In this post:
This is a school assignment. It’s an (amateurish, etc) review of Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions. That book is arguably the most famous work in comparative historical sociology and helped establish it as a subdiscipline within sociology.
I wrote this for SOC532: Comparative Historical Sociology, taught by Jonah Stuart Brundage. That class was amazing and genuinely one of the most insightful semester’s I’ve had in either undergrad or grad school.
I don’t have much of a background in comparative historical sociology so this post is not meant to showcase expertise nor to make a specific intervention by thinking with Skocpol (also, that wasn’t our assignment) — but it does show my thinking, and the end especially contains my general perspective to what the work of criticism (or scholarship in general) can do. And it’d never see the light of day other than my Canvas submission box were I not to throw it online, so here it is. So it’s here on my blog now !
Skocpol’s argument and theoretical intervention#🠑
Theda Skocpol develops her theoretical intervention by contrasting from existing approaches, distilled by Skocpol in the introduction into three perspectives. First, she emphasizes a “nonvoluntarist, structural perspective on [revolutions’] causes and processes,” explicitly rejecting schools of thought as diverse as the “political-conflict” and “aggregate-psychological” liberal schools and the Marxist notions of a vanguard party or class consciousness as the keys to revolution. Skocpol doesn’t dismiss these notions as completely irrelvant, especially the Marxist perspectives,1 but she believes that locating the causes of revolutions primarily within the popular will is easily contradicted by examples of “blatantly repressive and domestic illegitimate regimes as the South African.“2 (16) Secondly, Skocpol similarly situates revolutions with “systematic reference to international structures and world-historical developments,” (14) rejecting preexisting theories prioritizing intra-national developments. Finally, she emphasizes the state as a party that can act autonomously, independent of any specific class interest or even as the manifestation of the conflict between two classes. Skocpol needs this starting point to understand when states turn against the interests of dominant classes, a development within all three main cases that provided the initial conditions for revolution.
From this basic theoretical position, Skocpol investigates the causes of a revolution that can lead to a “centralized, bureaucratic, and mass-incorporating nation-state with enhanced great-power potential in the international arena” (41). Notably, this is a fairly specific outcome. Skocpol herself argues for historical specificity and that “one cannot mechanically extend the specific causal arguments that have been developed for France, Russia, and China into a ‘general theory of revolutions.‘” (288) With that perspective, Skocpol guides the reader through a comparison of revolutions in France, China, and Russia, and several other countries that serve for her as contrapositives or negative cases for the general trends she establishes. Through this comparative approach, Skocpol identifies three main causes of the type of revolution she is interested in: the incapacitation of central state machineries, which can often be attributed to the aforementioned international developments; peasant rebellions, importantly distinguished from worker (e.g. factory) rebellions; and attempts by mass-mobilizing political leaderships post-revolution, which was important for the establishment of these states as “great power” nations.
Does Skocpol succeed in making that argument?#🠑
She does, in my opinion, but that is mostly not because she applies Mill’s methods of agreement and difference, as she claims to do in her introduction.
To start, the cases of France, Russia, and China have weak, or at least very messy, justifications. In the last section of the Introduction, titled “Why France, Russia, and China?”, Skocpol provides a few empirical and practical reasons why these cases are useful — they mostly avoid the issue of colonial rule, and occurred long enough ago that a study of ”entire revolutionary transformations” (40) to be pursued — but argues that they are more importantly useful because they are similar societies in many ways. Pre-revolutionary France, Russia, and China were “wealthy and politically ambitious agrarian states,” underwent international pressures due to a relatively weak military, and experienced a revolution characterized by the developments listed above as the causes she argues for (incapacitated state machinery, peasant rebellion, mass-mobilizing political leaderships).
This is a believable account of how she came to “choose” these cases, but it is not a defense of these cases on intellectual grounds. Firstly, this means that Skocpol is not applying Mill’s method of agreement, which requires that cases with a common outcome be selected to maximize the number of differences they have, instead of their similarities. But even more confusingly, she selects these cases based on the same similarities that she claims she would show are causes of the outcome she is interested in, taking as her premise what she stated earlier in the introduction she would spend the rest of the book arguing for. It is not clear if other revolutions exist that may not have any of the causes she argues for. From a theoretical perspective, it is not clear what these cases offer that is particularly illustrative about social revolutions.
The issue of case selection is somewhat mitigated by how she ends up applying a combination of Mill’s methods of agreement and difference. Skocpol and Somers describe the method of States and Social Revolutions as a macro-analytic approach, one that attempts to use both the method of agreement (through parallel construction) and the method of difference (through contrast-oriented studies) to make generalizable claims (that are not too generalizable). Skocpol contrasts France, Russia, and China from Prussia, Japan, and England, which did not experience similar revolutions. These cases act as negative controls, and support Skocpol’s case selection by showing that she is not selecting on the dependent variable. Selecting on the dependent variable is inevitable for the method of agreement which assumes similar outcomes among cases, but this still leaves open the possibility that important causes for social revolutions may be missed if Skocpol were to only study states with revolutions, hence the utility of the negative cases. This is important and useful for Skocpol, but it does not address the aforementioned issue that other cases may exist which have similar outcomes but dissimilar causes, or that other cases may exist which have dissimilar outcomes but similar causes, and a potentially arbitrary case selection process may have simply missed these cases.
This approach also does not constitute a faithful application of Mill’s method of agreement or the method of difference. Skocpol generally locates similarities among the three main cases, and validates these similarities as causes for revolution by showing that states without these qualities did not experience the same outcomes. For the cases of France, Russia, and China that have similar outcomes, following Mill’s method would require Skocpol to locate differences among them to eliminate them as potential causes for revolution, and following Mill’s method of difference for the cases of contrast would require Skocpol to locate similarities among these to eliminate them as potential causes for revolution. Not following Mill’s method is completely fine for all of the reasons discussed in Week 3 (the Lieberson and Go readings), but Skocpol then leaves open even more possibilities for counterarguments than those adhering to Mill’s methods. To phrase them as general questions, what other qualities exist among France, Russia, and China that we should not consider as general causes for similar revolutions due to being differences among these cases? What other qualities exist among Prussia, Japan, and England that we should consider dismissing as general causes for revolutions due to them not being held by France, Russia, and China?
It’s not right to insist that Skocpol’s approach is truly scientific and completely mitigates any single type of criticism. Skocpol instead makes her argument compelling by combining these methods with a theoretical bent outlined in the introduction, and weaves that macrosociological imagination through each chapter. As opposed to theory simply guiding Skocpol towards potential solutions that she may validate or dismiss based on Mill’s methods of agreement and difference, theory and narrative themselves comprise a large part of her defense and what makes this text compelling for a reader.3 It is likely not difficult for an audience of sociologists to accept Skocpol’s argument for the importance of social structures, which has been defended countless times in the rest of the sociological literature, and I likewise believe in what Skocpol argues as much as I acknowledge the causes she identifies may not be the only possible explanations for the revolutions she describes.
Concluding thoughts#🠑
In other words, Skocpol’s analysis is not airtight. I conclude this paper with a short argument that Skocpol’s text is even more important because of these “shortcomings.”
The cultural critic Stuart Hall argued Marx himself was useful for us today because Marx was fallible and disputable. “He’s performed his historical task – he’s put ideas in our heads! He’s made us reject some of his own ideas! He’s brought us into confrontation with him – we’re arguing with him all the time, in order to figure out how the world works. That is the challenge of a very profound thinker.” Rather than agree with every claim Marx laid down from the Manifesto to the Grundrisse, Hall made an argument for the intellectual project opened by Marx that was built by all of Marx’s methods, his claims, his corresponding practice, and his engagement with his contemporaries — the whole of which ultimately went far beyond the life and achievements of Marx himself.
One could say the same of Skocpol’s text.4 Along with others like Perry Anderson, Barrington Moore, Frances Moulder, Clifford Geertz, and other authors we noted in Week 3, Skocpol opens a field of inquiry not by leading by example (though, as may be obvious, there is much to admire about this book), but by inviting readers to exceed, refute, and rework her own seminal project. With a compelling pursuit of ambitious theoretical claims that may never be fully resolved by any sociological method, Skocpol illustrates to readers the expansive questions that can be addressed if one applies careful argumentation through a comparative historical approach. She hints at the wide-ranging potential that sociological emphases on institutions and structures can bring to historical studies; the “imperfect” method, the constrained scope of her study, and the hybridity and experimentation in her still-compelling work may all be read as invitations for readers to attempt to realize that same potential. Through this thrust, States and Social Revolutions is valuable even if one comes to disagree with every substantive claim made in the text — exactly by forming our own critiques and new approaches can a more illuminating field of comparative historical sociology be formed. To state this more simply, however crudely: States and Social Revolutions is dead — long live comparative historical sociology!
- Obviously this is tangential to the focus of the class, but I was impressed at how much Skocpol drew from Marxist thinkers and gave them credence as theorists of revolution while stopping short of locating herself among their ranks. One reviewer I read described her explicitly as a Marxist; I can't tell if I agree entirely with that, but I did feel that she at times was being a "better" Marxist in her understanding of structures and mass mobilization than the Marxists she criticized. Some historiography could probably make sense of this situation, since as you noted in class, Marxists tend to love writing about revolution. Lastly, I feel that intellectual currents have shifted a bit now such that I would associate Marxist perspectives much more so with a structuralist bent than Skocpol does, another reason for my surprise at how she describes her intervention. In any case. ↩
- As discussed in class, this book was written before the fall of the apartheid regime, so she may have spoken too quickly here -- though the causes of the end of apartheid can arguably be attributed to international pressure that had accumulated by the 1990s, and domestic illegitimacy was not sufficient for apartheid to end. But this is just an unsubstantiated footnnote in a response paper. ↩
- I suspect what I am trying to argue in somewhat amateurish terms will be a recurring theme throughout the semester, so I'll mostly just look forward to that instead of belaboring it here. ↩
- Not the point, but Hall's perspective on Marx is not entirely dissimilar from Skocpol's, in how Skocpol builds her work through a thorough appraisal and critique of Marxist theories of the state and revolution. ↩