Dr. Jack Goldstone

Yeah, I'm Jack Goldstone, he, him.

Like anything else, it's a combination of persistence and stubbornness.

I got interested in revolutions because I wanted to know why governments often do stupid things.

I figured the most stupid thing a government could do would mess things up so badly that it would get overthrown by its own people.

So I started looking into this question of how do states fall into revolution?

And it's a difficult question.

And I've had to learn about revolutions in a lot of different places and over a lot of history.

So it was a big project.

And yeah, it took decades to establish a sense of knowledge about it.

Well, I certainly had a bent toward history.

You know, if people ask me, when did I start studying revolutions?

I'd say in an undergraduate college paper, I was reading about ancient Greece and the ideas they had about transitions from democracy to tyranny.

And I said, hey, this goes way back.

Of course, revolution keeps changing as people learn, but it's been an endlessly fascinating topic for me.

Yeah, that's right.

I think the world once got hung up on the idea of the French Revolution as the model revolution.

And it's really not a revolution unless you have people hanging from lampposts and such.

But we now have to recognize that that's not the only way these things happen.

There have been nonviolent revolutions throughout history.

And lately, the nonviolent approach has become much more widespread.