Appendix 3- From Equilibrium to Disequilibrium

What It Covers

Mike Duncan examines how stable political regimes transition into pre-revolutionary disequilibrium through elite splits, conflicts between innovation and tradition, and the spread of new ideas that challenge existing power structures.

Key Questions Answered

• •Elite Division as Catalyst: Revolutions begin when ruling class factions split and defecting elites redirect their material resources—businesses, land, regional influence, client networks—from defending the sovereign to attacking it, opening doors for popular forces to enter.
• •Dual Innovation Models: Pre-revolutionary instability emerges through two opposite patterns: resistance to intolerable sovereign innovations like new taxes and regulations, or frustration when stagnant regimes refuse needed reforms despite obvious inadequacies and changing social conditions.
• •Financial Crisis Driver: Most sovereign innovations that trigger resistance center on revenue extraction—monarchs implementing new taxation methods, administrative reforms, or efficiency measures to solve fiscal problems, which wealthy elites perceive as threats to their traditional privileges and economic interests.
• •Rhetorical Escalation: New ideas destabilize regimes by recasting self-interest as fights over abstract principles like justice and liberty, transforming minor tax disputes into existential battles over rights, making compromise impossible and priming societies for revolutionary reformation.