The Triple Revolution: 1965-2015

In the mid-1960s, a committee of 35 academics and social activists sent a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson describing three broad social forces or revolutions that were reshaping the world. They were: cybernation revolution, weaponry revolution, and human rights revolution. They argued that these "three separate and mutually reinforcing revolutions" called for a "fundamental reexamination of existing values and institutions."


Robert Perrucci and Marc Pilisuk took the idea of the triple revolution and elaborated its implications for understanding institutional social problems in the United States, publishing it in a collection of papers with the title: The Triple Revolution: Social Problems in Depth, Little Brown, 1968. Three years later, they published an expanded version with the same publisher under the title: The Triple Revolution Emerging: Social Problems in Depth, 1971. The expanded version contained about 200 pages of new text by the authors in the form of chapter introductions.


The main thrust of this early work was that America's social problems should be understood as institutional problems and not as failures or deficiencies of individuals. The significance of this work was that the thrust of the analysis of social problems was shifted from individual pathologies and individual deficiencies to a focus on the larger structures of power and inequality that were themselves social problems.


Carolyn Cummings Perrucci and Robert Perrucci are now working on a project that returns to the themes of the original works in 1968 and 1971 to update the argument with new data and an assessment of what has or has not changed. We will identify those forces contained in the three revolutions -- technological militarism, cybernation, and human rights -- that remain significant today in modified form or in new institutional structures, and those forces and conditions that no longer hold today. We also propose to examine why there are both continuities and changes over the 50-year period.