ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the most fundamental problems have to do with ways in which social scientists have thought about the nature and causes of violent conflict within the state. Harry Eckstein (1980) distinguishes between two classes of conflict theory: those which assume that violence is inherent in political processes and structures, and those which assume that it is contingent on special and unusual combinations of conditions. The effect of the Russian Revolution of 1917 on economic productivity is a case in point. In the short run, revolutionary policies and civil war drastically reduced industrial and agricultural production. Gamson (1975) identifies a number of conditions that might influence the success of challenging groups in American political history and include the nature of the groups' demands, their organizational characteristics, and the use of violence against challenging groups. A positive construction on political violence also is found in many scholarly writings on revolution and coups d'etat, some of them reviewed by Bienen.
