22
Our desires and pleasures spring from
society; we measure them, therefore, by
society and not by the objects which
serve for their satisfaction. Because they
are of a social nature, they are of a relative
nature.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Wage Labor and Capital
BENEATH the complexity of human motivation neurophysiologists .
have identified two great "appetitive systems" that provide the
motivating feelings against which everything that happens to us
is measured and judged. Stimulation of one of these systems provides
our feelings of elation, satisfaction, and love. Stimulation
of the other leads to sensations of anxiety, terror, depression, and
rage. These feelings color our perceptions of the world and energize
our actions. Learning is based on these appetitive systems,
first directly, then indirectly: we learn to do and to seek out those
things that bring satisfaction, and to avoid those that have noxious
effects.1
Men's circumstances change, however, and what they have
learned does not always prove suitable for deriving satisfactions
from changed circumstances. "We become frustrated," Cantril
writes, "when we sense a conflict between the significances we
bring to a situation and which have worked in the past but seem to
have no correspondence . . . to the emerging situation we face.
• • .'' 2 This conflict or tension is fundamentally unpleasant: to be
avoided or overcome if possible; to be released in expressive,
"nonrealistic" ways if not. It is the fundamental source of both
innovation and destruction in human affairs. Why innovative behavior
should occur in response to tension is clear enough: the
socialization process teaches men to learn to avoid unpleasant
stimuli, and only severe new conflicts are likely to paralyze the
adaptive capacities men acquire in that process. Destructive behavior
may be explained by reference to another fundamental
property of the human organism: if men are exposed to noxious
1 A brief introduction to the neurophysiological literature, and an interpretation
of its implications for motivation generally, are provided by Hadley Cantril, "Sentio,
ergo sum: 'Motivation' Reconsidered," journal of Psychology, LXV (January 1967),
91-107. The appetitive systems were located by neurophysiologists in the mid-
1950s and have been identified and studied in both man and other mammals.
2 Cantril, p. 99.
2. Relative Deprivation and
the Impetus to Violence
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  23
stimuli that they cannot avoid or overcome, they have an innate
disposition to strike out at their sources. Striking out may or
may not reduce the frustration, but it seems to be an inherently
satisfying response to the tension built up through frustration.3
The desire to release tension is not the only source of aggression,
however. Innovative responses to tensions may themselves include
the resort to violence. Most important, the choice of tactical
or "realistic" violence as an innovative response to tension is reinforced
by the innate disposition to aggression created by the tension.
Distinctions between "realistic" and "nonrealistic" conflict
or aggression thus may be analytically useful, but the physiological
and psychological evidence suggests that elements of the
latter are almost always present.4 It is likely to be absent only
among those who are coerced into participation in collective con-
flict.
These principles operate in a wide range of individual behavior,
including the actions of those in rebellion against their political
community. We need concepts and hypotheses better suited to
analyzing the social and psychological transactions that provide
the impetus to political violence among members of a collectivity.
"Relative deprivation" (RD) is the term used in the preceding
chapter to denote the tension that develops from a discrepancy
between the "ought" and the "is" of collective value satisfaction,
and that disposes men to violence. The term's definition is distinct
from its conventional sociological usage, but not so different
as to warrant using a neologism like "cramp" or "exigency." This
chapter examines the RD concept and its subordinate concepts:
values, value classes, value expectations, value capabilities, and
value opportunities. The frustration-aggression relationship provides
the psychological dynamic for the proposed relationship
between intensity of deprivation and the potential for collective
violence; consequently it is examined in some detail. Other conceptual
interpretations of the impetus to political violence are
3 The drive properties of frustration-induced aggression are examined and documented
by Norman R. F. Maier, Frustration: The Study ofBehaviorWithout a Goal
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), passim, and Leonard Berkowitz, "The Concept of
Aggressive Drive: Some Additional Considerations," in Berkowitz, ed., Advances in
Experimental Psychology, Vol. II (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 307-322,
among others. Like the appetitive systems, it appears to be characteristic of man
and of higher-order animals generally.
4 Considerable significance has been attached to the distinction between realistic
and nonrealistic conflict by Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New
York: The Free Press, 1956), 48-55 and passim. The distinction is commonly made
in conflict theory, as pointed out by Raymond W. Mack and Richard C. Snyder,
"The Analysis of Social Conflict: Toward an Overview and Synthesis," journal of
Conflict Resolution, I (June 1957), 221-248.
24  ✻  Chapter Two
related to the relative deprivation model, including notions of
dissonance, anomie, and social conflict. Finally three patterns
of disequilibrium between value expectations and value capabilities
are proposed to facilitate dynamic analysis.
Relative Deprivation Defined
Hypothesis V.l: The potential for collective violence varies
strongly with' the intensity and scope of relative deprivation
among members of a collectivity.
Relative deprivation (RD) is defined as actors' perception of
discrepancy between their value expectations and their value capabilities.
Value expectations are the goods and conditions of life
to which people believe they are rightfully entitled. Value capabilities
are the goods and conditions they think they are capable
of getting and keeping. (These concepts are more precisely defined
below.) The emphasis of the hypothesis is on the perception of
deprivation; people may be subjectively deprived with reference
to their expectations even though an objective observer might
not judge them to be in want. Similarly, the existence of what
the observer judges to be abject poverty or "absolute deprivation"
is not necessarily thought to be unjust or irremediable by those
who experience it. As Runciman puts it, "if people have no reason
to expect or hope for more than they can achieve, they will be less
discontented with what they have, or even grateful simply to be
able to hold on to it." 5 The concept of RD was first used systematically
in the 1940s by the authors of The American Soldier to denote
the feelings of an individual who lacks some status or conditions
that he thinks he should have, his standards of what he should
have generally being determined by reference to what some other
person or groups has.6 The concept is widely used in sociological
research, where it is usually assumed for operational purposes that
value standards are set by reference t:o some group or status with
which an individual does or is thought to identify.7 It is more gen-
5 W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social justice (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1966), 9·.
6 See note 27, chap. 1.
7 See for instance Runciman, 11 ff; David F. Aberle, "A Note on Relative Deprivation
Theory," in Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in
Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 209-214; Gordon Rose, "Anomie
and Deviation: A Conceptual Framework for Empirical Studies," British journal
of Sociology, XVII (March 1966), 29-45; Peter Townsend, "The Meanings of Poverty,"
British journal of Sociology, XIII (September 1962), 210-227; and the statusinconsistency
literature beginning with Gerhard Lenski, "Status Crystallization:
A Non-Vertical Dimension of Social Status," American Sociological Review, XIX
(August 1954), 405-413.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  25
erally recognized, however, that value standards can have other
sources. An individual's point of reference may be his own past
condition, an abstract ideal, or the standards articulated by a leader
as well as a "reference group." The definition used here makes
no assumptions about the sources of value expectations; it is
similar to Aberle's definition of RD as "a negative discrepancy
between legitimate expectations and actuality." 8
Values are the desired events, objects, and conditions for which
men strive.9 The values most relevant to a theory of political violence
are the general categories of conditions valued by many men,
not those idiosyncratically sought by particular individuals. In psychological
terms, values are the goal objects of human motivation,
presumably attributable to or derived from basic "needs" or "instincts."
There have been innumerable attempts to identify and
categorize "needs," "goals," or "values" for purposes of psychological,
sociological, and political analysis. Freud postulated a
single basic need, Eros; Henry Murray listed 12 "viscerogenic"
and 28 "psychogenic" needs.10 Three influential and reasonably
parsimonious lists are summarized in table l and related to one
another. A three-fold categorization that includes welfare values,
power values, and interpersonal values is used here. There is no
need for originality in such a scheme; it is a composite typology,
representing values common to other schemes and relevant to
the genesis of collective RD.
Welfare values are those that contribute directly to physical
well-being and self-realization. They include the physical goods
of life-food, shelter, health services, and physical comfortsand
the development and use of physical and mental abilities.
These two classes of welfare values are referred to below as
economic and self-actualization values. Self-actualization values
may be instrumental to the attainment of other welfare values and
vice versa. Aside from this, however, Maslow and Davies have
argued persuasively that "self-actualization" is an end in itself
for many men: we take intrinsic satisfaction in exercising our intellects
and our hands.11 Power values are those that determine
the extent to which men can influence the actions of others and
avoid unwanted interference by others in their own actions. Power
values especially salient for political violence include the desire
8 Aberle, 209.
9 Following the usage of Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society:
A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950),
55-56.
10 Summarily listed and discussed in James C. Davies, Human Nature in Politics
(New York: Wiley, 1963).
11 Maslow, passim; Davies, 53-60.
26  ✻  Chapter Two
TABLE 1
Four Lists of Value Categories
Runciman's
Lasswell and Dimensions of
Maslow's Need Kaplan's Social Composite
Hierarchy" Values 0 Inequality c Typology
WELFARE VALUES
Physical Well-being, Economic class
)wealth
Welfare valuesSelf-actual- Skill, enlightization
enment
DEFERENCE VALUES
Safety, order Power Power Power values
Love, belong- Affection
)
ingness Interpersonal
Self-esteem Respect Status values
Rectitude
a A. H. Maslow, "A Theory of Human Motivation," Psychological Review, L
(1943), 370-396, summarized and discussed in James C. Davies, Human Nature
in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1963), 8-63.
Maslow postulates a hierarchy among needs: safety and order needs will not emerge
until physical needs are satisfied, love needs emerge only after safety needs are
satisfied, etc. The needs are listed here in Maslow's proposed order with the exception
of self-actualization, which he suggests emerges after love needs are
satisfied.
• Power and Society, 55-56.
c Relative Deprivation, chap. 3. Runciman does not treat these explicitly as
values or needs but as conditions that groups have in varying degrees, and with
respect to which people judge their relative satisfaction or deprivation.
to participate in collective decision-making-to vote, to take
part in political competition, to become a member of the political
elite-and the related desires for self-determination and security,
for example freedom from oppressive political regulation or from
disorder. These two classes of power values are referred to below
as participation and security values. Interpersonal values are the
psychological satisfactions we seek in nonauthoritative interaction
with other individuals and groups. These values include the
desire for status, i.e., occupancy of a generally recognized role by
virtue of which we are granted some measure of prestige by
those with whom we interact; the related need to participate in
stable, supportive groups-family, community, associationsthat
provide companionship and affection; and the sense of certainty
that derives from shared adherence to beliefs about the
nature of society and one's place in it, and to norms governing
social interaction. These three classes of interpersonal values
are labeled status, communality, and ideational coherence.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  27
The value expectations of a collectivity are the average value
positions to which its members believe they are justifiably entitled.
Value position is the amount or level of a value actually
attained. Value expectations refer to both present and future conditions.
Men ordinarily expect to keep what they have; they also
generally have a set of expectations and demands about what they
should have in the future, which is usually as much or more than
what they have at present. It is important to note that value expectations
are defined with reference to justifiable value positions,
meaning what men believe they are entitled to get or maintain,
not merely what they faintly hope to attain. Hoselitz and Willner
make a precisely comparable distinction between expectation
and aspiration:
Expectations are a manifestation of the prevailing norms set by
the immediate social and cultural environment. Whether expressed
in economic or social terms, the basis upon which the
individual forms his expectations is the sense of what is rightfully
owed to him. The source of that sense of rightness may be
what his ancestors have enjoyed, what he has had in the past,
what tradition ascribes to him, and his position in relation to
that of others in the society. Aspirations, on the other hand,
represent that which he would like to have but has not necessarily
had or considered his due. . . .12
The value capabilities of a collectivity are the average value
positions its members perceive themselves capable of attaining
or maintaining. Value capabilities also have both present and
future connotations. In the present, value capabilities are represented
by what men have actually been able to attain or have
been provided by their environment: their value position. In the
future, value capabilities are what men believe their skills, their
fellows, and their rulers will, in the course of time, permit them to
keep or attain: their value potential. It is possible to distinguish
between perceived and actual value potential: men's capacities
for attaining their value expectations may be substantially greater
or less than they believe them to be. However, it is perceived
value potential that determines present behavior. It is also likely
that perceived value potential is considerably more important
than present value position in determining how people assess
their capabilities. The attained value positions of a group may
12 Bert Hoselitz and Ann Willner, "Economic Development, Political Strategies,
and American Aid," in Morton A. Kaplan, ed., The Revolution in World Politics
(New York: Wiley, 1962), 363.
28  ✻  Chapter Two
be quite low with respect to value expectations, but perceived
deprivation and manifestations of discontent will tend to be low
to the extent that potential is perceived to be high. The obverse
relationship characterizes some prerevolutionary societies: attained
value positions appear relatively high with respect to value
expectations, but the potential for increasing or even maintaining
value positions is perceived to be declining. These assertions are
documented in the following chapters.
The courses of action people have available to them for attaining
or maintaining their desired value positions are their value
opportunities, three types of which can be distinguished: personal,
societal, and political. Personal opportunities are individuals' inherited
and acquired capacities for value-enhancing action. Inherited
capacities are normally distributed in most collectivities
and thus have little relevance to a theory of collective violence.
The technical skills and general knowledge acquired through
education, however, can greatly increase men's sense of personal
competence, particularly in improving their material value positions.
Societal opportunities are the normal courses of action
available to members of a collectivity for direct value-enhancing
action. Societal opportunities for economic value attainment include
the range and number of remunerative occupations, the ease
of access to those occupations, and the economic resources available
to compensate those engaged. Participation values can be
attained through routinized channels for political participation
and recruitment to the political elite; the attainment of security
values is largely a function of the capacity of the political system
for simultaneously minimizing detailed regulation of human
activity and maintaining internal order. Interpersonal values are
enhanced to the extent that familial and communal life is free
from external disruption, and to the extent that there are generally
accepted norms on the basis of which status and respect are accorded
in interpersonal relations. Political opportunities are the
normal courses of action available to members of a collectivity
for inducing others to provide them with value satisfactions.
Political opportunities refer to political actions as means rather
than ends; opportunities for political participation as an end in
itself are comprised under societal value opportunities. The same
procedures and institutions that provide the latter usually also
provide the means by which collectivities can demand welfare
and power benefits from a government. There are other kinds of
opportunities that are "political" in the sense intended here,
including collective bargaining procedures by which workers can
demand greater welfare benefits from their employers, and as-
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  29
sociational activity by subcultural groups designed to increase
their members' status in dealing with members of other groups.
The scope of RD is its prevalence with respect to each class of
values among the members of a collectivity. Some deprivations
are characteristic of some members of all groups. Deprivation is
relevant to the disposition to collective violence to the extent
that many people feel discontented about the same things. Unexpected
personal deprivations such as failure to obtain an expected
promotion or the infidelity of a spouse ordinarily affect few people
at any given time and are therefore narrow in scope. Events and
patterns of conditions like the suppression of a political party,
a drastic inflation, or the decline of a group's status relative to its
reference group are likely to precipitate feelings of RD among
whole groups or categories of people and are wide in scope. Aberle
dichotomizes what is here called scope into two general classes of
deprivations, those that are personal and those that are group experiencesP
Scope is better regarded as a continuum: it should be
possible to identify, for example by survey techniques, the proportion
of people in any collectivity that feels deprived with respect
to any specified class of values.
The intensity of RD is the extent of negative affect that is associated
with its perception, or in other words the sharpness of discontent
or anger to which it gives rise. Runciman similarly speaks
of the "degree" of deprivation, defined as "the intensity with which
it is felt." 14 Intensity, like scope, is subject to direct empirical
assessment: one can infer the intensity of men's feelings about RD
using interview, projective, and content analytic techniques,
among others.15 Moreover it is possible to specify a number of
properties of value expectations and value capabilities that increase
or decrease the scope and intensity of deprivation, and that can be
examined without necessarily relying on survey techniques. Some
determinants of the scope and intensity of RD are examined in
the following chapter.
Potential for collective violence, the dependent variable of the
hypothesis stated at the outset of this section, is defined as the
scope and intensity of the disposition among members of a collectivity
to take violent action against others. For many research
purposes this potential may be treated as a hypothetical construct,
a disposition to act inferred to exist in the minds of many members
13 Aberle, 210.
14 Runciman, 10.
15 One appropriate interviewing technique, the self-anchoring scale, is used in
Hadley Cantril, The Pattern ofHuman Concerns (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1965).
30  ✻  Chapter Two
of a collectivity but measured only in terms of its antecedents,
the intensity and scope of RD, or in terms of its consequences,
the magnitude of collective violence. If it could not conceivably
be assessed more directly there would be no point in stating hypotheses
about it; the only testable hypothesis would be that the
greater the intensity and scope of relative deprivation, the greater
the magnitude of collective violence. In principle, however, the
potential for collective violence can be independently assessed.
One means is the use of interview techniques that specifically
ask people whether they are prepared to participate in a riot, or
that allow them to project violent sentiments in response to ambivalent
stimuli. These techniques can be used in structured
or laboratory situations. They also can be and have been employed
in natural populations. Louis Harris, for example, has polled
black Americans about their willingness to riot.16 It also is possible
to construct simulation studies of prerevolutionary situations
and assess the responses of players, an approach being developed
by SchwartzP This diversity of approaches seems to
justify treating potential for collective violence as a crucial intervening
variable between deprivation-induced discontent and
political violence, rather than as a merely hypothetical and superfluous
construct.
The Sources of Aggression 18
Psychological theories about the ongms of human aggression
provide an explicit motivational explanation for the proposed
causal link between relative deprivation and collective violence.
There is a variety of theoretical writings on this question, some
of it speculative, some of it based on empirical research. Some
psychological "theories" about the sources of aggressive behavior
can be disregarded at the outset. There is little support for pseudopsychological
assertions that most or all revolutionaries or conspirators
are deviants, fools, or the maladjusted.19 Psychodynamic
explanations of the "revolutionary personality" may be useful for
16 William Brink and Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of U.S. Racial
Attitudes Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 266.
17 David Schwartz, "Political Alienation: A Preliminary Experiment on the Psychology
of Revolution's First Stage," paper read at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association (1967).
18 Portions of this section first appeared in Ted Gurr, "Psychological Factors in
Civil Violence," World Politics, xx (January 1968), 247-251.
19 See for example Kurt Riezler, "On the Psychology of the Modern Revolution,"
Social Research, X (September 1943), 320-336; portions of Eric Hoffer's generally
useful The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York:
Harper, 1951); and Donald J. Goodspeed, The Conspirators: A Study of the Coup
d'Etat (New York: The Viking Press, 1962).
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  31
microanalysis of particular events, but contribute relatively little
to general theories of collective action.20 Aggression-prone victims
of maladaptive socialization processes are found in every society,
and among the actors in most outbreaks of political violence,
but they are much more likely to be mobilized by strife than to
constitute it in its entirety. Nor can a general theory of political
strife be based solely on culturally specific theories of modal
personality traits, though it should take account of their effects
(discussed in chapter 6). The most generally relevant psychological
theories are those that deal with the sources and characteristics
of aggression in all men, regardless of culture. Such psychological
theory provides a motivational base for theory about political
violence and provides a means for identifying and specifying the
operation of some explanatory variables.
There are three distinguishable psychological assumptions about
the generic sources of human aggression: that aggression is solely
instinctive, that it is solely learned, or that it is an innate response
activitated by frustration.21 One or another of these is implicit in
most theoretical approaches to civil strife that have no explicit
motivational base. The instinct theories of aggression, represented
among others by Freud's qualified attribution of the impulse to
destructiveness to a death instinct and by Lorenz's view of aggression
as a survival-enhancing instinct, assume that most or all men
have within them an autonomous source of aggressive impulses,
a drive to aggress that, in Lorenz's words, exhibits "irresistible
outbreaks which recur with rhythmical regularity." 22 Although
there is no definitive support for this assumption, its advocates,
including Freud and Lorenz, have often applied it to the explanation
of collective as well as individual aggression.23 The assump-
20 A recent study of this type is E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality:
Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
21 A threat-aggression sequence is discussed below.
22 Konard Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966),
chap. 4, quotation from xii. The aggressive instinct in animals and man is said ordinarily
to be triggered by the presence or approach of another creature. In the absence
of such an activator, however, aggression will occur spontaneously. Such assertions
are supported by somewhat idiosyncratic observational reports on animal behavior.
23 See for example Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan
Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930); Lorenz, chaps. 13, 14; and Franz
Alexander, "The Psychiatric Aspects of War and Peace," American journal of Sociology,
LXVI (1941), 504-520. Freud's instinctual interpretation of aggression is
advanced in his later works; his early view was that aggression is a response to frustration
of pleasure-seeking behavior. For reviews and critiques of other instinct
theories of aggression see Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social Psychological
Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), chap. 1, and Ralph L. Holloway, Jr.,
"Human Aggression: The Need for a Species-Specific Framework," in Morton
Fried and others, eds., War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression
(Garden City, New York: Natural History Press, 1968), 29-48.
32  ✻  Chapter Two
tion is evident in Hobbes' characterization of man in the state of
nature, and perhaps implicit in Nieburg's recent concern for "the
people's capability for outraged, uncontrolled, bitter, and bloody
violence," 24 but plays no significant role in contemporary theories
of civil strife.
Just the opposite assumption, that aggressive behavior is solely
or primarily learned, characterizes the work of some child and social
psychologists, whose evidence indicates that some aggressive
behaviors are learned and used strategically in the service of particular
goals- aggression by children and adolescents to secure attention,
by adults to express dominance strivings, by groups in competition
for scarce values, by military personnel in the service of
national policy.25 This assumption, that violence is a learned response,
rationalistically chosen and dispassionately employed, is
common to a number of recent theoretical approaches to collective
conflict. Among theorists of revolution, Johnson repeatedly, though
not consistently, speaks of civil violence as "purposive," as "forms
of behavior intended to disorient the behavior of others, thereby
bringing about the demise of a hated social system." 26 Timasheff
regards revolution as a "residual" event, an expedient "resorted
to when other ways of overcoming tensions have failed." 27 Morrison
attributes rural discontent and strife in developing nations
to "relative deprivation," defined as it is here, but he explicitly
assumes rationality in the behavior of the deprived when he hypothesizes
that "all attempts to reduce discontent are selected on the
basis of the actor's perception of the probability of the attempt's reducing
the discontent." 28 Parsons attempts to fit political violence
into the framework of social interaction theory, treating the resort
to force as a way of acting chosen by the actor(s) for purposes of
deterrence, punishment, or symbolic demonstration of capacity to
act.29 Schelling represents those conflict theorists who explicitly
24 H. L. Nieburg, "The Threat of Violence and Social Change," American Political
Science Review, LVI (December 1962), 870.
25 A characteristic study is Albert Bandura and Richard H. Walters, Social Learning
and Personality Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963).
26 Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 12,
13, italics added.
27 Nicholas S. Timasheff, War and Revolution (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965),
154.
28 Denton E. Morrison, "Relative Deprivation and Rural Discontent in Developing
Countries: A Theoretical Proposal," paper read at the Annual Meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (1966), 6.
29 Talcott Parsons, "Some Reflections on the Place of Force in Social Process,"
in Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War: Problems and Approaches (New York: The
Free Press, 1964), 34-35.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  33
assume rational behavior and interdependence of adversaries' decisions
in all types of conflict.30
The third psychological assumption is that much aggression occurs
as a response to frustration. "Frustration" is an interference
with goal-directed behavior; "aggression" is behavior designed to
injure, physically or otherwise, those toward whom it is directed.
The disposition to respond aggressively when frustrated is part
of man's biological makeup; there is a biologically inherent tendency,
in men and animals, to attack the frustrating agent. This
is not necessarily incompatible with the preceding two assumptions.
Frustration-aggression theory is more systematically developed,
however, and has substantially more empirical support
than theories that assume either that all men have a free-flowing
source of destructive energy or that all aggression is imitative and
instrumental.
The most influential formulation of frustration-aggression theory
was proposed by Dollard and his colleagues at Yale in 1939. The
basic postulate is "that the occurrence of aggressive behavior always
presupposes the existence of frustration and, contrariwise,
that the existence of frustration always leads to some form of aggression."
It is clear from the remainder of the study that the second
part of the postulate was not intended to suggest either that
aggression was the only possible response to frustration, or that
there was no difference between the instigation to aggression,
subsequently called "anger," and the actual occurrence of aggression.31
Miller later offered a clarification: frustration produces
instigations to various responses, one of which is aggression.
If the non-aggressive responses do not relieve the frustration,
"the greater is the probability that the instigation to aggression
eventually will become dominant so that some response of aggression
will occur." 32 Empirical studies identify fundamental
responses to frustration other than aggression. Himmelweit sum-
30 Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy ofConflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1960), 4.
31 John Dollard and others, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1939), quotation from p. l. Major summaries of the experimental and
theoretical literature include Hilde T. Himmelweit, "Frustration and Aggression:
A Review of Recent Experimental Work," in Psychological Factors of Peace and
War, ed. T. H. Pear (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 161-91; Elton D. McNeil, "Psychology
and Aggression," journal of Conflict Resolution, III (June 1959), 195-294;
Arnold H. Buss, The Psychology of Aggression (New York: John Wiley, 1961);
Aubrey J. Yates, Frustration and Conflict (New York: John Wiley, 1962), especially
chaps. 2-4; and Berkowitz, Aggression.
32 Neal E. Miller and others, "The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis," Psychological
Review, XLVIII (July 1941), quotation from 339.
34  ✻  Chapter Two
marizes experimental evidence that frustration in children can
lead to regression in the form of lowering intellectual performance,
and to evasion.33 Four response patterns were found in an examination
of frustration-induced behaviors in a New Guinea tribe: submission,
dependence, avoidance, and aggression. The primary
emotional response to frustrations among children is rage or anger,
modified by later learning experiences.34 Prolonged frustration,
in the form of continuous unemployment, has been observed to
result in apathy.35
These findings and observations are qualifications of the basic
frustration-aggression thesis, not refutations of it. The basic explanatory
element that frustration-aggression theory contributes
to the understanding of human conflict, and specifically to the
analysis of political violence, is the principle that anger functions
as a drive. In the recent reformulation of the theory by Berkowitz,
the perception of frustration is said to arouse anger. Aggressive
responses tend to occur only when they are evoked by an external
cue, that is, when the angered person sees an attackable object or
person that he associates with the source of frustration. This argument,
and the experimental evidence that supports it, suggests
that an angered person is not likely to strike out at any object
in his environment, but only at the targets he thinks are responsible.
The crucial point is that occurrence of such an attack is
an inherently satisfying response to anger; if the attacker has
done some harm to his frustrator, his anger is reduced, whether or
not he succeeds in reducing the level of frustration per se.36 If
frustration continues, aggression is likely to recur. If it is reduced
as a result of the attack, the tendency to attack is reinforced, and
the onset of anger in the future is increasingly likely to be accompanied
by aggression.
Maier has undertaken many studies which support the thesis
that innate frustration-induced behaviors become ends in themselves
for the actors, unrelated to further goals, and qualitatively
different from goal-directed behavior. He suggests that there are
four frustration-induced responses, including regression, fixation,
and resignation as well as aggression. Frustration-instigated behavior
is distinguished from goal-directed behavior by a number of
33 Himmelweit, 172.
34 J. M. V. Whiting, "The Frustration Complex in Kwoma Society," Man, XLIV
(November-December 1944), 140-144.
35 Marie Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisal, "Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal," Psychologische
Monographen, v (1933), summarized in Himmelweit, 172.
36 On the drive properties of anger see Berkowitz, "The Concept of Aggressive
Drive," and S. Feshbach, "The Function of Aggression and the Regulation of Aggressive
Drive," Psychological Review, LXXI (July 1964), 257-272.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  35
characteristics: it tends to be fixed and compulsive; it is not necessarily
deterred by punishment, which may instead increase the
degree of frustration; it takes the form most readily available,
little influenced by anticipated consequences; and it is satisfying
in itself.37 Furthermore the original goal which suffered frustration
may become largely irrelevant to behavior. "Aggression then
becomes a function of the frustration, the previously existing goal
response having been replaced by behavior which is controlled
by an entirely different process." 38
The threat-aggression sequence is another behavioral mechanism
that a number of psychologists have argued is as fundamental,
if not as common, as the frustration-aggression relationship. Clinical
and observational evidence suggests that the greater the perceived
threat to life, the greater the violent response. According
to Wedge, "When the .value directly at stake is life, violent response
occurs as reaction to fear rather than expression of anger." 39 Surveys
of the effects of bombing on Japanese, German, and English
civilian populations during World War II show that heavy bombings-including
those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-first produced
acute fear, not anger, but also generally led to increased hostility
toward both the enemy and the government that failed to prevent
the bombings.40 Experiments with animals provide substantiating
evidence: events that immediately and actively threaten the continued
existence of the organism trigger avoidance-survival mechanisms,
which can include extraordinarily violent behavior. The
threat-aggression sequence can be interpreted as a special case of
the frustration-aggression relationship, as Berkowitz does. A
threat to life is an anticipated frustration; as the degree of threat
increases, fear and anger rise simultaneously, and the extent to
which fear predominates may be "a function of the individual's
perceived power to control or hurt his frustrater relative to the
frustrater's power to control or harm him." 41 It nonetheless seems
likely that people have a fundamental disposition to respond ag-
37 Maier, 92-115, 159-161; also see Yates, 24-30, 36-56.
38 l'<orman R. F. Maier, "The Role of Frustration in Social Movements," Psychological
Review, LXIX (November 1942), 587.
39 Bryant Wedge, "The Case Study of Student Political Violence: Brazil, 1964,
and the Dominican Republic, 1965," World Politics, XXI (January 1969), 195-196.
Also see Jerome Frank, Sanity and Survival: Psychological Aspects of War and
Peace (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 75.
40 1. L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress; Psychological Studies of Bombing
and Civilian Defense (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 4-152. Comparable reactions
have been observed in many disaster studies. See for example George W. Baker
and Dwight W. Chapman, eds., Man and Society in Disaster (New York: Basic
Books, 1962).
41 Berkowitz, Aggression, 42-46, quotation from 45.
36  ✻  Chapter Two
gressively to extreme fear itself; if so, the response can reinforce
and be reinforced by frustration-induced anger. The relationship
appears especially relevant in evaluating the effect 'of police
and military actions in precipitating and prolonging collective
violence.
The frustration-aggression and the related threat-aggression
mechanisms provide the basic motivational link between RD and
the potential for collective violence. They are not inconsistent
with the presence of learned and purposive elements in acts of individual
and collective violence, however. Men feel deprived
with respect to what they have learned to value and to what they
have learned to do. The beliefs and symbols that determine the
timing, forms, and objects of violence are learned. If their anger is
powerful and persistent, men can employ much reason and inventiveness
in devising ways to give it violent expression. Some such
men may learn to value violence for its own sake. But much of this
learning takes place after anger has already been aroused; individuals
who are dispassionately violent often are using techniques
that proved useful and satisfying in response to past frus-
trations.
There also is an evident sense of purpose among many of the
participants in most outbreaks of collective violence, in the sense
that they expect violent action to enhance their value position.
Revolutionary leaders put their followers' anger to their purpose
of seizing power; rioters take advantage of disorder to loot stores
for food and furniture; demonstrators hope to persuade their rulers
to take remedial action. The nature and strength of these purposes
are major determinants of the form and tactics of collective violence.
But in most instances they appear to reinforce or channel the
impetus to violence, and are infrequently an autonomous motive
for violence. This assertion is made without an attempt to support
it, but it is suceptible to empirical test. It is true, and the frustration-aggression
relationship is significant for political violence, to
the extent that actors in political violence manifest or admit to some
degree of anger.42
In summary, the primary source of the human capacity for violence
appears to be the frustration-aggression mechanism. Frustration
does not necessarily lead to violence, and violence for
42 Anger is quite often accompanied by other affective elements, notably excitement;
the test proposed here is whether anger is present in substantial degree.
Excitement does not seem to be an independent affective state but a general emotional
arousal that precedes and accompanies goal-consummatory activity; the
angry man who anticipates a riot is excited for much the same reasons that a starving
man is excited at the smell of food cooking.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  37
some men is motivated by expectations of gain. The anger induced
by frustration, however, is a motivating force that disposes men to
aggression, irrespective of its instrumentalities. If frustrations are
sufficiently prolonged or sharply felt, aggression is quite likely,
if not certain, to occur. To conclude that the relationship is not relevant
to individual or collective violence is akin to the assertion that
the law of gravitation is irrelevant to the theory of flight because
not everything that goes up falls back to earth in accord with the
basic gravitational principle. The frustration-aggression mechanism
is in this sense analogous to the law of gravity: men who are frustrated
have an innate disposition to do violence to its source in
proportion to the intensity of their frustration, just as objects are
attracted to one another in direct proportion to their relative masses
and inverse proportion to their distance. A number of other variables
influence the behavior of men, and of objects, in such circumstances:
for men, their beliefs, inhibitions, and social environment;
for objects in a gravitational field, their energies, configuration,
and the properties of the medium in which they are situated.
But it seems even less feasible to account for political violence
without reference to the properties of men that dispose them to
violence than it is to construct a theory of flight without reference
to the law of gravitation. On earth, gravity can be assumed a
constant; among men, levels of frustration vary greatly.
Relative Deprivation and Analogous Causes of
Political Violence
Relative deprivation, defined as perceived discrepancy between
value expectations and value capabilities, is sufficiently
general to comprise or be related to most of the general "preconditions
of revolution" identified in other theoretical analyses. Some
of these conceptual relationships are examined here, not to demonstrate
that RD is somehow a "correct" concept and that others are
not, but to show that in addition to its relatively clear definition
it can synthesize diverse other notions.
For Aristotle the principal cause of revolution is the aspiration
for economic or political equality on the part of the common people
who lack it, and the aspiration of oligarchs for greater inequality
than they have, i.e. a discrepancy in both instances between what
people have of political and economic goods relative to what they
think is justly theirs.43 Edwards, writing some twenty-three centuries
later, asserts that all revolutions are due to "repression of
43 The Politics of Aristotle, trans. J. E. C. Welldon (New York: Macmillan, 1883,
1905), 338-342.
38  ✻  Chapter Two
elemental wishes" and that the violence of any revolution is proportional
to the degree of such repression. The sense ofrepression,
or "balked disposition," develops when "people come to feel that
their legitimate aspirations and ideas are being repressed or perverted,
that their entirely proper desires and ambitions are being
hindered and thwarted...." 44 Pettee's concept of "cramp"
similarly resembles RD. People feel "cramped" when they find
that satisfaction of their basic needs for liberty and security is
interfered with, and moreover regard this repression as unnecessary
and avoidable, hence unjustified. "A revolution takes place
when the great majority of the society feel cramped beyond tolerance."
45
Analogous concepts are used by contemporary theorists. Lasswell
and Kaplan attribute political instability to the discrepancy
between expectations and the "degree of ... realization of value
for the mass. . . . It is a low degree of realization- disparity
between value position and value demanded and expectedwhich
is most directly effective." 46 Zollschan argues that all
activity, including revolutionary activity, begins with "exigency,"
defined as "a discrepancy (for a person) between a consciously
or unconsciously desired or expected state of affairs and an actual
situation." 47 Both of these concepts make assumptions about
states of mind of revolutionary actors, as do the concepts mentioned
in the preceding paragraph. Johnson makes no such assumptions
in identifying a "disequilibrated social system" as a necessary
precondition for revolution, which is explicitly a macroanalytic
concept. Its manifestations at the individual level of
analysis may be readily interpreted in terms of RD, however: it
constitutes a discrepancy between men's value expectations (collectively,
their "value structures") and their means for attaining
those values (collectively, the social system's "pattern of adaptation
to the environment" and its capacity to "fulfill functional
requisites").48
Some theorists explicitly use the terms "frustration" or "deprivation"
to represent the impetus to collective violence. Davies attributes
revolutionary outbreaks to the frustration which results
44 Lyford P. Edwards, The Natural History of Revolution (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1927), 3-4, 30-33.
45 George S. Pettee, The Process ofRevolution (New York: Harper, 1938), chap. 2,
quotation from 33.
46 Lasswell and Kaplan, 264.
47 George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch, eds., Explorations in Social Change
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), xxv, 89.
48 Johnson, chap. 5. For a similar analysis see Neil J. Smelser, Theory ofCollective
Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1963), chaps. 2, 3.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  39
from a short-term decline in achievement following a long-term
increase that generated expectations about continuing increase.49
Lerner similarly describes the gap between what people want and
what they get as "frustrating" and suggests revolutionary consequences.
"The spread offrustration in areas developing less rapidly
than their people wish can be seen as the outcome of a deep imbalance
between achievement and aspiration . . . aspiration outruns
achievement so far that many people, even if they are making
some progress toward their goal, are dissatisfied because they get
so much less than they want." 5°Crozier says that the one element
common to all rebels is frustration, defined as "the inability to do
something one badly wants to do, through circumstances beyond
one's control." 51 The Feierabends associate political instability
with aggressive behavior, which is said to vary with the extent of
"systemic frustration." The extent of systemic frustration is the
ratio of social want satisfaction to social want formation, or, in RD
terms, the discrepancy between present value position and value
expectations.52
Relative deprivation is related to frustration by Coser, and applied
to the explanation of suicide rates.53 Hoselitz and Willner,
extending their distinction between expectations and aspirations,
link deprivation with the potential for revolution.
Unrealized aspirations produce feelings of disappointment,
but unrealized expectations result in feelings of deprivation.
Disappointment is generally tolerable; deprivation is often intolerable.
The deprived individual feels impelled to remedy,
by whatever means are available, the material and psychic frustrations
produced in him. Whereas disappointment may breed
the seeds of incipient revolution, deprivation serves as a catalyst
for revolutionary action.54
49 James C. Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological
Review, XXVII (February 1962), 5-19. The Davies thesis is also used by Raymond
Tanter and Manus Midlarsky, "A Theory of Revolution," journal of Conflict Resolution,
XI (September 1967), 264-280, who characterize the discrepancy as a "revolutionary
gap."
50 Daniel Lerner, "Toward a Communication Theory of Modernization: A Set of
Considerations," in Lucian W. Pye, ed., Communications and Political Development
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 327-350, quotations from 330-
335.
51 Brian Crozier, The Rebels: A Study of Post-War Insurrections (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1960), 15-16.
52 Ivo K. and Rosalind L. Feierabend, "Aggressive Behaviors Within Polities,
1948-1962; A Cross-National Study," journal of Conflict Resolution, x (September
1966), 250-251.
53 Lewis A. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (New York: The
Free Press, 1967), 56-62.
54 Hoselitz and Willner, 363.
40  ✻  Chapter Two
The anthropological literature on American Indian response to
white conquest also makes use of the deprivation concept. Nash,
for example, shows how deprivation may occur either through
acceptance or rejection by Indians of white values and skills,
and proposes that the aggressive components in Indian revivalism
are a response to that deprivation.55 Geschwender attributes the
American Negro revolt of the 1960s to "relative deprivation," defined
in its conventional sociological sense of status discrepancy
vis-a-vis a reference group.56 Galtung, although he does not use
the concept of relative deprivation per se, attributes aggression
within and among societies to status discrepancy, or "rank disequilibrium,"
in what is essentially a generalized rephrasing of
the Aristotelian thesis with which this catalog of concepts began.
If men or groups are high on one dimension of a stratification system,
but low on another, e.g., if they have high power or education
but low income, they are said to be disposed to use aggression to
attain a high or equilibrated position on all dimensions.57
This catalog could be extended at length, but only at the risk
of belaboring the obvious. Almost all theories that purport to explain
violent collective behavior assign a central place to a variable
or concept that generally and often specifically resembles RD as it
is defined here. Some salient characteristics of the RD variable
are not necessarily incorporated in these other concepts, however.
Some of them, particularly those making use of "want/get"
formulations, make no reference to the justifiability or intensity of
men's value expectations, nor to the theoretical desirability of
taking into account both actual and anticipated discrepancies between
goals and attainments. Moreover, while many of them
specify by illustration the kinds of societal and political conditions
that constitute the variable or increase its magnitude, few
include specific propositions about its determinants, and only
some suggest categories for classifying the variable's manifestations.
Finally, many theories do not provide a motivational rationale
for the causal connection they propose between the variables
and the violent events toward which it is supposed to dispose
men.
55 Philleo Nash, "The Place of Religious Revivalism in the Formation ofthe Intercultural
Community on Klamath Reservation," Social Anthropology ofNorth American
Tribes, ed. Fred Eggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 377-442.
56 James A. Geschwender, "Social Structure and the Negro Revolt: An Examination
of Some Hypotheses," Social Forces, XLIII (December 1964), 248-256.
57 Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Aggression," Journal ofPeace Research,
No. 2, 1964, 95-119. Galtung also posits several variables that intervene between
rank disequilibrium and aggression, including lack of alternative means and the
extent of cultural experience in aggression.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  41
There are three other concepts frequently· employed in the
analysis of disruptive collective behavior that are not directly
analogous to RD but that appear to be alternatives to it: dissonance,
anomie, and conflict. Without passing judgment on their analytic
usefulness in other contexts, it can be suggested that they relate
to conditions either more or less specific than RD.
Dissonance is a concept widely used in individual psychology.
In Festinger's formulation of cognitive dissonance theory, the term
refers to inconsistency between two cognitive elements or clusters
of elements. Cognitive elements, "the things a person knows
about himself, about his behavior, and about his surroundings,"
are dissonant if "the obverse of one element would follow from
the other." 58 For example, a citizen who believed that his government
would begin a war only if attacked and then learned through
news media that it had initiated a war without provocation is said
to experience dissonance. The assumption is that people sensing
dissonance are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, which they
can do by changing their behavior or beliefs, by changing the
corresponding situation, or by seeking new information to reduce
dissonance while avoiding information that would increase dissonance.59
Depending on the magnitude of dissonance, i.e. the
importance or value of the dissonant elements to him, the citizen
may change his views about the government, attempt to change the
personnel or policies of the government through political action,
or, most likely in this instance, deny the validity of the evidence
that the war was begun without provocation and be receptive to
any evidence of provocation, however flimsy. Many hypotheses
have been proposed and considerable empirical research done on
effects of dissonance in decision-making, compliance, receptivity
to information, social support for mass phenomena, and the influence
process in small groups.60
The dissonance and RD concepts neither comprise nor subsume
one another but overlap. RD is perceived with reference to
individuals' welfare, power, and interpersonal value expectations;
dissonance can obtain among any set of cognitive elements, not
only those that relate to valued goods and conditions of life.
Moreover only some perceptions of deprivation entail dissonance,
in its original sense of contradiction among cognitive elements.
58 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1957), quotations from 4, 13. The perception ofcontradiction can arise
on logical, experiential, cultural, or other grounds, according to Festinger.
59 Festinger, 18-24.
6°Festinger, passim; Jack W. Brehm and Arthur R. Cohen, Explorations in Cognitive
Dissonance (New York: Wiley, 1962).
42  ✻  Chapter Two
Most black Americans know very well that their expectations of
economic and social equality will be only grudgingly and gradually
satisfied, if at all; the failure of the political system to take massive
remedial action is "dissonant" only for those Negroes who at one
time thought that it would. For the great majority the lack of action
merely confirms prior cognitions of the system and intensifies
discontent. The dissonance concept and hypotheses seem directly
applicable to only one particular aspect of the processes by which
the perception of RD develops: when an individual first perceives
inadequacies in value opportunities he had thought were appropriate
and sufficient for attainment of his value expectations, he
can be said to experience dissonance. The onset of RD through
increasing value expectations, or the existence of a discrepancy
between expectations and capabilities per se, does not itself constitute
dissonance, however, nor as Festinger pointed out does
dissonance exist whenever an individual encounters resistance or
frustration in trying to achieve an objective.61
Anomie, in the sense Durkheim used it in Suicide, is a situation
in which either ends (value expectations) outstrip men's means,
or ends remain constant while means are severely restricted, and
corresponds quite closely to the RD concept. The more generalized
sense that Durkheim gave the term in The Division of Labor
in Society, one which Merton popularized in his essay on "Social
Structure and Anomie," is that anomie is a breakdown of social
standards governing social behavior, or normlessness. It is specifically
a sociological concept: "the degree of anomie in a social
system is indicated by the extent to which there is a lack of consensus
on norms judged to be legitimate, with its attendant uncertainty
and insecurity in social relations." 62 Manifestations of normlessness
within individuals are characterized as anomia. Rose,
summarizing the literature, identifies three kinds of anomie:
weakness of norms per se, the existence of several strong but conflicting
norms, and ignorance of norms. All three situations lead
to the pervasive sense of uncertainty to which is attributed much
deviant behavior, including criminality, suicide and drug addiction,
and gang behavior. Merton originally suggested that anomie
could lead to widespread deviant behavior and the establishment
of alternative norms, which constitutes "rebellion." "When rebel-
61 Festinger, 278.
62 Robert K. Merton, "Social Structure and Anomie: Continuities," Social Theory
and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1957), quotation from
266-267. This discussion of the anomie concept makes substantial use of Gordon
Rose, "Anomie and Deviation," 29-45. A more comprehensive summation of work
making use of the concept is Marshall B. Clinard, ed., Anomie and Deviant Behavior:
A Discussion and Critique (New York: The Free Press, 1964).
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  43
lion becomes endemic in a substantial part of the society, it provides
a potential for revolution, which reshapes both the normative
and the social structure." There seem to have been no substantial
later attempts to relate anomie to the occurrence of collective
violence other than gang behavior, however.63
Anomie can be related to the RD concept, as defined here, in
two ways. If group norms are weak or in conflict about how members
can satisfy value expectations, value opportunities are thereby
limited. This is particularly the case with respect to personal and
societal opportunities; the less certain people are about what
ways of acting are appropriate for attaining their goals, i.e. the
greater their anomia, the lower their value capabilities are likely
to be and hence the greater is RD. It should be noted that men can
experience normlessness or norm conflict in any social role and
outside social roles, for example as subordinates in an authority
relationship or as passengers on a jet flight. Thus anomie constitutes
or increases RD only when it relates to norms of valuemaintaining
or value-enhancing activities.
It also can be argued, partly on the basis of cognitive dissonance
theory, that sets of internally consistent norms are intrinsically
valued and that the breakdown of systems of norms therefore constitutes
RD with respect to "coherence" values. The argument is
not that everyone who suffers from anomia is therefore deprived;
it is that RD is experienced by those persons who at one time accepted
an internally consistent set of norms as valid guides to
action but have subsequently felt those norms to be seriously challenged,
without being replaced by another internally consistent
set of norms. Deprivation in this instance results from value loss,
i.e. a declining value position with respect to the ideational coherence
category of interpersonal values. In an anomie society,
however, there are likely to be many people who have never held
one unquestioned, consistent set of norms. Never having had a
consistent set of norms, they are less likely to be discontented over
its lack than those who experience a threat to or loss of strongly
held norms.
The most potent effect of anomie on RD probably is its impact
on value opportunities. Whether normative systems are intrinsically
valued in the sense that economic goods, security, and
63 Merton, 191. One application to political violence is Elwin H. Powell, "Reform,
Revolution, and Reaction as Adaptations to Anomie," Review of Mexican Sociology,
XXV (1963), 331-355. David C. Schwartz has developed a process model of revolutionary
behavior which uses the related concept of alienation and specifies the
circumstances in which political alienation occurs, in "A Theory of Revolutionary
Behavior," in James C. Davies, ed., When Men Revolt and Why (New York: The
Free Press, 1970).
44  ✻  Chapter Two
status are valued is an empirical question most directly answered
by ascertaining the extent to which threats to norm systems anger
people. Generally, the anomie and anomia concepts are related
to RD in a way comparable to dissonance: they overlap RD, but
they cannot be subsumed by it nor do they incorporate all or most
aspects of it.
"Conflict" in its collective sense is sometimes defined as a condition,
sometimes as a process, and sometimes as an event. Galtung
defines it as a condition: "An action-system is said to be in conflict
if the system has two or more incompatible goal-states." 64
Coser initially defines it as a process, "a struggle over values and
claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of
the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals." 65
In conventional usage conflict is an event, a violent or nonviolent
clash between two groups. By either of the first two definitions
conflict resembles the RD concept more closely than either dissonance
or anomie.66 One difference is that RD refers both to individual
states of mind and their collective distribution, whereas
social conflict is generally treated as a property of collectivities
without reference to its manifestations in the minds of the individuals
involved. Galtung identifies a more consequential dif-
ference:
Conflict should . . . be distinguished from frustration, which
is the more general case where goals are not achieved (needs
are not satisfied, gratification not obtained, values not fulfilled,
etc.) for some reason. A very simple case is that of scarcity.
. . . Another simple case is when something is blocking the
access to the source of gratification. . . . But the most important
special case . . . is the case of conflict where efforts
by oneself or others to obtain some value can be seen as the
source of frustration.67
Conflict defined as a condition is essentially a special case of RD
in which the source of the discrepancy between value expectations
and capabilities is another group competing for the same values.
Conflict defined as a process refers to the interaction between
groups in their respective attempts to alleviate RD.
64 Johan Galtung, "Institutionalized Conflict Resolution: A Theoretical Paradigm,"
journal of Peace Research, No.4, 1965, 348.
65 Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, 8.
66 Conflict also has a psychological usage not examined here, namely the presence
in an individual of two (or more) competing and incompatible motives. For a review
of this concept and the literature see Yates, esp. chap. 5.
67 Galtung, "Institutionalized Conflict Resolution," 349.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  45
The conflict concept is less appropriate than RD for the analysis
of political violence for several reasons. One is simply that in its
connotations of process or class of events it includes by definition
some of the variables that this analysis proposes to explain. I hope
to account for the forms and extent of violent political conflict by
proposing some of their general determinants, not to "explain"
them by defining them as conflict. Moreover, conflict defined as
a condition in which group X has what group Y wants refers to a
particular kind of RD, but by no means exhausts the RD concept.
RD refers to any collectively felt discrepancy between a sought
and an attainable value position, whether or not some other group
has the value sought and whether or not group Y tries to seize it
from group X. There are psychological grounds, suggested in the
preceding section, for expecting collective violence to result from
any RD that is of wide scope and intensity. It also seems evident
that many acts of political violence, revolutionary movements in
particular, do not involve a struggle for values so much as a demand
that systems be reshaped so that they can create new values. In
this connection, one difficulty that arises if political violence is
treated as a category of conflict is that political violence is thereby
assumed to entail a struggle for scarce values, an assumption that
forecloses examination of other causal factors.
One last limitation of conflict theory for our purposes is the
distinction commonly made by conflict theorists between what is
called "realistic" and "nonrealistic" conflict (Coser), or "rational"
and "nonrational'' conflict (Schelling), or "destructive behavior"
and "conflict behavior" (Galtung). The essence of the distinction
is between actions instrumental in securing the values sought
and actions destructive for their own sake. The analytic usefulness
of the distinction is not in question; what is questionable is attempting
to account for political vi~lence using theoretical approaches
that assume that only the instrumental manifestations of
violence are relevant or subject to analysis. Coser and Galtung,
among other conflict theorists, recognize that both elements are
present in most conflict. Coser criticizes others for failure to
realize that "conflict may be motivated by two distinct yet intermingled
factors- a realistic conflict situation and the affective investment
in it...." Galtung similarly makes the theoretical
point.that underlies this entire discussion: "conflict behavior tends
to become destructive behavior (because of the frustration-aggression
cycle) and destructive behavior tends to be self-reinforcing." 68
Despite this recognition, most of the concepts and hypotheses
68 Coser, 59; Galtung, 349. Also see Mack and Snyder, 219, 222-223.
46  ✻  Chapter Two
of conflict theory are concerned with the instrumentalities of
strife. This analysis gives equal weight to its nonrational origins
and manifestations.
Patterns of Relative Deprivation
In static terms, RD is a discrepancy between value expectations
and value capabilities, its intensity and scope determinable in
any accessible population by the use of survey and other techniques.
Dynamic analysis requires conceptual tools that take into
account patterns of changes in value expectations and value capabilities
over time. One can begin with the assumption that, because
RD is a psychically uncomfortable condition, men tend over
the long run to adjust their value expectations to their value
capabilities. Societal conditions in which sought and attainable
value positions are in approximate equilibrium consequently can
be regarded as "normal," however uncommon they may be in
the contemporary world, and provide a base-line from which to
evaluate patterns of change. Three distinct patterns of disequilibrium
can be specified: decremental deprivation, in which a
group's value expectations remain relatively constant but value
capabilities are perceived to decline; aspirational deprivation,
in which capabilities remain relatively static while expectations
increase or intensify; 69 and progressive deprivation, in which
there is substantial and simultaneous increase in expectations and
decrease in capabilities. All three patterns have been cited as
causal or predisposing factors for political violence.
DECREMENTAL DEPRIVATION
The model shown graphically in figure 1 represents settings
in which group consensus about justifiable value positions has
varied little over time, but in which the average attainable value
position or potential is perceived to decline substantially. Men
in these circumstances are angered over the loss of what they once
had or thought they could have; they experience RD by reference
to their own past condition. The value position of an entire society
may fall because of declining production of material goods,
declining capacities of the political elite to provide order or resolve
crises, imposition of foreign rule, or loss of faith in the society's
integrating structure of beliefs and attendant norms of
action. Value capabilities also may fall among one or more segments
of society because its members lose out in absolute terms
in conflict with other groups over scarce values. Examples in-
69 These patterns are labeled and described briefly by Morrison, 5.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  47
high
Collective
value
position
value expectations
value capabilities
~
low'-----------------------
Time -+
Figure 1. Decremental deprivation.
elude the effects of progressive taxation on the wealthy and of
regressive taxation on the poor; the loss of political influence by
elites and oppositional groups newly barred from political activity;
and the decline in status and influence felt by middleclass
groups as the status of working-class groups increases.
The value position or potential of a particular group also may seem
to decline not because of any diminution or redistribution of
total values available in a society but because of the declining
number or appropriateness of opportunities, for example the
shrinking number of employment opportunities for unskilled
labor in highly industrialized societies and the lack of stable
communal relationships open to migrants newly arrived in the
city from rural villages. The systemic sources of declining value
capabilities are examined in more detail in chapter 5.
A number of theorists have attributed political violence wholly
or in part to decremental deprivation. The revolutions that Aristotle
held to be characteristic of democracies and oligarchies were
said to result partly from deprivations of this type. "The main
cause of revolutions in Democracies is the intemperate conduct
of the demagogues who force the propertied class to combine
partly by instituting malicious prosecutions against individuals ...
and partly by inciting the masses against them as a body," whereas
in oligarchies one of the two general causes of revolution is seen
as the oppression of the masses by the oligarchs.70 In democracies
the relatively high, stable value position of the oligarchs is threat-
70 Aristotle, The Politics, Book v, chaps. v and VI. Quotation from J. E. C. Welldon,
trans., The Politics of Aristotle (New York: Macmillan, 1883, 1905), 355.
48  ✻  Chapter Two
ened, in oligarchies it is the low, stable value position of the
masses that suffers interference. In 1925 Sorokin advanced a general
thesis about the significance of "repression" in the genesis
of revolution that influenced a number of later writers. The immediate
cause of revolution, he wrote, "is always the growth of 'repression'
of the main instincts of the majority of society, and the
impossibility of obtaining for those instincts the necessary minimum
of satisfaction." If the desire for food of a substantial number
is "repressed" by famine, riots result. If the "reflexes of individual
self-preservation" are "repressed" by arbitrary executions,
total war, or terror, the result is the same. Other repressed instincts
which dispose men toward violence are said to include
collective self-preservation, want of housing, the "instincts of
ownership" and of self-expression, and so forth.71 The Marxian
view in its original dispensation is similar. Marx and Engels argued
the inevitable growth of profound dissatisfactions in the proletariat
as a consequence of absolute deprivations or oppressions:
the destruction of the worker's pride through his subjection to
the machine and the market; economic deprivation because of
minimal wages and job insecurity, the latter a consequence of
crises in the economic system; and repressive measures of the
bourgeois state.
Decremental deprivation is probably most common in "traditional"
societies and in traditional segments of transitional societies.
Natural disasters in traditional societies often gave rise to
collective violence, as Norman Cohn observes in his study of
violent millenarianism in medieval Europe:
Again and again one finds that a particular outbreak of revolutionary
chiliasm took place against a background of disaster:
the plagues that preluded the First Crusade and the flagellant
movements of 1260, 1348-1349, 1391, and 1400.... The
greatest wave of chiliastic excitement, one which swept through
the whole of society, was precipitated by the most universal
natural disaster of the Middle Ages, the Black Death....72
Hobsbawm says that social banditry was most pervasive in the
precapitalist peasant societies of Southern Europe "when their
traditional equilibrium [was] upset; during and after periods of
abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars, or at the moments
71 Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Sociology ofRevolution (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1925), 367-369.
72 Norman R. C. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, 2nd edn. rev. (New York:
Harper, 1957, 1961), 315. Also see Smelser, chap. 6.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  49
when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seized these static
communities in order to destroy and transform them." 73 Such irresistible
events inflicted decremental deprivations on and led
to banditry by peasants who had no effective methods of social
agitation, i.e., no political value opportunities. The imposition
of alien authority on non-Western peoples had similar effects.
Colonialism to varying degrees disrupted interpersonal relationships
and undermined tribal and other traditional authority.
Interpersonal and power deprivations were inflicted on many
newly conquered people at the same time that traditional value
opportunities, especially political ones, were disrupted. These
conditions often generated violent traditionalist resistance that
subsequently was transformed into nationalist rebellion.74
Decremental deprivation may be less common than other forms
of RD in societies undergoing socioeconomic transformation, but
it is not uncommon and it can have virulent effects. The great
human and material sacrifices of the Russian people during the
first World War provided the basic potential for the first Russian
Revolution; the refusal of the Kerensky regime to terminate Russia's
involvement in the war led directly to the Bolshevik seizure
of power and indirectly to the civil war that followed. Almost all
analyses of the post-war fascist movements emphasize the absolute
deprivations that motivated most of their adherents. In a
comparative study of fascist movements in nine countries Carsten
concludes that
certain social groups responded much more strongly to the
Fascist appeal than others. This is particularly true of those
who were uprooted and threatened by social and economic
change, whose position in society was being undermined, who
had lost their traditional place, and were frightened of the
future. These were above all [segments of] the lower middle
classes. . . . Perhaps even more important in the early stages
were the former officers and non-commissioned officers of the
first world war for whom no jobs were waiting, who had got
accustomed to the use of violence, and felt themselves deprived
of their "legitimate" rewards.75
73 E. J. Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms
ofSocial Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959),
23-24.
74 See, for example, William Kornhauser, "Rebellion and Political Development,"
in Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War: Problems and Approaches (New York: The
Free Press, 1964), 145.
75 F. L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), 232.
50  ✻  Chapter Two
Cantril's social psychological analysis of the roots of Nazism is
similar. Nazism was capable of succeeding as a movement because
"old norms, old cultural standards, were no longer able to provide
the framework necessary for a satisfying adjustment of the
individuals who composed the culture." Decremental deprivation
was intense for a variety of groups on many values; there was
economic distress, many people had suffered status reductions,
and most felt a profound sense of personal insecurity because of
the disintegration of both social structures and normative sys-
tems.76
Any absolute decline in the value position or value potential
of a social group constitutes decremental deprivation, and many
additional cases of political violence attributable to this pattern
of RD could be cited. Some others are examined in chapter 5. Despite
the considerable emphasis given in contemporary social analysis
to "revolutions of rising expectations," examined below, over
the long run of human history decremental RD has probably been
a more common source ofcollective violence than any other pattern
of RD. And one can speculate that decremental RD of a given degree
probably instigates men to greater intensities of violence
than an equivalent level of aspirational RD. Men are likely to be
more intensely angered when they lose what they have than when
they lose hope of attaining what they do not yet have.
ASPIRATIONAL DEPRIVATION
The aspirational RD model, sketched in figure 2, is characterized
by an increase in men's value expectations without a concomitant
change in value position or potential. Those who experience
aspirational RD do not anticipate or experience significant
loss of what they have; they are angered because they feel they
have no means for attaining new or intensified expectations. An
"increase" in value expectations may reflect demands for a greater
amount of a value already held in some degree, for example for
more material goods and a greater degree of political order and
justice. It may be a demand for new values never previously held,
such as political participation for colonial peoples and personal
equality for members of lower class and caste groups. Third, it
76 Hadley Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements (New York: Wiley, 1941),
228-269, quotation from 266. Also see Frederick L. Schuman, The Nazi Dictatorship:
A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism (New York: Knopf,
1935). Individual documentation of the nature and severity of these frustrations
is provided by the autobiographical essays of Nazi Party members which are ana-.
lyzed by Theodore Abel, The Nazi Movement: Why Hitler Came to Power (New
York: Atherton Press, 1938, 1966).
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  51
high
Collective
value
position
---------
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
value expectations
,/
/
/
/
__./
_...................
value capabilities
low'--------------------------
Time +
Figure 2. Aspirational deprivation.
may represent intensification of the commitment to (salience of)
a value position that earlier was weakly sought, for example intensifying
demands for welfare goods among those who experience
breakdown of communal life during the early stages of modernization,
and intensified demands for access to political elite positions
among the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie of seventeenthand
eighteenth-century Europe. Degrees and saliences of value
expectations quite often increase simultaneously, but no necessary
relation holds between the two. For example, the contemporary
demands of black Americans for social equality compared
with demands made in the 1940s appear to reflect an increase in
the salience of status values among Negroes, a shift from faintly
held aspirations for equality to an intensely held belief that equality
is deserved now, rather than an increase in the degree of
equality sought.
Many sources of increasing value expectations are identified in
studies of RD and of political instability. For some traditional
peoples mere exposure to, or knowledge of, a better material way
of life is assumed to raise expectations. In medieval and early
Renaissance Europe the growth of industrial and commercial centers
demonstrated new possibilities beyond any that life had to
offer the peasant. The new ways attracted the surplus population
in particular, but also those who were in some way dissatisfied
with manor life. "As social and economic horizons expanded,
hardship and poverty and dependence ceased to appear the ineluctable
fate of common folk." 77 A special case of the demonstra-
77 Cohn, 27-28. Also see Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
52  ✻  Chapter Two
tion effect is "relative deprivation" in its narrow sense, that is,
setting one's value expectations by reference to the higher value
position of some other individual or group. In particular, expectation
levels are often accelerated by the demonstration effect of
other groups that are improving while one's own group is not.
Brogan observed that the new ways and new wealth of the Industrial
Revolution impelled many intellectuals to revolutionary
fervor. Men like Friedrich Engles "were struck by the paradox
that the means of wealth were vastly increasing and that the benefits
of that wealth seemed to be more and more narrowly bestowed."
78 Discrepancy between an individual's or group's relative
share of welfare, power and interpersonal values also is
specifically related to political violence by a number of theorists,
among them Aristotle, who wrote that the source of disposition to
revolution
is the aspiration after equality which provokes the commons
to sedition when they suppose that they have a small share
... although they are the equals of the privileged Few, and
it is the aspiration after inequality or in other words after superiority
which provokes the Oligarchs to sedition, when they
imagine that despite their inequality their share is not greater
than that of others but is equal or even smaller.79
These and other conditions that increase expectation levels beyond
the capacities of men to satisfy them, and hence dispose
men to collective violence, are examined more closely in chapter
5. Some comparable effects of new beliefs and ideologies are considered
there and in chapter 7.
PROGRESSIVE DEPRIVATION
The third pattern of RD, sketched in figure 3, is a generalized
version of a model proposed by Davies, who refers to it as the
"]-curve" hypothesis: "revolutions are most likely to occur when
a prolonged period of objective economic and social development
is followed by a short period of sharp reversal." 80 It can be regarded
as a special case of aspirational RD, one in which longrun,
more-or-less-steady improvement in peoples' value position
generates expectations about continued improvement. If value
capabilities stabilize or decline after such a period of improve-
78 Denis W. Brogan, The Price ofRevolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 30.
79 The Politics, Welldon trans., 343-344. For a restatement of the Aristotelian
position see Fred Kart, "The Quantification of Aristotle's Theory of Revolution,"
American Political Science Review, LXVI (June 1952), 487.
80 Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," 6.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  53
high
Collective
value
position
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
value expectations /__..
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
------ ~---­
/
/
/
/
low L---------~-------------------------------------
Time -+
Figure 3. Progressive deprivation.
ment, progressive RD is the result. Such a pattern is most common
in societies undergoing simultaneous ideological and systemic
change. Economic depression in a growing economy can have this
effect. So can the articulation of an ideology of modernization in a
society that has structural inflexibilities that prevent expansion
of value output beyond a certain point. The model also can be
used to subsume some "social change" theories of revolution,
which in their general form postulate that political violence is a
consequence of decreasing responsiveness of social structures,
beliefs, norms, or all three to objective change.
Davies emphasizes that the revolutionary state of mind requires
"the continued, even habitual but dynamic expectation of greater
opportunity to satisfy basic needs," by which he includes all
types of values, physical, social, and political. In addition, what
is needed
is a persistent, unrelenting threat to the satisfaction of these
needs: not a threat which actually returns people to a state of
sheer survival but which puts them in the mental state where
they believe they will not be able to satisfy one or more basic
needs. . . . The crucial factor is the vague or specific fear that
ground gained over a long period of time will be quickly lost.
The political system is perceptually related to these fears; they
are generated "when the existing government suppresses or is
'blamed for suppressing such opportunity." 81 In support of the the-
54  ✻  Chapter Two
sis, Davies identifies a J-curve pattern of progress followed by
relative decline in case studies of the preconditions of a number
of revolutions and rebellions, including the French, Russian, and
Nazi Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Egyptian Revolution
of 1952. For example, he shows that Dorr's Rebellion in
Rhode Island in 1842 occurred after a forty-year period of improving
economic conditions and expanding political suffrage. Economic
depression in 1835-40 and the rejection by an oligarchic
state government of demands for further extension of suffrage led
to the drafting of a People's Constitution, an attempt to seize
state buildings, and sporadic violence. There also is evidence of a
progressive deprivation pattern in the economic status of American
Negroes relative to whites in the two decades preceding the "black
rebellion" of the 1960s. The income of Negroes relative to whites
of comparable education increased rapidly towards equality between
1940 and the early 1950s but then began to decline, so that
by 1960 half the relative gains of the earlier period were lost.82
In this study's terminology, both cases were characterized by rising
value expectations, set in motion by prolonged experience of
improving value positions. Diminishing capabilities, evident in
politicians' reluctance to extend political rights and in irremediable
economic decline, provided the background conditions necessary
for the outbreak of violence.
Le Vine's explanation of mob violence by African colonial peoples
against their rulers resembles the }-curve argument. Such
turmoil is said to be a consequence of psychological conflict generated
when colonial officials encouraged expectations of selfrule
by their stated policies and practices, but then accompanied
or followed those policies with others which, Africans thought,
interfered with the attainment of those expectations. Le Vine
describes seven cases that appear to support the hypothesis.83
The J-curve hypothesis is also implicit in Deutsch's interpretation
of the relationship between governmental capability and
political stability in societies in the early and middle stages of modernization.
Increasing capabilities, as an object of government
policy, require increasing mobilization of citizens for participation
in the market economy and political life. "Such mobilization,
82 Case studies of the Russian and Egyptian Revolutions and Dorr's Rebellion
appear ibid. The other studies are included in James C. Davies, "The J-Curve of
Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of some Great Revolutions and a
Contained Rebellion," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence
in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969), 547-576.
B:J Robert A. Le Vine, "Anti-European Violence in Africa: A Comparative Analysis,"
journal of Conflict Resolution, III (December 1959), 420-429.
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  55
however, is usually accompanied by rising needs and expectations,
which must not be frustrated if stability is to be preserved." To
preserve stability-that is, to minimize progressive RD and the
consequent impetus to violence- outputs must continue to increase.
Deutsch cites only two types of value outputs, increasing
per capita income and expanding governmental activity, but his
argument is readily extended to other value classes.84
Progressive RD is a common theme in many old and some new
theories that attribute revolutionary potential to general social
change. Simple versions of these theories emphasize structural inflexibility,
i.e. the inability of social and political institutions to
adapt their value outputs rapidly enough to changing conditions.
Yoder proposes, for example, that change in social life is continual,
and that the organized group must and ordinarily does constantly
readjust to changing situations, resulting from inventions, discoveries,
culture contact, and so forth. In some cases, however, groups
within the society desire to preserve the old order- "the traditional
institutions, the time-tried folkways, mores, conventions, and customs"
-even though irrelevant to present situations. The end of
adaptation is the beginning of revolution.85 Johnson's "socialdysfunction"
theory of the origins of political violence is of the
same genre, though its vocabulary has a more contemporary ring.
One necessary condition of revolution is said to be a disequilibrated
social system, i.e. a discrepancy between the belief structure of a
society and its division of labor, which may result from any combination
of internal or external changes in values or technology.
The second necessary cause is elite refusal ("intransigence") to
take action designed to relieve the disequilibrium. The consequence
is a loss of authority by the elite and its reliance upon force
to maintain its position. The sufficient cause of revolution in such
a situation is an "accelerator of dysfunction," any condition that
decreases the ability of the elite to control its armed forces.86
These and other social change theories refer to systems that were
able to adapt value outputs to changing environmental require-
84 Karl Deutsch, "Toward an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative
and International Politics," American Political Science Review, XIV (March
1960), 39.
85 Dale Yoder, "Current Definitions of Revolution," American journal of Sociology,
XXXII (November 1926), 440-442. Comparable explanations are proposed by
Charles A. Ellwood, The Psychology of Human Society: An Introduction to Sociological
Theory (New York: Appleton, 1925), chap. 8; Rex Hopper, "The Revolutionary
Process: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Revolutionary Movements,"
Social Forces, XXVIII (March 1950), 270-271; and Pettee, passim.
86 Johnson, Revolutionary Change, passim. An earlier and briefer statement of
the theory is his Revolution and the Social System (Stanford: The Hoover Institution
on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, 1964).
56  ✻  Chapter Two
ments and to men's changing value expectations up to some point
in time, but gradually or abruptly lost their adaptive capacities. In
societies that have experienced positive social change, the conditions
described in these theories fit the }-curve or progressive
deprivation model; in static societies, they more closely resemble
the absolute deprivation model. The point is that the RD models
correspond generally to many of the abstract theories of the preconditions
of political violence.
The RD Models: Some Qualifications and Uses
No one of the RD models is necessarily characteristic of a particular
type of society, although absolute RD seems more likely to
be found in static societies, while aspirational and progressive RD
appear most often in societies undergoing substantial socioeconomic
change. In any given society at any given time, however,
some groups are likely to experience RD of each type. Moreover,
some groups can experience different patterns of RD with respect
to different classes of values. For example, large segments of the
working classes of the defeated European countries after World
War I simultaneously experienced decremental deprivation with
respect to security and participation values, and progressive deprivation
on welfare values. A complete profile of RD in a society
requires specification of th~ extent and patterns of RD with respect
to each class of values for every consequential socioeconomic
group.
One operational use of the RD models is that they facilitate systematic
inferences about the effects of changes in various indices
of economic and political performance. Indicators of economic performance
and of governmental fiscal activity provide examples.
Rather than resorting to inferences about economic discontent
based on such measures as per capita income in country X compared
with country Y, or their relative rates of growth, one can
infer it more accurately from such patterns as short-term declines
in productivity following a period of stable production (deeremental
RD) and short-term changes in inflation rates, commodity
prices, or total productivity relative to rates in the more distant
past (decremental or progressive RD). Time-series wage and salary
data for various occupational groups are available for many modern
and some modernizing societies, from which welfare and in some
instances status RD can be inferred. One also can search systematically
for evidence of conditions associated with rising expectations,
such as rates of increase in schooling and literacy, announcement
of programs of reform, articulation by political leaders of
ideologies of modernization, and mobilization of previously non-
Relative Deprivation and the Impetus to Violence  ✻  57
participant citizens for purposes of political and associational activity.
To assess the effects of governmental action one can examine
the changing balance over time between value-depriving and
value-satisfying decisions, giving special attention to relative increases
in the former. Interpersonal RD of various patterns also can
be inferred from changes over time in measures of conditions as diverse
as internal migration, religious affiliation, changing size and
composition of occupational groups, and social origins of elite
groups. Procedures for making systematic, comparative inferences
of these kinds are not examined here; examples of some of them are
reported in other published studies.87
The three models of RD proposed do not exhaust all the logically
possible relationships between value expectations and value capabilities.88
Declining expectations might be found in some groups,
for example among members of a well-disciplined colonial elite
who expect gradually to lose their political authority to indigenous
rulers, or among members of a millenarian religious group who expect
the social order to deteriorate and collapse as a prelude to the
coming of a new order. Somewhat more common may be a "boom
and bust" set of expectations about value satisfactions, for example
among some traditional societies, under some totalitarian regimes,
and perhaps among some groups and isolated individuals in modernized
societies. Resigned anticipation of a "time of troubles"
following the death of a king was as common in feudal kingdoms of
tropical Africa as it was in medieval Europe. Those whose livelihood
depends on the land tend to develop a similar tolerance for
the vagaries of weather: two years of plenty and one of scarcity
is the way of the seasons. The Bemba of South Central Mrica, like
many other people living near the margin of subsistence, build
their way of life around a cycle of nine months of abundance followed
by a hunger season of three months.89 But in all such cycles
there is an element of predictability, and if this predictability vanishes
RD is the likely result. If, for example, conditions in such a
87 See Ted Gurr, New Error-Compensated Measures for Comparing Nations: Some
Correlates of Civil Strife, Center of International Studies (Princeton: Princeton
University, Research Monograph :'1/o. 2.5, 1966); Ted Gurr with Charles Ruttenberg,
The Conditions of Civil Violence: First Tests of a Causal Model, Center of International
Studies (Princeton: Princeton University, Research Monograph No. 28,
1967); and Ted Gurr, "A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis
Using New Indices," American Political Science Review, LXI (December 1968),
1104-1124.
88 A more comprehensive set of models of social change, including variations on
the three basic models proposed here, appears in lvo K. Feierabend, Rosalind L.
Feierabend, and Betty A. Nesvold, "Social Change and Political Violence: CrossNational
Patterns," in Graham and Gurr, eds., 497-542.
8" See Audrey I. Richards, Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (London:
Oxford University Press, 1939), especially chaps. 1-3.
58  ✻  Chapter Two
cycle deteriorate and remains bad, the result is decremental RD;
and if value positions stabilize at a high level substantially beyond
the expected onset of the next cyclical decline, any subsequent decline
would be likely to generate the potential for violent protest.
At the outset of the discussion of the models it was suggested
that over the long run men's value expectations tend to adapt to
their value capabilities; the discrepancies caused by rising expectations
or declining capabilities are temporary. Eventually men
collectively either succeed in raising their value capabilities to
meet their expectations or, if their circumstances prove impervious
to change, lower their expectations. For intensely felt expectations,
however, "eventually" may be measured in years, decades,
or even generations, which are likely to be characterized by both
constructive and destructive struggle. Some of the variables that
affect the persistence of RD and typical modes of response to it
are examined in subsequent chapters. If any single sentence can
summarize the arguments advanced in this chapter, it is that men
are quick to aspire beyond their social means and quick to anger
when those means prove inadequate, but slow to accept their limi-
tations.