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Discussion Among the Fifth-Generation Circle. A rejoinder to Mark Beissinger, Daniel Ritter, Valentine Moghadam, Egor Fain, and Alisa Shishkina
First of all, we would like to sincerely thank our critics for their work, for being able to find the opportunity to read our voluminous books, especially the Handbook of Revolutions (Goldstone et al., 2022b), which indeed came out much larger than we had planned, although unfortunately many topics and problems were left ‘off the table’ or were insufficiently exposed, as evidenced by the critical comments. We are grateful to our critics for being able to see the merits in our collective monographs, but even more so for their criticism, not only for that we consider fair and deserved, but also for that, we disagree with. For the latter, because this kind of criticism provides food for thought and stimulates argumentation, but perhaps most importantly, because it allows us to dwell on aspects that we would otherwise not have had the chance to cover. Discussions between authors (editors) and critics often turn into infighting, which quickly becomes uninteresting to the reader. This would be very undesirable, so that, we tried to make this rejoinder in a different key, to use it as a good, somewhat unique opportunity to generalize and at the same time specify many ideas and formulations regarding the directions of the fifth generation of revolution studies that were mentioned in our own review essay (Grinin and Korotayev, 2024, this issue). We also want to touch on those points that have not been mentioned or not mentioned enough. Our critics are exactly those authors whose books we presented in our own review essay (Grinin and Korotayev, 2024, this issue), and about whom we said that all of them are already representatives of the fifth generation. And since we hope that we can also be counted among this generation, we would like to present this answer precisely as a discussion within a certain circle of authors of the fifth generation. Our esteemed critics have pointed out many of the merits and demerits (at least in their opinion) of our books. However, some important or even very important aspects in terms of expanding the understanding of the directions of research of the fifth generation were not mentioned. This allows us to focus on clarifying the directions of work and program for the fifth generation in a more systematic manner. The further structure of the article is related to our desire to focus on the characteristics and tasks associated with the fifth generation. First, we will consider (1) those positive aspects of our work that have been noted by critics; then (2) we will respond to those points that critics consider important shortcomings, but this will be a discussion associated with certain theoretical or methodological approaches; furthermore, (3) we will discuss a number of important theoretical issues that are raised in reviews; (4) we will discuss an important question that was actually raised by Beissinger (2024, this issue)—how should a researcher of revolution relate to revolutions; and (5) we will conclude the article with a discussion of issues that were not addressed in the reviews and some ideas about what the fifth generation needs.