ABSTRACT
The term revolution can mean almost anything, and definitions have ranged all the way from “simple change” to “international holocaust.” Nonetheless, a body of literature has emerged that attempts to formulate some working models for how changes called revolutionary take place, and under what conditions (Hopper, 1950; Horowitz, 1964, pp. 313–330, Gross and Hopper, 1959, pp. 21–86). If this same literature does not deal seriously with why revolutions occur, this is because social scientists have focused too exclusively on consensual and functional patterns of interaction, and not nearly enough on conflictual and dysfunctional patterns. But our concern will be to understand what a revolution is in its morphological sense, rather than to explicate why a revolution takes place in its more abstract sense.
