The best book series about revolutions, for readers who want to understand why revolutions fail

Dickens was a great intuitive psychologist, and The Tale of Two Cities shows some brilliant insights into human behavior during and after revolutions. The wonderful dreams of French society being built on justice and fairness came crashing down after the revolution. This is because people driven by opportunism and pathological hatred took over society. These ‘revolutionaries’ had an intense desire for vengeance and violent retribution–as well as gaining power for themselves. 

This is a feature of revolutions that we see again and again after the collapse of the old regime: unprincipled opportunists jumping to power. The direction of change becomes more radical. Inevitably, a lot of innocent people became victims during this post-revolution period, as did many innocent French people during what became known as the period of ‘Terror,’ when the guillotine rapidly killed thousands and thousands.

Dickens shows that in this terrifying post-revolution period, some individuals make great sacrifices for the benefit of others. But this is not enough to save the revolutionary ideals that so many people sacrificed for. 

I include Robert Putnam’s book because, in a sense, it is about continuity rather than change, so it is about how things stay the same in some ways rather than revolutions that change things. What I particularly like about this book is Putnam’s discussion of inheritance, which he sees as being about far more than monetary wealth. Inheritance includes all the social networks, friends, connections, social knowledge, and everything else of value that your family passes on to you. Many inherited things are intangibles–like what you learn while sitting around as a child with your family, listening to grown-ups speak. 

Because inheritance is so vast, kids who are ‘poor’ are not just poor materially; they are poor because they lack the vast social knowledge and informal networks that rich kids inherit. This makes it far more difficult for poor kids to move up and make a success of themselves–so there is a stability of sorts. Of course, that is until some individuals who feel stuck and unable to make progress decide to rebel and try to break the system. They sometimes do this by supporting authoritarian strongmen who promise to lead attacks on the government. 

I am deeply passionate about Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace because I find that when I re-read it, I can always learn profound new lessons about human behavior. The setting of War and Peace is Russia in the period before, during, and after the Napoleonic Wars–roughly the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Both directly and indirectly, Tolstoy is dealing with the question of what happens after great revolutions.

France has experienced its great revolution and is now ruled by Emperor Napoleon. The talk is of spreading ‘revolutionary justice’ to the rest of Europe (and the world). In practice, Napoleon is making his own family members monarchs–the revolutionaries are the new aristocracy. Russia also experienced a kind of revolution because the French army's invasion of Mother Russia turned the Russian world upside down.

After invading Russia and capturing Moscow, the French military found themselves defeated by the Russian winter. Tolstoy shows that the Cossacks and the ordinary people of Russia sacrifice themselves to save the motherland. Some aristocrats live as if the war does not exist. However, the harsh conditions of war changed even some of the most corrupt Russian aristocrats. After all, they have within them something from the soul of Russia, a mysterious force that allows a young female Russian aristocrat to dance in an authentic peasant Russian style, even though she has never been taught this kind of rough behavior. There is something within both the French and the Russian peoples that leads them to naturally return to historic patterns of thinking and doing–the revolution does not change patterns deep within them. 

William Butler Yeats was a truly great poet who lived during revolutionary times in Ireland. I am recommending his poetry collection because his poems reflect the revolutionary times he lived in, but also because Yeats himself lived a revolutionary life of change. One of the things I most admire about Yeats is that his poetry continues to change right until the end of his life. He was never satisfied with his own work, and he always looked coldly and critically at himself. His epitaph is, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.”

In his poem ‘The Great Day,’ Yeats presents an image of two beggars, one on horseback whipping another on foot. After the revolution, the beggars changed places, but the whip went on. This is a remarkable image–unfortunately, one that my research shows to be close to the truth.

I am recommending George Eliot’s novel (published in parts 1871-72) because I believe it is as good as any of the great Russian novels and probably the best novel written in English. Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) was herself a revolutionary person. In 19th century England, she worked as an independent woman, lived with a married man (she eventually married him), and later married a man a lot younger than herself. Her novel is set in the early part of the 19th century when the aftereffects of the French Revolution were strongly felt in England, and there was even fear of revolution among the English aristocracy. The 1832 parliamentary reforms gave political power to the new middle class, and change was underway. Middlemarch is a fictional town, where the banker, mayor, and other middle-class professionals are rising in influence.

At the center of the novel is a medical doctor who intends to be part of a scientific revolution. However, his personality does not allow him to make much scientific progress despite his obvious research and academic talent. One of the lessons I learned from Middlemarch is that in order to succeed as a revolutionary in any field, it is necessary to have an appropriate personality–intellectual ability is not enough.