Confining Conditions and Revolutionary Breakthroughs*

Otto Kirchheimer

American Political Science Review, 1965, vol. 59, issue 4, 964-974

Abstract: I want to try to connect the course of several regimes with what, for want of a better name, I shall call “confining conditions”—the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of these regimes. Do I prejudice the case by calling the sum total of the prerevolutionary situation confining conditions rather than calling them more neutrally, as Val Lorwin suggested to me, simply antecedent conditions? Yet every situation which a new regime finds at its inception is an antecedent one. I am concerned specifically—and only—with the conditions that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue. How the new regime may accomplish this, or may fail to, is the subject of this paper. Therefore I consider the nature of the confining conditions, chiefly those of social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.

Date: 1965
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