States and Social Revolutions - Criticism

Criticism

Skocpol explains social revolutions as being based on four factors: 1) state social structures, 2) international competitive pressures and 3) international demonstration effects, and 4) class relations. Her argument is influenced by the Marxist notion of the class struggle, but she differs from Marx as she sees the state as an autonomous actor within society. Her argument is even more powered by the structuralist argument that revolution is a dysfunctional response to a destabilization of social system) schools. The book is also state centric (as shown by the very title of the book). By analyzing how the social institution of the state changed and influenced the social change, the book can also be placed within the historical institutionalism paradigm.

She stresses that international-scale actions (like threats or outcomes of war, and political and economic inequalities) have a major effect on domestic events (like revolutions). This effect can be explained as the outside effects lead to increased destabilization and political crises (financial crisis, elite divisions, mobilization of groups sensing political opportunity) which in turn increases the likelihood that revolutionary forces will arise and act. Skocpol notes that while elites are important, ordinary citizens are also vital, as supported by the fact that most successful revolutions were aided by urban and peasants mobilizations.

Criticism of Skocpol's book centers around her deemphasis of agency (role of individuals and ideology) and her mixed use of comparative methodological strategies.

In her book “States and Social Revolutions,” Theda Skocpol explains the social structural reasoning behind why and how revolutions occur. Her work is based on the work of Barrington Moore, who she was once a student of. Her theory created a new avenue for exploring revolutions and the reasons behind why they occur. Although her book is extremely influential and enlightening, many have found aspects of her theory that they disagree with or find qualms with.

According to Peter Manicas, Skocpol denies claims by historians that social revolutions should be analyzed as separate and distinct movements. She also denies claims that try to over generalize what makes a revolution. Peter Manicas says that Skocpol’s work is successful at creating a theory that uses generalizations but is sensitive to differences between states and situations.

Manicas says that Skocpol’s intention in “States and Social Revolutions” is to “widen the scope of structuralist analysis beyond the locus of “’conventional’ Marxian analysis.” According to Manicas, Skocpol denies claims by historians that social revolutions should be analyzed as separate and distinct movements. She also denies claims that try to over generalize what makes a revolution. Manicas says that Skocpol’s work is successful at creating a theory that uses generalizations but is sensitive to differences between states and situations.

Manicas’ says that Skocpol’s “treatment of the state reflects much of the current controversy and represents a decided advance over many accounts,” Skocpol is very careful to state the differences between modern nation-states and what can be classified as “empires” or monarchical states. She also focuses on the importance in differences between external characteristics of different states that may be experiencing revolutions and contrasts successful revolutions—i.e. France, Russia and china—with unsuccessful revolutions like Prussia and Japan.

Skocpol’s theories, according to Manicas, are causal in nature; she explains one event by identifying it as a direct result of another event or phenomenon. She does suggest, however, that there are alternatives and there are times when one event does not necessarily lead to the result expected. She argues that existing structures in society are a result of the intentional actions of humans and a result of the transformations humans have made to them preceding the current situation in any given state. Skocpol also argues that these changes and transformations over time are not made deliberately, they simply occur according to the circumstances surrounding a state at any given time period.

Manicas says that Skocpol’s causal argument is insufficient in the explanation of revolutions because she contradicts herself. According to Manicas, Skocpol puts more emphasis on structure than she does on group efforts, although she does cite the importance of group efforts. However, this does not mean that these group efforts were voluntary or conscious. Manicas brings to light the example of the French Revolution. Skocpol says that the convening of the Estates General in 1789 was essential for the start of the French Revolution. This “is not to say that the king intended to start a revolution.” According to Marinas, “to say this is also to say that the ‘causal arguments’ …are not sufficient to explain the French Revolution…they leave out precisely what one needs in order to explain the French Revolution, or indeed, to explain any historical event.”

Skocpol’s book “States and Social Revolutions” gives an understanding of the similarities and differences between the structures of prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary societies in each of the revolutions she looks at. Skocpol also shows the connections these states had with the international realm and how these affected the internal structures as well as the public and the revolutionary changes.

Although Skocpol argues against the use of generalizations in historical explanation, she uses some generalizations herself. Manicas says that the use of the term “revolution” is in itself a generalization. In the end of her book, Skocpol points out all the generalizations she uses and admits that they cannot be used to explain all modern revolutions beyond the French, Russian and Chinese. This is because causes for revolution vary due to historical and international circumstances. A second reason Skocpol point to is that “patterns of revolutionary causation and outcomes are necessarily affected by world-historical changes in the fundamental structures and bases of state power as such.”

Manicas argues that Skocpol does not explain why the revolutions in her book happened, but she offers a structural analysis for the understanding of these revolutions. According to Manicas, “history and the social sciences have distinct interests and tasks.” Social scientists attempt to better our understanding of societies in the past, present and future. Historians, in contrast, explain pivotal points in history. The distinction between history and social science is, according to Manicas, “not in terms of time, but in terms of task.”

Dwight Billings relates Skocpol to Marx. He argues that Skocpol’s theory is more similar to Marxism than it is to the other three theories she criticizes in her book. Despite this, her “stress on the potential autonomy of the state avoids the ‘class struggle reductionism’ of classical Marxism.”

According to Steve Pfaff, Skocpol’s book “States and Social Revolutions” created “a distinctive genre of neo-Weberian state-society analysis and, more broadly, served as signature work in the new historical and comparative subfields in sociology and comparative politics.” He says that Skocpol presents revolutionary urban middle class in each of the states she studies as “political entrepreneurs” because they take on the reigns of the revolution after the peasant class has successfully weakened the ruling government.

Unlike previous studies of revolutions, Skocpol’s book focuses on the importance of structural conditions within a state over the ideological motives behind a revolution. For Skocpol, ideology was simply a means to an end. She asserts that ideologies like Marxism-Leninism “were instrumental: useful to the extent that they were idealistic and universalistic, offering rhetoric and idioms for popular mobilization, and justifying ruthless means in the pursuit of higher ends.” Skocpol overlooks the real purpose of ideologies and only focuses on their instrumental uses. She ignores the differences between ideologies and puts them all in the same boat as instruments of revolution. Pfaff says, “In many instances, it appears as if ideology really did influence the decisions that revolutionary elites made, particularly after they seized power and could implement their ideas of social transformation.”

Pfaff also says that Skocpol focuses too much on big picture characteristics of revolutions and does not say anything about individual motives or how collective mobilization began in the first place. She is vague about revolutionary actors, labeling them in terms of classes. Pfaff believes that Skocpol’s revision of class based explanation of revolutions, “it would be more persuasive if collective action were explained and not simply treated as an independent variable.”

Skocpol also argues that successful revolutions “paved the way for centralized, rational bureaucratic administration in the countries she studied.” According to Pfaff, many scholars have argued “while social revolutions removed the old governing class that was frequently an obstacle to significant administrative reforms, they often failed to deliver the degree of rational bureaucratic administration they promised.” In the case of the French Revolution, Skocpol claims that the revolution removed “medieval rubbish” and allowed modern bureaucratization to be created. It has been found, however, that there were “prerevolutionary trends towards greater administrative efficiency that, in some cases, may have been more disrupted by revolution than accelerated.”

Skocpol’s book, according to Pfaff, is a clearly identifiable as a product of the politics of the 1970s. She “helped launch a new generation of comparative research on the largest and most consequential of historical questions.” Pfaff goes on to say, even if Skocpol didn’t explain the causes that might have triggered state crisis and the mobilization of the people, “and if, in its enthusiasm for revolution, it overestimated the gains of revolutionary transformation, the book nevertheless deserves its place among the canonical works of comparative and historical research.”

In Michael Richards’ review of “States and Social Revolutions,” he says that it is rare that a singular social revolution is studied along with the discussion of a theory of social revolutions. Barrington Moore was the first to make a significant contribution to this kind of writing. Theda Skocpol’s book, however, does something similar, but is “a more carefully circumscribed effort,” focusing on three countries rather than six as Moore did and is “less sweeping in its conclusions.”

Richards commends Skocpol for choosing to focus her book on three revolutions rather than bringing to light a large number of successful and unsuccessful revolutions “in hopes of achieving statistical validity or in the expectation of being able to explain a number of related phenomena.” Like Peter Manicas, Richards also finds Skocpol’s refusal to create a general theory for all revolutions commendable. According to Richards, Skocpol “recognizes the limitations of comparative study and the dangers of fitting events into relatively inflexible categories.”

Similarly to Pfaff, McNeill believes Skocpol implicitly repudiates “the role of personalities in affecting the revolutionary process she analyzes.” However, unlike Pfaff, McNeill sees this as essential to her argument. To include such a variable would, according to McNeill, “spoil the sociology she seeks to discover in human affairs.”

Jasper and Goodwin believe Skocpol’s book was, like the works of many sociologists in the 70s, a result of her disappointment with the lack of revolutionary success in the United States and Britain. According to Jasper and Goodwin, Skocpol articulated the message many had been thinking—that the actions and the ideologies prove meaningless without the proper causes for revolution being present.

Jeff Goodwin argues, in his own analysis of “States and Social Revolutions,” that Skocpol’s fame comes in large part, not from a substantial amount of people reading her book, but from a small amount of “designated readers” critiquing her book and spreading what they believe to be her main ideas. Goodwin says, “A good part of Skocpol’s fame is due to the wide diffusion of several misformulations of some key ideas.” Goodwin explains three major “misformulations” scholars have made about “States and Social Revolutions.”

The first misinterpretation of Skocpol’s book says she makes the point that a revolution or a rebellions success depends solely on state institutions. According to Goodwin, however, Skocpol’s argument is more complex: it states that the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions are a result of state institutions becoming more susceptible to collapse due to outside influence as well as peasant rebellion.

A second misperception of “States and Social Revolutions” claims that Skocpol denotes the relevance of ideology in a revolution, an argument made by Steve Pfaff, as mentioned earlier. What Skocpol means to argue, Goodwin says, is that no singular group consciously brought on the revolution.

A third and final argument people have claimed Skocpol to make in “States and Social Revolutions” is that a general theory on revolutions can be made simply through the comparison of a select group of revolutions. Goodwin, like Richards, says Skocpol’s book does not try to create an overarching theory of revolution by using the three examples of revolutions. To the contrary, “she explicitly warns that her conjunctural explanation for social revolutions in this particular context cannot be mechanically extended to others.”

Himmelstein and Kimmel claim to find “Tocquevillian” tendencies within Skocpol’s argument, pinning the roots of her theory to “the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Similarly to Tocqueville, Skocpol “is concerned with the relations between the state as an autonomous institution and society." She sees political centralization as a consequence of revolution. Although less obviously than Tocqueville, Skocpol “presents the irony of revolutions made in the name of freedom but culminating in a much strengthened state.” Himmelstein and Kimmel applaud Skocpol’s ability to combine Tocquevillian views of the state to Marxian class based ideology.

Similarly to Pfaff and Goodwin mentioned earlier, Himmelstein and Kimmel see Skocpol’s minimal focus on “how human beings actually make a revolution,” problematic. Skocpol’s denial of the idea of people voluntarily starting a revolution leads her to forget the importance of human action as “a link between structural conditions and social outcomes.” This ignoring of the mediator between structure and results makes her analysis incomplete.

According to David Laitin, Skocpol “finds history to be moved not by structure or agent but by irony.” One ironic point Skocpol makes is that, despite her emphasis on international pressures, France’s revolution came at a time when France was “unequivocally victorious.” Outcomes that cannot be predicted by structure, Laitin says, “are explained by the demonic forces of irony.” Laitin also goes on to say that, although structure is important, Skocpol denies the importance of human choice and action. Irony, says Laitin, is not an element of structure, but Skocpol’s attempt at avoiding admittance “that action and fortune play a pivotal role in the drama of history.”

Walter Goldfrank believes “States and Social Revolutions” to be an excellent book. He argues that, while some might see her book to have limitations “in analyzing today’s core,” this does not “damage explanations of yesterday’s semi-periphery." Skocpol’s major drawback, Goldfrank says, is her “tendency toward positivist ahistoricity."

Despite this, Goldfrank says Skocpol’s book marks a leap forward in historical scholarship. While the focus on Skocpol’s book is international conflict and foreign wars, Rosemary O’Kane argues that the focus in understanding social revolutions should be civil wars instead. According to O’Kane, it is important to explore the decisions and policy implementations of the new state to see how they were affected by war, which Skocpol does not do. Skocpol, O’Kane says, “seems to stress the importance of international over national factors,” while still having civil war as an important factor in her argument. Skocpol’s lack of focus on civil wars leads to the failure in her analysis. She fails to realize the “centralized control over the revolutionary forces of internal coercion.”

Although published over twenty years ago, Theda Skocpol’s book “States and Social Revolutions,” continues to influence historians and sociologists alike today. Skocpol presented a new way to look at social revolutions and analyze then through a structural and state centered perspective. Although her analysis may not be complete in the eyes of many, it offers a new perspective and fills in the holes in many theories before hers as well as the theories of her educators, including Benjamin Moore.