ABSTRACT

Several authors have produced social and political analyses using a structural and historical approach. Social structures impose limits on social processes and reiterate established forms of behavior. A social structure is a pattern of repeated action - social practice - animated by a practical culture shared among the actors. Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes. The various actions in a social structure will be successful, and the beliefs animating them will be reinforced, when there is some level of logico-meaningful integration among the beliefs. Since social structures inevitably entail the repetitive pursuit of some conflicting goals, actors need conflict-resolving schemes if they are to cooperate with each other at even minimal levels. To explain social revolutions, one must find problematic, first, the emergence of a revolutionary situation within an old regime.