Revolution and Modernization Traps

Leonid Grinin discusses several important processes connected with revolutions in modernizing societies. He shows that as a result of the escape from the Malthusian trap a society can fall into a new trap denoted as the modernization trap. The Malthusian trap is associated with the lag of productive forces behind the population's growth rate, i.e. with insufficiently rapid technological growth and generally insufficient dynamism of changes. The core element of the modernization process is industrialization and associated deep changes. Modernization gives an opportunity to escape from the Malthusian trap. But in the process of escape from it, as well as in the process of changing society, there is a great danger of falling into a different type of trap—a modernization trap. The modernization trap, contrary to the Malthusian trap, is the result of excessively rapid changes, to which a number of societal important relations and institutions do not have time to adapt. Because of the inability of many traditional institutions, relations, and ideologies to keep up with changes in technology, communications, the system of education, the medical sphere, and demographic structures, strong prerequisites for a revolutionary crisis emerge. Thus from the point of view of the world-historical process, revolutions are not coincidental in a sense that they are especially characteristic of a certain phase of societal development when among many transformations modernization is also present. Grinin also proposes as an original typology of modernization traps as well of modernization proper.