The Greek Revolution, A Critical Dictionary, Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Constantinos Tsoukalas, March 25, 2021

Introduction 4
articulated amid intense ideological conflict in the two de cades leading up to
the revolution (Brinton 1952, 72–74). Once the uprising was set in motion in
the Morea and Rumeli, the revolutionary dynamic of peasant society helped
spread the insurrection in those regions. This illustrates the classic analy sis of
the “revolution from below” in the historical sociology of revolutions by Barrington
Moore, Jr., and later Theda Skocpol. Moore’s comparison of England
and France on the question of peasant society and its significance for the prospects
of revolution is relevant in the consideration of the Greek case: the integrity
of peasant society in the Morea, Rumeli, Crete, and elsewhere in the Greek
lands can explain how the revolution found its necessary social bases in those
regions, survived once it broke out, and persisted amid the civil wars and other
adversities of the revolutionary de cade.
The Greek Revolution can also be interpreted through the lens of two theoretical
approaches that elaborate on Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of the revolution
of rising expectations, which points out that revolutions come not when
things are at their worst, but rather when they are on the road to improvement,
encouraging unrealistic expectations. The resulting disappointment leads
people to resort to vio lence and revolution. In Tocqueville’s diagnosis, this
was what led to the French Revolution. James Davies and Ted Gurr expanded
on this theory in their own analyses of revolution, which traced the origins of
revolutionary action to discontent resulting from a contraction in well- being
following a period of improvement and to a sense of relative deprivation,
respectively.
Although these theories were based on evidence provided by changing societies
in the twentieth century, they could be tested on the basis of the historical
rec ord provided by the Greek Revolution. It should be remembered that the
revolution came to the Greek world after a long period of social and cultural
change in the eigh teenth century and remarkable economic development during
in the Napoleonic wars and the continental blockade. When all this came to
an end after 1815, the disappointment of rising expectations created a climate
of discontent that made pos si ble the work of the Philiki Etaireia, the secret society
founded in 1814 with the intention to prepare the revolution, as explained
by C. Chatzopoulos in this volume.
The social- psychological perspective on the Greek Revolution could be
greatly enriched by considering Moore’s later work on the significance of the
sense of injustice and the moral outrage resulting from it (Moore 1978). Such
feelings may motivate re sis tance and revolutionary action. The lit er a ture of the
Greek version of the radical demo cratic Enlightenment both before and during
the course of the Greek Revolution, is replete with examples of how the sense
of injustice experienced by Greeks with an enhanced awareness of the condi-