Who's Who in Political Revolutions: Seventy-three Men and Women Who Changed the World

by Jack A. Goldstone (Editor)

Who's Who in Political Revolutions is a brilliant new collection of accessible, illustrated profiles of more than 70 individuals from every corner of the world who through their actions, writings, and ideals shaped the course of history in revolutionary ways in the last 200 years.Who's Who in Political Revolutions is a perfect complement to the Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions as a reference for your library's circulating collection. Students and interested lay readers will find it valuable because it is:
-- Accessible -- Lively writing plus a minimum of jargon and esoteric concepts allow the profile of each revolutionary leader to take shape and dimension.
-- Authoritative -- Profiles and supporting essays are based on the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions, published by CQ under the editorial direction of the scholars in the field throughout the world and Professor Jack Goldstone, one of the leading experts on revolutions and revolutionaries.
-- Abundantly Illustrated -- Nearly every profile includes a compelling picture of the revolutionary leader.

Genres: History

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist and political scientist, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, and international politics. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 140 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the “California school” in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.

Goldstone is currently the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.

His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very useful, easy-to-read book of mini-bios of 73 revolutionary figures, ranging from George Washington to Giuseppe Garibaldi, George Orwell to Francois-Dominique Toussaint L´Ouverture. Each bio is written by a historian/expert, and includes a photo/engraving of each revolutionary figure. So it´s handy as a reference (the entries are in alphabetical order) but also is interesting to read in and of itself. The stories are inevitably ones of struggle, how each leader or thinker changed and in turn changed the world.

Here are some quotes:

From the Introduction:

¨The tendency of structuralist social scientists to minimize the role of revolutionary leaders in making revolutions arises in part because what successful revolutionary leaders do best is take advantage of structural weaknesses in an existing regime. Thus successful leadership and structural vulnerability are almost always found together and are easily confounded."

¨Revolutionary leaders, then, are indispensable to revolutions. Without talented, balanced, and united revolutionary leadership, even the collapse of states does not automatically bring forth a new regime. And when a new regime is constructed, the choices and vision of revolutionary leaders are crucial to shaping its future."

From John Adams (1735-1826) bio:

¨Adams insisted in "Thoughts on Government," published in 1776, that popularly elected legislatures must be checked by a natural social and intellectual elite in control of upper houses and executive authority."

From Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) bio:

¨In 1923 Ataturk consolidated his political control by dissolving the assembly and calling new elections with carefully prepared lists of candidates. The subsequent founding of the People´s Party, encompassing all members of the new assembly, formed the basis of his one-party state, and a republic was declared in October."

¨Religious education and the supervision of pious foundations were severely reduced and brought within the purview of government ministries."

¨These measures were designed to break down religious custom and instill in the populace a secular mentality. Among the more important measures, Sufi orders and sites of pilgrimage were closed; fezzes and turbans were banned and the European brimmed hat imposed (more than six hundred people were executed by special Independence Tribunals for resisting these laws); a secular civil code was adopted; and in 1928 a phonetic Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic-Persian script."

¨A language reform was attempted, rooting out words of Persian and Arabic origin and replacing the with Turkish neologisms."

¨Ataturk also worked to expand literacy, and education generally, and to alter radically the position of women. He campaigned for an end to veiling, promoted women´s entrance into the workforce and professions, and gradually introduced coeducational classrooms. Monogamous civil marriage was made law in 1926, and women achieved full political rights in 1934.¨

From Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) bio:

¨The chaos and disorder that accompanied his military campaigns and dogged the new states after independence confirmed his belief in the need for strong central authority. Politically conservative, he was socially liberal, introducing measures to improve the conditions of the region´s Indian population and to end slavery. Yet his liberalism was tempered by pragmatism and the need to maintain elite support, a fact that explains the inconsistencies and contradictions in his actions and writings."

From Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761-1837) bio:

¨During his imprisonment (March-October 1795), he met Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) and others who would agitate over the subsequent winter for a restoration of social reforms associated with the memory of Robespierre and for the introduction of the abandoned democratic constitution of 1793. When in the spring of 1796 the alarmed executive Directory took steps to crush the agitation, Babeuf and Buonarroti went underground and began to plan an uprising whose ultimate aim was the abolition of private property."

From Edmund Burke (1729-1797) bio:

¨The Americans were in the right, he argued, because they defended traditional practices and principles, the rights of Englishmen, against the disruptive innovations represented by George III´s trade and taxation policies."

¨While most of his British contemporaries applauded the revolutionary developments in France, Burke warned that with the events of 1789 ¨the age of chivalry is gone...and the glory of Europe extinguished forever.¨¨

From Fidel Castro (1926-2016) bio:

¨Between 1959 and 1961 Castro´s policies transformed Cuba. His government expropriated all the means of production (except some peasant agricultural plots) and turned all the private schools, hospitals, and charitable entities into state agencies as well."

¨Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba received vast economic subsidies from the Soviet Union. From the 1960s to the early 1990s Castro supported insurgencies in several dozen Latin American and African countries, with few successes."

From Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) bio:

¨...Cromwell was committed to permitting freedom of religious worship and expression.¨

From Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) bio:

¨The cornerstone of his economic reforms in agriculture was the decision to break up the collective communes and replace them with a family responsibility system" in which each family worked its own plot of land and was allowed to sell for personal profit any production above a set quota."

From Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) bio:

¨Along with Thomas Jefferson, Paine, and John Adams, Franklin´s was the authentic voice of the American Revolution."

¨...with John Adams and john Jay, he negotiated the favorable 1783 treaty of peace with Great Britain, granting the United States standing as a fully independent nation whose western border was the Mississippi River. Heralded on both sides of the Atlantic as, along with Washington, the foremost hero of the Revolution, he had completed the most successful diplomatic mission in American history."

From Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) bio:

¨Yoga is the oldest form of religious and philosophic thought in India."

¨The cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed Indians and the gross atrocities that followed British imposition of martial law throughout Punjab Province convinced Gandhi of the ¨satanic¨ nature of British rule and modern Western industrial society, which were built on violence and oppression. He called for a return to ancient rural Indian values, to India´s village communities, ashrams, several of which he started and which survive to this day as exemplars of Gandhian communism, where each contributes what he or she does best for the benefit of all."

From Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) bio:

¨In May 1860, with most of central and northern Italy liberated, Garibaldi launched a famous expedition of his red-shirted volunteers, known as ¨The Thousand,¨ rapidly conquering Sicily and Naples. Proclaiming himself temporary dictator, he promised social reforms that led millions of southern peasants to revere him as a savior.¨

From Patrick Henry (1736-1799) bio:

¨Henry feared a powerful, centralized government, which he believed would be too far removed from its citizens."

From Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) bio:

¨...Hitler... became chancellor (prime minister) in January 1933.¨

¨Hitler quickly banned all opposition, ended democracy, and turned Germany into a totalitarian police state with himself as fuhrer, or leader. State and party control was gradually imposed on industries and all key social institutions. Rearmament and a huge road-building project ended the depression."

From Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) bio:

¨The [1954] Geneva Conference temporarily divided Vietnam into two zones--a Communist North and a non-communist South. Ho was elected president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, with its capital in Hanoi. The Geneva agreement called for national elections to reunify the country in 1956, but the government in the South, with U.S. backing, refused to carry them out."

¨Ho´s distinctive approach to waging revolution--using a combination of nationalism and populism while downplaying issues related to class struggle and proletarian internationalism--was often criticized by European Marxists. But it became the foundation of Vietnamese revolutionary strategy and is widely viewed as the key to the party´s final victory over the South in 1975.¨

From Hong Xiuquan (1814-1864) bio:

¨...following the Opium War (1839-1842), population pressures and foreign encroachment intensified unemployment, landlord greed, banditry, opium smuggling, ethnic polarization, famine and plague throughout south China´s Guangzhou delta and neighboring Guangxi Province."

¨[Hong, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864)] ... assaulted Confucianism by abolishing female foot-binding, concubinage, arranged marriage, and prostitution, and by decreeing women´s equal access to schooling, the examinations, public office, military service, and landholding. Hong also substituted the Bible and his own writings for Confucian texts as the basis of universal public education and the examinations and guaranteed economic security and social welfare through property-sharing at a level of government never before proposed in China: the ¨congregation"of twenty-five families.¨

From Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) bio:

¨As a proponent of limited government, a skeptic about urbanization and industrialization, a lifelong slaveholder, and a philosopher who expressed a strong suspicion that blacks might be inferior to whites, Jefferson has recently become a favorite target for critics of the limitations of American revolutionary thought."

From Benito Juarez (1806-1872) bio:

¨In 1846, as war with the United State began, liberals reclaimed power and Juarez [born a Zapotec Indian] became a deputy in the national congress. He returned to Oaxaca in 1847 as the elected state governor. He aimed to support the war effort but faced rebellion among the Zapotecs of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, who demanded political autonomy and opposed liberal laws that privatized community lands and coastal salt beds. Juarez defended the liberal state, private property, and commercial production, sending troops to defeat the rebels in a conflict that consumed much of his term as governor."

¨Juarez, elected president a second time in the fall of 1867, asserted national power, completed the nationalization of church properties begun in 1856, and pressed forward the privatization of community lands."

From Jomo Kenyatta (ca 1888-1978) bio:

¨Under the harambee (¨self-help¨) concept that Kenyatta created, the Kenyatta era (1963-1978) ushered in a phenomenal expansion of health services and primary and secondary schools."

¨As practiced under Kenyatta, African socialism was capitalist. Kenyatta pursued a conservative political strategy, and in 1969 Kenya became a single-party state. He died in office on August 22, 1978."

From Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) bio:

¨Khomeini first appeared on the national political scene in 1963 as an outspoken critic of the shah and his reform program. He was imprisoned and, after demonstrations by his supporters were violently suppressed in June, exiled to Iraq. It was during his decade and a half of exile in Iraq that Khomeini began to prepare a beleaguered Shi'ite hierarchy to take over a secularizing state. By the late 1970s he had enlisted the loyalty of many of the ablest and most energetic Shi'ite clerics. The militant clerics rallied behind him in opposition to Western cultural domination and to the shah´s policies, which they considered a threat to the integrity of Islamic religious institutions."

¨Khomeini´s themes of American imperialism and U.S. control of the shah were already popular with nationalists and leftists, including youth and students. Khomeini was also helped by a popular reaction to changes that had hurt or uprooted various segments of Iranian society..."

¨The theocratic constitution was approved by a referendum in December 1979, shortly after the occupation of the American embassy and the taking of its staff as hostages, which resulted in the toppling of Bazargan´s government. By backing the taking of hostages, Khomeini caused a major international crisis. In the course of the ensuing power struggle among the partners in the revolutionary coalition, Khomeini sanctioned the violent suppression of the leftist and secular elements in Iranian politics. After the revolutionary power struggle ended with the complete victory of his supporters, Khomeini sought to maintain unity between the conservative and the radical clerics."

From Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) bio:

¨North Korea encountered trouble in the 1960s when its closest allies, the Soviet Union and China, split. Because of the historical ties that Kim Il Sung and his revolutionaries had with the Chinese communist movement, North Korea sided with the Chinese, straining Soviet-North Korean relations. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), however, the Chinese Red Guards criticized Kim Il Sung and his leadership in North Korea. Kim decided to become independent of both the Soviet Union and China and declared a self-reliance policy. North Korea established diplomatic relations with more than one hundred developing countries and joined the nonaligned movement."

From Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) bio:

During this period (of 1965-1968), he became more outspoken in his insistence that major economic reforms were necessary to achieve social justice in the United States."

From Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette (1757-1834) bio:

¨After his return to France [from America] in 1782, Lafayette supported greater political, economic, and religious liberty and the reduction of governmental regulation on trade."

¨Lafayette continued during this last years to support such causes as Greek and Polish Independence, public education and libraries, the abolition of slavery, prison reform, and women´s rights--all outgrowths of the ideas he had espoused from youth."