Skocpol's ( 1979:4) definition of great social revolutions-“rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below”-was taken as standard.
Although scholars admitted that other events, such as the Mexican and Cuban revolutions ( Womack 1968, Dominguez 1978, Eckstein 1986, Knight 1986), had valid claims to be great revolutions, the most influential comparative studies of revolution from Brinton (1938) to Skocpol (1979) dealt mainly with a handful of European and Asian cases. Through the 1980s, most writers on revolution focused on the “great revolutions” of England (1640), France (1789), Russia (1917), and China (1949). THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Definitions of Revolutionĭefinitions of revolution have changed as new events have come forth on the stage of world history. I therefore close with some suggestions for shifting the approach, and improving the generalizability, of theories of revolution. However, the study of revolutions may be reaching an impasse at which it is simply overwhelmed by the variety of cases and concepts it seeks to encompass. I thus aim to present a brief overview of the development of the comparative and theoretical analysis of revolutions in the past decade and to lay out the main concepts and findings that now govern our understanding of how and why revolutions occur. The study of revolutions has thus blossomed into a multifaceted exploration of a panoply of diverse events.Ī short review cannot encompass this range of literature, much less the explosion of historical literature analyzing particular revolutions. Moreover, in addition to identifying key causal factors and outcomes, scholars now seek to explain the micro processes of revolutionary mobilization and leadership, using approaches ranging from rational choice analysis ( Opp et al 1995) to sociological and anthropological studies of social movements ( Selbin 1993, Aminzade et al 2001a). What was once a fairly structured subfield, focusing primarily on a handful of “great revolutions” in Europe and Asia, now grapples with collapsed states in Africa ( Migdal 1988, Migdal et al 1994, Zartman 1995), transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere ( Banac 1992, Linz & Stepan 1996), movements of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East ( Keddie 1995b), and guerrilla warfare in Latin America ( Wickham-Crowley 1992). In recent years, scholarship on the causes, processes, and outcomes of revolutions has sprawled across topics and disciplines like an amoeba, stretching in various directions in response to diverse stimuli. This article is one of 13 articles in the Domestic Political Violence and Civil War compilation. Weakness in those factors then opens the way for revolutionary leadership, ideology, and identification, along with structural factors such as international pressure and elite conflicts, to create revolutions.
Rather than try to develop a list of the “causes” of revolutions, it may be more fruitful for the fourth generation of revolutionary theory to treat revolutions as emergent phenomena, and to start by focusing on factors that cement regime stability. Analyses of revolutions in developing countries and in communist regimes have further argued for incorporating these factors and for the inadequacy of structural theories to account for these events. In the last decade, critics of structural theories have argued for the need to incorporate leadership, ideology, and processes of identification with revolutionary movements as key elements in the production of revolution. Third-generation theories of revolution pointed to the structural vulnerabilities of regimes as the basic causes of revolutions.
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