Social revolutions in the modern world

Cambridge University Press

1994

viii, 354 p.

Cambridge studies in comparative politics

9780521400886

Introduction: Explaining social revolutions: first and further thoughts --I Doing macroscopic social science --A critical review of Barrington Moore's social origins of dictatorship and democracy --Wallerstein's world capitalist system: a theoretical and historical critique --The uses of comparative history in macrosocial inquiry (with Margaret Somers) --II Making sense of the great revolutions --Explaining revolutions: In quest of a social-structural approach --Revolutions and the world-historical development of capitalism (with Ellen Kay Trimberger) --France, Russia, China: a structural analysis of social revolutions --III Dialogue about culture and ideology in revolutions --Ideologies and social revolutions: reflections on the French case, by William H. Sewell, Jr. --Cultural idioms and political ideologies in the revolutionary reconstruction of state power: a rejoinder to Sewell --IV From classical to contemporary social revolutions --What makes peasants revolutionary? --Rentier state and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian revolution --Explaining revolutions in the contemporary third world (with Jeff Goodwin) --Social revolutions and mass military mobilization --Conclusion: Reflections on recent scholarship about social revolutions and how to study them.

In this collection of essays, Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning States and Social Revolutions (CUP, 1979), updates her arguments about social revolutions. How are we to understand recent revolutionary upheavals in countries across the globe? Why have social revolutions happened in some countries, but not in others that seem similar? Skocpol shows how she and other scholars have used ideas about states and societies to identify the particular types of regimes that are susceptible to the growth of revolutionary movements and vulnerable to transfers of state power to revolutionary challengers.

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