarts!, No.64, 10 August 1844

This quote is of particular interest to me because it not only discusses the particular views Marx had of a millennial communist society, characterizing this as essentially political, but explicitly identifying the revolutionary means to this millennial end as political. Engels in his remarks at Marx’s graveside said that, “Marx was before all else a revolutionist,” and in the above quote he reveals his essentially political conception of revolution. But revolution, like Marxism itself, is a complex historical phenomenon; revolution is not one, but many.

The idea of revolution as essentially political is of particular interest to me because I attempted to sketch what I considered to be the essential elements of a true revolution, and I now realize in retrospect that I was approaching a cataclysmic conception of revolution. I suggested this twice, first, somewhat indirectly, in A Note on The Internal Structure of Revolutions:

Revolutionary cadres are often credited with fomenting revolution, directly inspiring the masses who engage in direct action such as killing, looting, and reprisals. But the intellectual elements that seem to foment and direct revolutionary action are often powerless to control the revolution once it starts, and such cadres can retain their credibility only by confirming the facts on the ground, essentially giving rationalizations and justifications for what has already been done in the name of a revolution.

In other words, once a revolution is in full swing, it is outside our control. We do not direct a revolution, it is something that happens to us, like an earthquake or a flood or any other natural disaster of Act of God. Later in Revolutionary Violence I elaborated on this theme:

…in the case of true revolutionary violence, not something engineered from above but a movement growing from below that spills over suddenly and unexpectedly into violent insurrection, a mass of people swarms over, around, and through any technology — whether social technology or hardware technology — designed to stop a riot. One could define the difference between a riot and a revolution such that a riot can be checked and stopped by riot police, whereas in a revolution the numbers of those involved overwhelm police and security services, and in fact the police and security services may join the revolution and turn on their leaders.

There I suggested that this could be called revolution sensu stricto or the strong sense of revolution, and for such a conception of revolution, a revolution is a cataclysm.

But no revolution is simply and only a cataclysm that happens to us. Even a cataclysmic conception of history can recognize some trivial degree of human agency, and in this way: in the eschatological conception of history, we recognize human agency in the form of the propitiation of unseen powers; similarly, in the cataclysmic conception of history, we can recognize that human beings do indeed set events in motion, if only as a trigger to events that might have been triggered in some other fashion, but that once events are set in motion, they are beyond our control. We suffer history; it happens to us, and there is little or nothing we can do about it. And so too for revolution in the strong sense: we suffer revolution.

The cataclysmic conception of history is the philosophy of history embodied in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice (to use a romantic era myth), or (to take a classical myth) the unhappy fate of Phaëton when he attempted to drive the chariot of Helios across the sky and discovered that he lacked the mettle to do so. Such hubris is always punished in the tragic cosmos of the Greeks, and such hubris is still punished today.

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Revolution Day!

Sunday

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The quote on the above modified poster is from Guavera’s Guerrilla Warfare: A Method, p. 149. This is not the quote that originally appeared on this poster.

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Happy Revolution Day!

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Today we celebrate the armed struggle of the American people and their ultimate overthrow of colonial oppressors. And when these revolutionaries came into political power they did not hesitate to inaugurate one of the most radical regimes ever seen in the history of world in which the power was vested in the people. Although that was more than two hundred thirty years ago, the government that these radicals created is still radical today, and it has not been without difficulties to sustain a radical regime in political power for more than two hundred years.

The quote on the above modified poster is from Marx. This is not the quote that originally appeared on this poster.

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The US has missed a tremendous propaganda opportunity by failing to sufficiently capitalize on its revolutionary origins. The number of successful revolutions in the history of civilization that have placed power in the hands of the people have been few and far between. In Spreading Democracy: An Historical Perspective, I previously discussed the radicalism of Athens’ democratization policy when it headed up the Delian League. And since I have been reading Pirenne over the past few days, I am reminded of his treatment of democratic movements in the cities of medieval Flanders. These latter two experiments in democratic radicalism did not endure; the American experiment has endured.

The American Revolution learned well the lesson urged by Lenin: “No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.” (Collected Works, Volume 28, 1974, pages 113-126) The American Revolution has defended itself against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so successfully that it is now the premier military power in the world. That is no small achievement for a revolutionary regime.

And the founders might just as well have quoted other soundbites of revolutionary wisdom from Lenin, such as, “The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.” (Collected Works, Volume 24, pages 42-54) Certainly the American Revolution dispossessed the ancient ruling class of English aristocrats, passing state power to a class of native revolutionaries, in a very practical political fashion.

Even Mao’s Little Red Book, when it speaks of revolution, says much that is as true of the American Revolution as of any other: “The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.” and, “Without an army for the people, there is nothing for the people.” How did the disconnect emerge between the American Revolution and revolutionary movements that no longer look to the American Revolution as their archetype? This would be an appropriate question for a detailed historical study. And it also suggests a further question: can American recapture the revolutionary vanguard?

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