Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

DETERMINANTS OF RETIREMENT

Most current research examining retirement is of one of two types: national longitudinal studies that address the behavior of workers across a wide variety of occupations and industries (e.g., Quinn and Burkhauser, 1994; Hayward et al. 1989) and studies of specific firms that assess the retirement behavior of workers who share substantial commonality in workplace features (e.g, Hardy et al. 1996; Stock and Wise 1990). The former design maximizes variation in both work context and individual characteristics, using statistical controls to assess the relative impact of individual and job characteristics on retirement transitions. Because of the sampling strategy, results from these studies can be generalized to the national population of older workers. The second design—the case stud- y—limits observations to workers who share a particular work context and attempts to explain variation in workers’ responses to a common decisional matrix.

In both these designs, individualized models of retirement have been dominant, although the

relative emphasis of ‘‘sociological’’ versus ‘‘economic’’ models may differ. Retirement models proposed by economists have emphasized the fi- nancial considerations involved in exchanging one income flow (e.g., wages and salary) for alternative sources of income (e.g., pensions and income from savings and investments). They have proposed measurement strategies based on the calculation of the present discounted values of the various income streams to attempt to disentangle relative effects. Sociological studies of retirement frequently focus either on the social psychological consequences of retirement or on the importance of occupational structure in shaping behavioral contingencies. Both opportunities and constraints are unequally distributed across workers. Whereas unionized manufacturing jobs may protect older workers through seniority systems, they also provide early retirement incentives through employ- er-based pension plans. Older workers are also vulnerable to plant closings and job dislocations that accompany mergers, downsizing, and cutbacks. This theoretical framework views retirement transitions as a career characteristic, with

late-career behaviors being at least partially contingent on earlier career opportunities. In addition, retirement behavior is embedded in more general macroeconomic conditions. Rates of unemployment, changes in both government and employer pension programs, and the age structure of both the population and the labor force are implicated. Combining insights from both disciplines leads to models in which the financial trade-off is captured by the relative effects of current earnings and the present value of pension benefits; human capital (and, indirectly, the probability of alternative employment) through education, health status, skill level, and age; characteristics of career through years of seniority, history of recent layoffs, and overtime work; and family situation through marital status and the presence of children in the home.

MEASURING RETIREMENT

As the nature of retirement transitions changed, the question of measurement became more difficult. Armstrong’s definition of ‘‘no longer working for pay’’ was being replaced by a variety of definitions oriented toward transitions out of career employment or full-time work, changes in major income sources (the receipt of Social Security or employer pension benefits), or changes in identity structures (e.g., through self-identifica- tion as a retiree). As definitions of retirement shifted toward receipt of pensions and the inclusion of part-time workers, the concerns of government turned toward the escalating cost of retirement and the advisability of delaying it. It became important to distinguish among exiting the labor force through ‘‘early’’ retirement, ‘‘regular’’ retirement, or disability, since these distinctions have implications for income replacement as well as labor-force reentry. Professionals, managers, and salespeople tend to delay retirement, whereas skilled and semiskilled blue-collar workers move more rapidly into retirement; clerical workers move more quickly into both retirement and disability statuses; and service workers experience relatively high rates of disability and death out of employment (Hayward et al. 1989). In addition, reentry into the labor force has become more common, with estimates of as many as one-third of retirees becoming reemployed, often within one to two years of their retirements. In short, the heterogeneity of what it means to be retired has increased considerably: it encompasses a broader age range;

it involves diversity of income sources; and it allows for some level of postretirement employment.

ISSUES OF GENDER AND RACE

The development of retirement policy has been primarily oriented around the work careers of men, predominantly white men. The original Social Security program excluded industries in which women and blacks were concentrated. Although later amendments eventually covered these categories of workers, the benefit structure continued to reward long and continuous attachment to the labor force and to penalize workers for extended or frequent work interruptions. The temporal organization of women’s lives relative to work and family, paid and unpaid labor, put women ‘‘off schedule’’ in accumulating claims to retirement income.

Spousal and survivors’ benefits were designed to support couples and (primarily) widows during their later years. Research on women’s retirement often focused on unmarried women and found that the determinants of retirement for women were similar to the determinants that had been identified for men. Although unmarried women and men differed in occupational locations, wages, health, and access to employer-sponsored pensions, these determinants appeared to sort unmarried women into retirees and workers in much the same way as they sorted men.

The pattern of women’s labor-force participation has changed in recent decades, and more women—particularly more married women—are in the labor market. In fact, the trends in rates of labor-force participation for older women reflect both the increasing employment rates for successive cohorts of women and the tendency for more recent cohorts of older working women to retire at younger ages. The increase in dual-earner couples suggests that retirement decisions may be interdependent, with age differences, relative earnings, and the relative health of spouses figuring into joint decisions about careers, retirement, and postretirement employment.

Work and income disadvantages that are experienced at earlier stages of the life course cast a shadow on retirement transitions among minority group members. Lower earnings, lower job status, and discontinuity in labor-force attachment all

undermine the financial platform for retirement. Work histories characterized by frequent spells of unemployment, illness, or temporary disability are linked to lower average retirement benefits and lower rates of savings and asset accumulation. In addition, African Americans are less likely to be married than whites and therefore more likely to be limited to their individual earnings and retirement resources. African Americans are more likely to exit work through disability and also more likely to continue to work intermittently after retirement. Gibson (1987) argues that disability can be used as another pathway to retirement for older African Americans, one that offers financial advantages. Because work histories can appear sporadic in old age as well as youth, establishing the timing of retirement as an event also can be difficult (Gibson 1987).

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

Industrialization, economic development, demographic shifts, and politics are implicated in international comparisons of both the prevalence and the financing of retirement. Pampel (1985) reports that, among advanced industrial nations, a pattern of low labor-force participation among aged males is related to the level of industrialization and population aging. Cross-national comparisons of employment-to-population ratios demonstrate a continued decline in labor-force participation between 1970 and 1990 for men aged 55 and older. This decline is not, however, consistent across all age groups. Employment rates for men aged 55–59 have not shown the same proportional decrease as rates for men aged 60–64, or for those aged 65 and older. Compared to other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (see Figure 2), Canada, Finland, Japan, Sweden, and the United States have relatively high rates of labor-force participation for men and women aged 65 and older.

Despite an overall downward trend in average age of retirement, nations continue to differ in the patterns of labor-force exits. Early retirement in European countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Germany remains the norm, with onehalf to three-quarters of 60–64-year-old men out of the labor market (Guillemard and Rein 1993). Whereas early retirement in the United States was

primarily financed through early retirement incentive programs (ERIPs) offered by private firms, more severe problems of unemployment in Europe fueled early retirement through expanded eligibility for state programs. Among some countries of western Europe and North America, disability programs also can operate as pseudo-retire- ment programs that allow workers to exit prior to normal retirement age. In contrast to the pattern of western Europe, Canada, and the United States, labor-force participation rates in Japan for men in all three age groups have been more resilient. Rates in 1990 remained relatively high, with more than one-third of men aged 65 and older participating in the labor force (Quinn and Burkhauser 1994). Cross-national comparisons of women’s retirement patterns are more complicated. Whereas some countries show little change since 1970 (e.g., Canada, Australia, Italy, Japan, and the United States), others show patterns of labor-force withdrawal that parallel the trends for older men (e.g., Finland, France, West Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom).

When comparing rates of labor-force participation, it is important to take into account national differences in census procedures, the definition of the labor force, and the kinds of activities that constitute ‘‘work.’’ Because countries differ in the pathways workers take to retirement, using pension receipt as an indicator is also flawed. In Germany, for example, disability benefits and intermediate unemployment benefits also provide access to early retirement. Comparisons based on rates of labor-force participation confound country differences in full-time versus part-time employment, complete versus partial retirement, and unemployment and employment. In addition, crosssectional figures do not allow a comparison of rates of withdrawal or reentry that would allow us to distinguish relatively stable from volatile labor markets.

Within each nation, policy development and social dynamics exert an important influence on retirement behavior. Recent debate in the United States and other countries has centered on the financial burdens of supporting a growing population of retirees and the desirability of reversing the trend toward early retirement. In 1983 the United States amended the Social Security Act to legislate a gradual increase in the age of full entitlement from 65 to 66 by 2009 and to 67 by 2027. Germany

(1992 Pension Reform Act) and Italy have made similar policy changes. Japan tried to raise the retirement age from 60 to 65 but failed in their initial attempt. In 1990 Sweden succeeded in blocking the early retirement pathway through the disability fund, but in 1992 failed to abolish the partial retirement pension system. Even in France, where ‘‘old age is seen as a time of life when work is illegitimate (Guillemard 1983, p. 88) and where the legal retirement age was lowered to 60 in 1982, it is likely that the retirement age will be raised. This type of political reaction to demographic aging is one way of trying to shift the cost of early retirement from government programs to firms and individuals.

Other workplace policies linked to demographic aging, such as flexible retirement systems, are also being considered in countries like Germany, France, and Great Britain. Countries with lower rates of early exit, such as Japan and Sweden, provide an alternative approach to labor-market withdrawal which may alleviate the pressures of demographic aging. These countries structure retirement as a gradual process involving lowering

wages, reducing hours, and reassigning workers. To some extent this model is already in place in the United States through ‘‘bridge jobs,’’ in Sweden through partial retirement pensions, and in Japan through wage reduction arrangements.

DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH

Sociologists are also interested in the social context in which retirement decisions are made and retirement policies are developed. Family contexts, work contexts, economic contexts, and historical contexts all provide important frames of reference in which these behaviors are negotiated. To date, retirement research has refined both the measurement of concepts and the complexity of the behavioral models. Many of these refinements have involved the economic dimensions of retirement. The financial trade-off between pensions and wages, the changes in accumulated pension wealth, and the age-earnings profiles of different occupations have been captured in current models. What models of retirement continue to lack, however, is sensitivity to the social frames of reference (e.g., the shop floor, the office, the firm, the

family, and the community). Studies that have addressed some of these issues (e.g., Hardy and Hazelrigg 1999) suggest, for example, that firm level features may be implicated in both the rate and the determinants of early retirement.

Retirement behavior may be primarily motivated by financial considerations. But given a threshold of financial security, perhaps the unfolding of the retirement process also involves the culture of the workplace, family dynamics, and societal values. Our first task is to theorize the social aspects of these decisions so that we can develop hypotheses. To test these hypotheses, a different data collection strategy is required—one that samples a sufficient number of observations of individual workers within sufficient numbers of organizational or, more generally, cultural contexts that can themselves be measured in terms of their salient characteristics. What has become clear is that retirement decisions are shaped by individual preferences, but that these preferences are shaped by the opportunities and constraints that workers encounter.

REFERENCES

Achenbaum, W. Andrew 1983 Shades of Gray: Old Age, American Values, and Federal Policies since 1920. Boston: Little, Brown.

Atchley, Robert 1982 ‘‘Retirement: Leaving the World of Work.’’ Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 464:120–131.

Barfield, Richard E., and James N. Morgan 1969 Early Retirement: The Decision and the Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Derthick, Martha 1979 Policymaking for Social Security. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Donahue, Wilma, Harold Orbach, and Otto Pollak 1960 ‘‘Retirement: The Emerging Social Pattern.’’ In Clark Tibbitts, ed., Handbook of Social Gerontology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fischer, David Hackett 1977 Growing Old in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gibson, Rose 1987 ‘‘Reconceptualizing Retirement for Black Americans.’’ Gerontologist 27(6):691–698.

Graebner, William 1980 A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution 1885– 1978. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Guillemard, Anne-Marie 1983 ‘‘The Making of Old Age Policy in France: Points of Debate, Issues at

Stake, Underlying Social Relations.’’ In Anne-Marie Guillemard, ed., Old Age and the Welfare State. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.

———, and Martin Rein 1993 ‘‘Comparative Patterns of Retirement: Retirement Trends in Developed Societies.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 19:469–503.

Hardy, Melissa A., and Lawrence Hazelrigg 1999 ‘‘A Multilevel Analysis of Early Retirement Decisions among Auto Workers in Plants with Different Futures.’’

Research on Aging 21(2):275–303.

———, and Jill Quadagno 1996 Ending a Career in the Auto Industry. New York: Plenum.

Hayward, Mark D., Melissa A. Hardy, and William Grady 1989 ‘‘Labor Force Withdrawal Patterns among Older Men in the United States.’’ Social Science Quarterly 70(2):425–448.

Munnell, Alicia H. 1977 The Future of Social Security. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Olsen, Laura Katz 1982 The Political Economy of Aging: The State, Private Power, and Social Welfare. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pampel, Fred 1985 ‘‘Determinants of Labor Force Participation Rates of Aged Males in Developed and Developing Nations, 1965–1975.’’ In Zena Blau, ed.,

Current Perspectives on Aging and the Life Cycle. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.

Plakans, Andrejs 1989 ‘‘Stepping Down in Former Times: A Comparative Assessment of Retirement in Traditional Europe.’’ In David Kertzer and K. Warner Schaie, eds., Age Structuring in Comparative Perspective. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Quinn, Joseph F., and Richard V. Burkhauser 1994 ‘‘Retirement and Labor Force Behavior of the Elderly.’’ In Linda Martin and Samuel H. Preston, eds., Demography of Aging. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Schulz, James H. 1976 The Economics of Aging. Belmont,

Calif.: Wadsworth.

Sklar, Martin J. 1988 The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sorensen, Aage B. 1989 ‘‘Old Age, Retirement, and Inheritance.’’ In David Kertzer and K. Warner Schaie, eds., Age Structuring in Comparative Perspective. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Stecker, Margaret 1955 ‘‘Why Do Beneficiaries Retire? Who among Them Return to Work?’’ Social Security Bulletin 18:3.

Stock, James H., and David A. Wise. 1990. ‘‘The Pension Inducement to Retire.’’ In David A. Wise, ed., Issues

in the Economics of Aging. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Streib, Gordon F., and Clement Schneider 1971 Retirement in American Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

U.S. Bureau of the Census 1987 Statistical Abstract of the United States 1986. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1976 Older Americans’ Act of 1965, as Amended and Related Acts, Bicentennial Compilation, March 1976. Washington, D.C.: Office of Human Development, Administration on Aging.

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics 1983 Current Population Reports, ser. P-60, no. 148. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Wentworth, Edna C. 1945 ‘‘Why Beneficiaries Retire.’’

Social Security Bulletin 8:16–20.

MELISSA A. HARDY

KIM SHUEY

REVOLUTIONS

Revolutions are rapid, fundamental transformations of a society’s socioeconomic and political structures (Huntington 1968). Social revolutions differ from other forms of social transformation, such as rebellions, coups d’état, and political revolutions. Rebellions involve the revolt of society’s subordinate classes—peasants, artisans, workers— but do not produce enduring structural changes. Coups d’état forcibly replace the leadership of states but do not fundamentally alter state structures. Political revolutions transform state structures but leave social structures largely intact. What is distinctive to social revolutions is that basic changes in social structures and political structures occur in a mutually reinforcing fashion (Skocpol 1979). A social revolution is more than a change in the state. It is a change in the state of an entire society.

Recent sociological work on revolutions recognizes their importance in the making of the modern world order and the opportunities revolutions offer for building theories of social and political change. These opportunities were most emphatically embraced by Marx, who placed the study and the making of revolution at the center of his lifework. Virtually all theories of revolution

since Marx share his concern with three separate yet interrelated phenomena: (1) the social conditions that lead to revolution or its absence, (2) the character of participation in revolutions, and (3) the outcomes of revolutions (see Tucker 1978). This review examines Marx’s theories in light of significant contemporary analyses of revolution, in order to evaluate how well his theories have stood the test of time and to consider how much of his legacy may endure in future sociological work.

First, Marx understood modern revolutions to be by-products of economic advance. Revolutionary situations emerged when contradictions between the forces of production (how the means of existence are produced) and the relations of production (how labor’s product is distributed) within an existing mode of production reached their limits. For Marx, the coming of the 1789 French revolution lay in the irresolvable contradiction between feudal restrictions on land, labor, and credit and emerging capitalist arrangements advanced by an ascending bourgeoise. Revolutions brought the resolution of these contradictions by serving as bridges between successive modes of production, enabling the ascent of capitalism over feudalism and later the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

Second, Marx held that revolutions were accomplished through class struggle. In revolutionary situations, conflict intensified between the existing dominant class and the economically ascendant class. Under feudalism, class conflict pitted the aristocracy against the ascendant bourgeoisie. Under capitalism, the differing situations of segments of society determined their revolutionary tendencies. Some classes, such as the petite bourgeoisie, would become stakeholders in capitalism and allies of the dominant bourgeoisie. Others, such as the peasantry, that did not fully participate in wage labor and lacked solidarity, would stay on the sidelines. The industrial proletariat would be the midwife of socialist revolution, for wage labor’s concentration in cities would generate solidarity and collective consciousness of the proletariat’s exploitation by the bourgeoisie. Class consciousness was a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for revolution.

Third, Marx believed that revolutions so thoroughly transformed class relations that they put in place new conditions enabling further economic

advance. Revolutions were locomotives of history that brought in train new structures of state administration, property holding, and political ideology. Reinforcing the fundamental changes in class relations, these transformations culminated the transition from one mode of production to another.

In sum, Marx’s theory identified the conditions that spawn revolutionary situations, the classes that would make revolutions, and the outcomes of revolutions. How well has Marx’s analysis served later generations of scholars and revolutionaries? Many of the sociopolitical transformations since his death were unanticipated by Marx. In light of these events, contemporary sociologists have reconsidered his thinking.

Consider first the social conditions making for revolution or its absence. Social revolutions are rare. Modern capitalist societies have experienced severe economic crises that intensified class conflict and gave the appearance of revolutionary situations, but they have skirted actual revolution. Modern capitalist economies have great staying power, and reform rather than revolution is the rule in advanced nations. Indeed, the great revolutions of France, Russia, and China, and those in Third World societies such as Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua, have occurred in predominantly agrarian economies where capitalist relations of production were only moderately developed. The 1917 Russian Revolution stands as proof of Lenin’s claim that revolution was possible in Russia despite its failure to develop a fully capitalist economy in the manner of the western European states Marx saw as the likely candidates for socialist revolution.

Rather than growing from contradictions between the forces and the relations of production, revolutionary situations arise in political crises occasioned by international competitive pressures. States with relatively backward economies are vulnerable to military defeats, as occurred in Russia in 1917, and to financial crises like that of 1789 France after a century of costly struggle with Britain and Continental Powers. Nation-states that are disadvantaged within the international states system are most at risk to externally induced crises and to the possibility of social revolution.

A state’s vulnerability to crisis, however, depends fundamentally on its autonomy, that is,

the extent of its dependence on elites, whether nobles, landlords, or religious authorities. State managers are forever caught in a vice between their obligation to increase revenues to meet intemational competitive challenges and the resistance of angry elites to resource extraction. States that are weakly bureaucratized, where elites control high offices and key military posts, cannot act autonomously. When powerful elites paralyze the state’s resource accumulation, severe crises occur, as in the English, French, and Chinese revolutions (Goldstone 1986).

However, externally induced crises may initiate an ‘‘elite revolution,’’ as occurred in Japan’s 1868 Meiji restoration and Ataturk’s 1919 revolution in Turkey. In such regimes, a bureaucratic elite of civil and military officials emerged that lacked large landholdings or ties to merchants and landlords. In the face of Western military threats to national sovereignty and, consequently, to their own power and status, these elites seized control of the state apparatus. With the aim of resolving economic and military difficulties, they transformed existing sociopolitical structures through land reform, leveling of status distinctions, and rapid industrialization (Trimberger 1978). These transformative episodes, sometimes called ‘‘revolutions from above,’’ are distinguished by the absence of popular revolts ‘‘from below.’’

Neopatrimonial regimes are highly vulnerable to revolutionary overthrow (Eisenstadt 1978). Examples include pre-1911 Mexico, pre-1959 Cuba, and pre-1979 Nicaragua. Centered on the personal decisions of a dictator, each of these regimes operated through extensive patronage networks rather than through a bureaucratized civil service and a professionalized military. Their exclusionary politics made reform nearly impossible and, in the event of withdrawal of support by stronger states, invited challenges that might overwhelm corrupt armed forces.

In contrast, revolution is unlikely in open, participatory regimes typical of modern capitalist democracies. By enfranchising new groups, these systems incorporate potential challengers. By redistributing wealth and opportunity—or appearing to do so through open markets and meritocracy— they are able to mute class antagonisms.

In sum, contradictions between the state apparatus and a society’s dominant classes have been

crucial to the onset of revolutionary situations. State bureaucrats are caught in the cross pressures between meeting the challenges of the international states system and yielding to the competing claims of elites. Consequently, state structures differ in their vulnerability to political crises.

Consider next the character of participation in revolutions. Critics of Marx’s voluntarist theory assert that no successful social revolution has been made by a self-consciously revolutionary movement. They allow that revolutionaries do guide the course of revolutions, but assert that they do not create revolutionary situations which emerge from externally induced political crises. These critics also offer a different reading of the roles of social classes in revolution. Urban workers, favored by Marx’s theory, played important parts in revolutions. However, their numbers were small and their protests lacked the impact of uprisings by peasants who composed the vast bulk of producers in agrarian societies. Indeed, peasant revolts provided the ‘‘dynamite’’ to bring down old regimes when political crises immobilized armies and upset food supplies and distribution (Moore 1966). Peasant revolts against the landed upper classes made it impossible to continue existing agrarian class relations and thereby reduced the prospects for liberal reforms or counterrevolution. It was the conjunction of political crisis and peasant insurrection that brought about the fundamental transformations identified with social revolutions in France, Russia, and China (Skocpol 1979).

But peasants do not act alone. A key difference between Old Regime revolutions and revolutions in the Third World is the importance of coalitions in the latter (Tilly 1978). Peasants in France and Russia lived in solitary and relatively autonomous village communities that afforded them the solidarity and tactical space for revolt (Wolf 1969). In the twentieth century, professional revolutionaries provided leadership and ideologies that cemented dispersed local groups with disparate interests into potent national movements. The success of their efforts depended in part on the breadth of the coalition they were able to realize among peasants, landless and migrant laborers, rural artisans, and sometimes landlords (Goodwin and Skocpol 1989).

Add to that the importance of urban groups which played crucial parts in making Third World

revolutions. In Cuba and Nicaragua, students, professionals, clerics, and merchants joined workers and peasants in coalitions that toppled dictatorial regimes. Similarly, the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran resulted from the mobilization of a broad coalition of merchants and workers, students and professionals, that met little resistance from powerful military forces (Farhi 1990).

Finally, revolutionary leaderships have not come from the ranks of an ascendant bourgeoisie or a risen proletariat. Rather, marginal political elites were most likely to consolidate power, for they were both skilled in the running of state organizations and tied by identity and livelihood to the aggrandizement of national welfare and prestige. Their role is clearest in revolutions from above but is no less prominent in social revolutions.

Consider, last, the outcomes of revolutions. For Marx, revolutions were bridges between successive modes of production. Bourgeois revolutions marked the transition from feudalism to capitalism; socialist revolutions opened the way for the transition from capitalism to communism, history’s final stage. Through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of private property, socialist revolution would bring the end of class struggle and the disappearance of state power.

Revolutions did transform class structures, economic arrangements, and political institutions, however, in all successful social revolutions, the transformations were accomplished by new state structures. The state did not wither away. Moreover, the new states were more centralized and bureaucratized than their predecessors. For example, liberal parliamentary regimes appeared in the early phases of the 1789 French and 1917 Russian revolutions. In the face of threats to sovereignty from abroad and counterrevolutionary threats at home, these regimes gave way to centralized governments which rationalized the machinery of state for national defense and internal control. Liberal parliamentary regimes were similarly shortlived during revolutionary episodes in post–World War II Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Indeed, what changed most in revolutions was the mode of social control of the lower strata as regimes centralized political power. All social revolutions ended with the consolidation of new massmobilizing state organizations through which peasants and urban workers were for the first time

directly incorporated into national economies and polities. While they aimed for independence from colonial powers, national liberation movements in Asia and Africa shared with these newly formed revolutionary states the project of state-centered mass mobilization.

Last, and vastly more important than the ways that individual revolutions changed sociopolitical institutions where they occurred, is the collective legacy of four centuries of revolution for the modern world. The legacy is clear in ways that revolutions transformed the workings of the world order and altered our sense of human prospects and limits. Through new political institutions, revolutions created our vocabulary of citizenship and its opposite, the machinery of tyranny. Through new structures of labor and investment, revolutions boosted agricultural and industrial output. By breaking old alliances and creating new ones, they altered the international states system and the shape of world markets. With wars and depressions, revolutions rightfully became the major markers of world history. Past revolutions are a benchmark from which we reckon humankind’s advance or descent. In all these ways, revolutions helped shape the structures and consciousness we know as modernity.

For a century, sociologists who study revolutions have pursued a project of revision. Informed by the study of recent sociopolitical transformations and by new interpretations of past revolutions, their work questions and qualifies much of Marx’s analysis. It considers national revolutions in the context of the world economy and the international states system. It places the relations between states and social classes in a new light, and it examines how social transformations in the recent or distant past weigh on the course of revolutionary events. On balance, it largely affirms and continues the main thrust of Marx’s perspective, notably his focus on actors embedded in concrete organizational settings within historically specific circumstances. This perspective—rather than a focus on personality, collective mentality, or system dysfunction—distinguishes the sociology of revolution. It owes much to Marx’s legacy.

What future sociologists will take from Marx’s legacy is an open question. Are revolutions in the coming century likely to differ in their causes, dynamics, or outcomes from the revolutions of

centuries past? Will revolutions become unlikely as global prosperity shrinks the now yawning gap between rich and poor? Is it possible that new state structures, either more responsive or more repressive than those we now know, will bring revolutions to an end? These are questions for the next generation of theorists.

Their search for answers will surely cover old ground. There is no ‘‘Y2K problem’’ for revolutionary theory. Changing the calendar does not change the world. The familiar masterplots that made modern world history—notably, the globalization of markets, communications, and culture, the international states system, and persistent inequalities in power and resources—sug- gest the shape of revolutions to come.

Indeed, for many sociologists, the past is prologue. For example, in an analysis of revolution and rebellion in Europe, China, and the Middle East from 1500 to 1850, Goldstone (1991) links population growth and state breakdown. He identifies a process in which population growth overwhelms the administrative capacities of agrarian states, bringing inflation and fiscal crisis, intraelite conflicts, popular unrest, and delegitimation of traditional regimes and their policies. Starting in roughly 1850, the underlying conditions changed when new forms of investment and infrastructure that accompanied urbanization and industrialization enabled modern states to manage population growth and prices. In much of the contemporary Third World, however, urbanization and industrialization did not strengthen the hand of state managers, but had the opposite effect. There, population growth and price pressures—often the unintended consequences of failed development schemes—continued to court state crises.

Nevertheless, Goldstone and other analysts assert revolutions will be rare. This is so because revolutions are not the result of a single cause, such as population pressure, but arise only when several causal elements, such as state crisis, elite withdrawal, and mass mobilization, converge in a rare revolutionary conjuncture. The worker masses of Sergei Eisenstein’s films and massed peasants of Hollywood spectacles give a misleading impression of revolutionary causation. There have been many popular uprisings—some of them large and quite violent—which did not bring revolutionary transformations.

Lachmann (1997) calls attention to the pivotal role of elites. He develops an explanation for revolutionary outbreak and success in terms of varying combinations of elite unity or conflict and mass participation or quiescence. Lachmann finds that single, unified elites are immune to mass revolutionary challenges (as happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). Conversely, mass mobilization succeeds at moments of heightened elite conflict (as in 1789 France). These conditions are self-reinforcing. By creating opportunities and potential alliances, elite conflict encourages nonelite mobilization (sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally), which, in turn, can alter the system of political domination and economic exploitation through which elites rule and live.

The study of mass-elite relations signals a turn toward understanding the importance of agency and ideology in making revolutions. The turn follows a generation of structural theories which spotlighted the crises through which revolutionary situations come, but left us unenlightened as to how revolutionary outcomes are realized in the actions of millions of men and women. For example, Markoff (1996) shows how in 1789 France, the abolition of feudalism was not foreordained by the state’s fiscal crisis, but a contingent outcome of the interplay of waves of rural insurrection, Parisian mobs, and legislative concessions. Through their dialogue with the ‘‘people,’’ revolutionary legislators created a form of discourse that defined the revolution as a watersheld moment between the old order and the new. Markoff shows that words, as well as deeds make revolutions. While the French revolution was more than talk, talk became the frame in which action was interpreted and given form.

Revolutionary outcomes, though, depend on more than the unfolding of actions and the shaping of ideologies by the makers of revolution. History shows that revolutionary outcomes are constrained by global circumstances. Contrasting the outcomes of the Mexican (1910–1917) and Bolivian (1952) revolutions, Eckstein (1976) shows the impact of U.S. foreign investment and military assistance on class structure, party formation, and national well-being. While both modernized their economies, Mexico had greater economic diversification, productivity growth, and political stability than Bolivia. Their revolutions did not alter their

standing relative to stronger states, leaving Bolivia with its weaker postrevolutionary state (and important tin mines) open to U.S. foreign aid and military assistance. Subsidized and schooled by the United States, the armed forces played the decisive role in the 1964 overthrow of the Bolivian regime that the United States had supported in 1952.

Revolutions will not disappear as long as na- tion-states remain the dominant form of world political organization. While the globalization of markets, communications, and culture seems to augur a new world, we live with the legacy of the capitalist world order. Ours is still a world of states, albeit one increasingly structured by regional alliances, multinational corporations, and international bodies like the United Nations. What Marx recognized in the late nineteenth century will likely hold in the century ahead: that persistent inequalities in power and resources between masses and elites and among the world’s nation-states will shape revolutionary prospects and processes.

(SEE ALSO: Marxist Sociology)

REFERENCES

Eckstein, Susan 1976 The Impact of Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of Mexico and Bolivia. London: Sage.

Eisenstadt, S. N. 1978 Revolution and the Transformation of Societies. New York: Free Press.

Farhi, Farideh 1990 States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Goldstone, Jack A. 1986 ‘‘The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions.’’ In J. A. Goldstone, ed., Revolutions. San Diego; Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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