Dr. Jack Goldstone

And I think it's a good thing.

Well, you have to go back and forth.

So sometimes you'll have a question that leads you back in time.

What did the French and Russian revolutions have in common?

Those are big peasant revolutions.

Sometimes you leap forward.

And you say, hey, you know, revolutions lately in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, those were nonviolent.

And how were they different?

But then if you want to ask something like, how did people develop a sense of injustice?

What is it that really kind of pissed them off and made them willing to turn against their own government?

Then you start hopscotching around and looking at the different ideologies, the different themes.

You say, how did someone like a Napoleon come out as the result of a revolution that fought against kings, ended up crowning an emperor, right?

And then in the modern world, we want to look at revolutions where democracies slid into authoritarian regimes because that's a type of revolution too.

I mean, people turn against their own government.

They want a strong man to replace the institutions.

And so we have had in history, authoritarian, fascist revolutions, whatever you want to call them.

But these are cases where people...

dismantled democracy, not in a military coup, but by mobilizing the population on their side.

Yes, it certainly does, because we have a kind of a myth of revolution as a heroic, noble cause to overthrow a terrible, oppressive government and liberate the people.

That's a myth that revolutionaries themselves have cultivated.