Ideology and Revolution: How the Struggle against Domination Drives the Evolution of Morality and Institutions

Ideology and Revolution: How the Struggle against Domination Drives the Evolution of Morality and Institutions, by Allen Buchanan (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 236 pp., cloth $120, eBook $120.

The major aim of Allen Buchanan’s recent book Ideology and Revolution is revealed by its subtitle. Buchanan seeks to establish that revolutionary struggles against domination can drive moral progress by compelling rulers to act with greater regard for the ruled, and by changing the terms on which power is justified and accepted. In the course of making this argument, however, Buchanan’s primary thesis—which he refers to as his “descriptive-explanatory project”—is increasingly overtaken by the normative implications of his analysis. Buchanan understands revolutionary situations as decision-making environments that establish predictable dynamics of strategy and counterstrategy. His normative concern, in particular, is that the more tyrannical the form of domination, the more it deprives the dominated of the social and institutional resources necessary for relatively consensual and nonviolent coordination. The perverse outcome is that, where “the moral case for revolution is strongest, where the regime is so authoritarian as to deny access to institutional resources for mobilizing and organizing resistance to it and where reform is therefore not an option,” the strategic situation is also such that “the outcome of the revolution is most likely to be morally repugnant” (p. 174), involving terrorism, human rights abuses, and continued authoritarianism.

The way that Buchanan grapples with this normative dilemma faced by revolutionary actors is both fascinating and provocative and seems to have implications that go well beyond what he discusses in the book. The argument foreshadowed by the subtitle remains relatively thin, however. Buchanan admits and defends the fact that his descriptive-explanatory claims are generally “speculative” (p. 37). Such speculation is both unavoidable and acceptable so long as it remains open to empirical disconfirmation. However, the reader should be aware that Buchanan’s large-scale claim about “the perpetual struggle between hierarchs and resisters” being “an important cause of social change” (p. x) is essentially a hypothesis to which he devotes one long chapter, and that the book is primarily devoted to conceptual groundwork and moral reasoning.

This is not to disparage Buchanan’s argument. Struggles over the terms on which people are willing to be governed—which concern the distribution of power and the justifications for both wielding and resisting it—are plausibly important factors in explaining changes in both the institutional forms that power takes and the moral and epistemic concepts humans use to understand and shape their social environments. As Buchanan states, exploring the implications of this claim will require both philosophical and social scientific research. Ideology and Revolution is a welcome and important contribution to this much needed “interdisciplinary cooperation” (p. 221), precisely because it combines conceptual analysis, moral philosophy, formal social theory, political science, economic and social history, and institutional analysis.

After mapping out the structure and recurring patterns of hierarchy and the struggle against domination in the first chapter, Buchanan turns to the titular concepts of ideology and revolution. He argues in chapter 2 that political ideologies play a significant role in explaining the occurrence and nonoccurrence of revolution. Buchanan sets himself against both the tradition of critical theory that takes “ideology” to name only those systems of belief that prop up domination and “ideology skeptics” who argue that the concept of ideology is otiose since domination is stabilized by collective action problems among the dominated rather than by “false consciousness” (p. 119). Deploying an evaluatively neutral conception of “ideology” as “a shared evaluative map of the social world” (p. 121), Buchanan argues that ideologies can preemptcollective action problems among the dominated—by convincing them that the present hierarchy is unalterable or even just, or that they lack the power to change things—such that the dominated never even confront the free-rider and assurance problems of revolutionary action. However, ideologies can also help to overcome those problems when they do arise. Because ideologies embed moral commitments, they can lead people to act without calculation, to override calculations of self-interest, or to take a leap of faith in the absence of any assurance that others will join them (pp. 123–25). Thus, ideologies can help us explain both the nonoccurrence and the occurrence of revolutions.

More importantly, ideologies can help us explain why revolutions can unleash so much violence, as Buchanan outlines in chapter 3. Where a regime has either destroyed or come to control a broad swath of nonstate social institutions, would-be revolutionaries will lack the institutional resources to coordinate and build support for a progressive change in regime. Revolutionary ideologies can help them overcome these deficits—which are created by the authoritarianism of the regime itself—but the ideologies that are most likely to help are those that heighten the sense of emergency and Manichean struggle, that “encourage extreme deference” to revolutionary leaders, and that use conspiracy theories to disarm challenges to the ideology (pp. 153–54). Such revolutionary ideologies make it easier to sanction extreme violence against opponents of the revolution and may set the stage for a postrevolutionary regime that is little or no better than the one overthrown.

At this point, the speculative method of the book shows its weaknesses. Buchanan’s characterization of these dangerous revolutionary ideologies is based entirely on the two cases of Jacobinism and Bolshevism, cases chosen because they gave rise to authoritarian regimes. This selection effect undermines the explanatory aspirations of Buchanan’s theory. Buchanan claims that his account indicates “that revolutions in which [these dangerous revolutionary ideologies] play a prominent role will tend to bring about authoritarian regimes” (p. 161), but this tendency is, as of yet, merely an artifact of the cases from which Buchanan abstracts his account.

What is significant about Buchanan’s account is not this hypothesized tendency, but the insight underlying it: that “the most acute and distinctive problems in the ethics of revolution arise because of the difficulties revolutionaries face and must overcome” if they are to be capable of waging an open struggle against the old regime (p. 181). The more tyrannical the regime, the more it will deprive would-be revolutionaries of the social resources necessary for solving coordination and participation problems in relatively pacific and democratic ways. But this also means that “the very circumstances in which there is the strongest moral case for revolution” will select for revolutionary leaders and organizations willing “to engage in immoral actions toward their fellow victims of oppression” for the sake of creating the conditions for revolutionary success (pp. 195, 190).

Buchanan’s analysis of the strategic dilemmas faced by revolutionaries indicates that outsiders may have a moral duty to intervene on behalf of even odious revolutionary forces, as discussed in chapter 5. The more isolated the population, the more severe the repressive powers brought to bear on them, and the more oppressive their domination, the more likely their struggles for emancipation are to take the form of terror attacks, provocations, and collective self-harm, fortified by the stimulants offered by millenarian and mystical ideologies. The factor that can change this—and thereby transform a desperate, suicidal struggle into a viable movement to replace a system of domination with a set of institutions in which people can share a status of free equality—is outside assistance from those who already enjoy significant freedom to organize publicly and who control significant economic and military resources (pp. 201–5).

The practical lessons of all of this for a real-world case such as Palestine are an exercise left for the reader. The value and the limitations of Ideology and Revolution stem from the same source: Buchanan’s promiscuous mingling of game theory, moral philosophy, history, and social theory. A work that opens up far more paths for research than it is able to explore or fully map, Ideology and Revolutiondeserves to be read widely and taken up as a challenge.

—William Clare Roberts

William Clare Roberts is associate professor of political science at McGill University, where he teaches the history of political thought. He is the author of Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton University Press, 2018).