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Conflict and Governance pp 95–121Cite as

The rationality of revolution

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Abstract

Between 950 and 1950, European states experienced four short intervals of rapid social, political and economic change. Each such period followed the introduction of a macroinvention in information and communication technology. Here these two sets of events are linked by a rational theory of revolution in which the optimal system for producing the information to allocate a society’s resources depends on the relative importance of fixed costs and network effects. Variations in these parameters can trigger four types of revolution — contractual, consensual, preemptive and prescriptive — each of which captures the essential features of one of the historical periods of change.

The author would like to thank Joel Mokyr, Ulrich Blum and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Financial support came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the FCAR Fund of Quebec.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CRDE and Economics Department, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7

    Leonard Dudley

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  1. Leonard Dudley
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  1. Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, 92697, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amihai Glazer

  2. WZB, Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785, Berlin, Germany

    Kai A. Konrad

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Dudley, L. (2003). The rationality of revolution. In: Glazer, A., Konrad, K.A. (eds) Conflict and Governance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05121-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05121-4_7

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