Mattei Dogan and John Higley (eds), Elites, Crises, and the Origins of Regimes (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
Available: SSL - JC330.ELI
Chapter 1 available PDF
Chapter 2 - Historical and theoretical conditions (Alan Knight).
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What exactly is a "crisis"? Difficult to identify empirically and is vulnerable to ex post facto rationalisations. We see crises when and where we want to. Even though Dogan and Higley do formulate a narrow political conception involving an event or series of events that over a short time period (days or weaks) that destroy or drastically weaken a regime's equilibrium and effectiveness.
Chapter 3 - Political crises and elite settlements (Burton and Higley)
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There is a disagreement here with Knight who argues that it is at times of crisis when elites are weakest. Knight has identified some situations where elite control was limited or absent. They regard this as supporting their theory; elites lost control because they were disunited. In none of these cases was there an elite settlement.
Knight is not the first scholar to speculate that elite settlements are largely epiphenemonal outcomes of structural class struggles or cultural evolutions. Marxists see the 1689 elite settlement in Britain as solidifying the landed class's hold on power.
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The thesis that because of a unique political crisis English elites alone reached a settlement during the early modern period is more parsimonious, less disembodied, and accords better with the conclusions of historians who have studied the period closely. There was a similar class system in other European countries but no specific settlements reached so the marxist explanation is less compelling.
A general shortcoming of class centred structural frameworks is that classes and other large collectivities are never actors; nor are states.
