States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China
Theda Skocpol
Language: English
Pages: 419
ISBN: 0511815808
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the 1970s, social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. And it develops in depth a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, the author urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. She argues for structural rather than voluntarist analysis, and for an emphasis on the effects of transnational and world-historical contexts upon domestic political conflicts. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.
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Market dynamics of a "world capitalist system." We can, however, certainly note that historically developing transnational eco· nomic relations have always strongly (and differentially) influenced na: tional economic developments. 50 .. Another kind of transnational structure - an international system of competing states - has also shaped the dynamic and uneven course of mod·, em world history. Europe was the site not only of capitalist economic breakthroughs but also of a continental political.
Superstructure spi�\yling over an entire continent. Such had always been the eventual fate �!it#�hes generated in other world-economies encompassed by political ,emPires-such as Rome and China. But the European world-economy was \ll�q'Ue in that it developed within a system of competing states. 51 In the w-oHls of Walter Dorn: It is [the] very competitive character of the state system of modern Europe that distinguishes it from the political life of all previous and ·�· �.\J: Y;::· ·; ;� ":.
Revolutionary l�� �shlps. �('JThejnvolvement within transnational structures of countries (actually d \Potentially) undergoing social revolutions is relevant in several ways. m�!p:t:ically, unequal or competitive transnational relations have helped to��� ape any given country's state and class structures, thus influencing �H�\t��isting "domestic" context from which revolution emerges (or not). FUrthermore, transnational relations influence the course of events during a�,��l revolutionary.
Indeed, sufficient similarities to allow these three Revolutions to be grouped together for comparative historical analysis, much is to be gained by actually doing so. The similar sociopolitical features of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions can be high lighted and explained in ways that would necessarily be missed by ana lysts determined to keep them segregated in separate type categories. Above all, there is much to be learned from the j uxtaposition of these Revolutions about the.
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