American and French Revolutions Led to Different Results
...the structure of a network determines its virality. As recent work by the social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler has shown, the contagiousness of a disease or an idea depends as much on a social network’s structure as on the inherent properties of the virus or meme. The history of the late eighteenth century illustrates that point well. The ideas that inspired both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were essentially the same, and both were transmitted through the networks of correspondence, publication, and sociability. But the network structures of Colonial America and ancien régime France were profoundly different (for example, the former lacked a large, illiterate peasantry). Whereas one revolution produced a relatively peaceful, decentralized democracy, albeit one committed to a transitional period of slavery, the other established a violent and at times anarchic republic that soon followed the ancient Roman path to tyranny and empire.
Notes:
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