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88 Pol. Sci. Q. 1 (1973)

handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry88 and id is 1 raw text is: The Social Origins of the American Revolution: An Evaluation and an Interpretation* JACK P. GREENE The Johns Hopkins University Given the rich theoretical literature on revolution that has been published over the last decade with its heavy emphasis on the relationship between revolutions and the social systems in which they occur,' it is hardly surprising that historians of mod- em political revolutions have increasingly turned their attention to the wider social context in their search for an explanation for those events or that their discussions of the causal pattern of rev- olutions now give as much attention to social strain as to political and ideological conflict; to social dysfunction, frustration, anomie, and their indices as to weaknesses and tensions within the polit- * An earlier version of this paper was presented at San Diego State College and San Jose State College on March 20 and 21, 1972 as the sec- ond annual lecture of the The California State University and Colleges Statewide Lecture Series to Honor the Bicentennial of the American Rev- olution. ' Especially Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston, 1966). But see also Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York, 1962); James C. Davies, Toward a Theory of Revolution, American So- ciological Review, XXVII (1962), 5-19; Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966); Henry Bienen, Violence and Social Change (Chicago, 1968); and Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, 1970). Volume LXXXVIII Number 1 March 1973 1