Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
And, in searching any given revolution for its Phase 0, how far do we want to go back to find that Phase 0 ?

I can make a case that Phase 0 before the French Revolution was broken some 180 years before heads were cut off - this incident from 1610 as an example - a map here.



The bottom line is that François de Vigny was un plus grand SOB, who abused his peasants, called in the army (probably the gendarmerie) to quell them, and got whacked in the process - which then meant more troops had to be called in, who settled all armed conflict issues in the effective manner of those times. 179 years later, the situation existed on a larger scale and most troops refused to fire.

So, how far do you want to go back to find causes and to develop hindsight solutions ?
JMM--
Lots of questions in the unexpurgated text of your post. I'll only try to address the last one in the excerpt I quote above.

I'm sure you are aware of the variuous types of cause that get mentioned in the literature. Two that seem most important in relation to your question are 'final cause' and 'proximate cause.' As I seem to remember from my philosophy of law coursework, these two are the only ones that really matter in tort cases. I could, arguably, sue all the heirs of Henry Ford in a wrongful death suit involving my parent's death by an exploding Ford Pinto gas tank. But the courts won't let me do so because these relatives have insufficient proximity to the cause of the death. In like fashion, we don't need to go back 180 years before the events of the tennis court on Vingt Juin Mille Huit Cent Quatre-Vingt Neuf to descry the beginnings of what ended the reign of le Roi Louis Seize. The reign of Louis Quinze is probably far enough. The activities of "agitators" in the 1950s is probably also far enough to start ascertaining the events that resulted in Detroit, Watts, and Newark.

Bottom line: Proximate causes are what we ought to try identify, as they are the kinds of things a government can affect to effect a change in the path down which their country is heading.


BTW, I understand the concern about governmental myopia that started off your post (and which I expurgated)--that's part and parcel of the "lead a horse to water" problem I mentioned. It has a corollary called the "Swapping Horses Fallacy;" namely, one cannot resolve a problem by changing one's perspective on that problem ("swap horses") in the middle of identifying and resolving the problem ("the middle of the stream" as it were).
As a reflective lawyer, you might also recognize it as a form of the "definitional stop" found in the work of H.L.A. Hart.