1 The Triumph of Imbalance

A SOCIETY OUT OF BALANCE, with power concentrated in a privileged elite, can be ripe for revolution. The American colonies by 1776 were ripe for revolution, as was Russia in the early twentieth century. So are many countries today, including some called democratic.

The trouble with revolution is that it usually replaces one form of imbalance with another. As some people among the disenfranchised gain power through force, they tend to carry their society toward some new extreme. Lenin promised the Russian people a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead, their revolution brought them a dictatorship of the Communist Party, exercised through the public sector. This new regime may have attended to certain collective needs, but at the expense of individual liberties. The United States went the other way, although it took two hundred years before tipping into imbalance.