Reflections on an anniversary

Over long research careers, some scholars identify one big question and come at it again and again, hoping to reach comprehensive answers, while others move from one question to the next, ever looking for new puzzles to resolve. I am decidedly in the latter camp, having pursued a career of disentangling causes of socio-political change by examining a succession of different subjects important beyond as well as within academia. Why? Curiosity about new topics has kept me motivated, interested, and passionate about research and writing. What is more, I long ago realised it is wise to move on to new questions before other scholars, especially rising youngsters, figure out the shortfalls of my previous answers! As the author of a bold first book that sparked a lot of debate and inspired many rounds of new research and theorising, I could have spent an entire career responding to my critics. Imagine how dreary and unproductive that would have been.

Accordingly, after publishing a collection of articles related to my first book, I stopped working on revolutions, happy to leave the field to many others like the contributors to this symposium who have produced excellent, innovative work on such conflicts and the concepts and methods we need to understand them. Determined (as I once quipped to a friend) to ‘get as far away from revolution as possible’, I proceeded to investigate a series of puzzles about the United States in historical and cross-national perspective. My work has addressed the peculiar shape and dynamics of US social policies compared to welfare states in Europe, Britain, and Canada. I have tracked the long-term evolution and recent transformations of US civic associations; probed repeated US struggles about health insurance; and – most recently – set out to explain the top-down and bottom-up forces that are fuelling right-wing radicalism in America.

It is not that I am indifferent about my first book; I remember vividly how thrilled I was when States and Social Revolutions first went into production. After Cambridge University Press sent a mock-up of the original book cover – nothing fancy or sophisticated, just a dark blue background with my name in bold white letters and the main title in large red script – I propped it up next to my reading chair and stared at it adoringly again and again over many weeks. But once my scholarly undertakings moved in new directions, I turned away all further invitations to defend the book and became oblivious to its passing birthdays. Thus, it is in one sense surprising that I agreed to participate in the 40th anniversary event held at All Souls just before the global pandemic shut us all down. Or maybe it is not so surprising, because like many American academics I am bewitched and bedazzled by old English academia and cannot resist invitations to visit Oxford and Cambridge. That trip to Oxford was very special, and when I arrived at the Warder’s cottage at All Souls, my first question was ‘what souls are we talking about’? Informed that it is ‘all of the faithful who died in the Hundred Years War’, I duly noted that the unfaithful who also perished are not included. Still, even though I remember that visit fondly, I do not recall much of what I said on the original panel. These brief reflections are conceived anew, on the other side of the Great Pandemic Divide.

Written in 1978, the Preface and Acknowledgements to States and Social Revolutions explain how the project was first conceived as a PhD dissertation and later turned into the tome widely read until this day and assigned in classes at universities, colleges, and military academies (I still get significant yearly royalties). Suffice it to say that I did not originally know what I was getting into. Having studied with Barrington Moore, Jr and mastered his magnificent Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy along with major works by other senior comparative historians like Reinhard Bendix and Samuel P. Huntington, I had learned to juxtapose historical trajectories and compare them to address causal hypotheses derived from different theoretical approaches. I wrote a graduate seminar paper comparing revolutions, read by Daniel Bell, who suggested as I sat across from his desk in William James Hall at Harvard, ‘you should do this for your thesis; it is a thesis in the best sense of the word’. I took that perhaps foolhardy advice and ran with it, defying the ‘realism’ of my PhD programme, where students were advised to do dissertations on ‘manageable’ projects, usually with statistically analysed quantitative data. I convinced myself that one could be methodologically rigorous in other ways and could use secondary histories as a source of evidence. For this endeavour, I was fortunate to get the blessing of my PhD committee of George Homans, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset, during a period when big-think sociology was esteemed. Even so, the project almost proved too much. I was hired to be one of the first women faculty members in the Harvard Sociology Department before I completed the dissertation, but faced a fixed deadline when the job would disappear if I did not finish. So, in a fit of practicality, I rushed the ending, writing merely the sketchiest sections on the outcomes of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Only after the PhD, did I come up with the design of chapters that appears in the book – comparisons of state breakdown and peasant revolts across all three revolutions and shadow comparisons to make sense of revolutionary outbreaks, followed by three major chapters on the evolving outcomes in France, Russia, and China.

This further development from dissertation to book was crucial, I believed then and still think now, because it enabled me to spell out how struggles among disparate groups involved in each revolution led to state-centralising outcomes none of them fully wanted or envisaged. That is what ‘structural’ analysis meant to me – not that groups and organisations and their purposes and ideas were irrelevant, but that no single group or alliance was in control of the revolutionary process or state-rebuilding outcome. Analysing the outcomes in France, Russia, and China fostered my enduring conviction that history is full of unforeseen and unintended twists, that the actors on the stage at the time rarely comprehend what will result from their struggles. The outcomes stories had a normative impact as well, helping me to see that violent social revolutions, even those that bring some liberating changes, are tragic in many respects, because they give way to authoritarian, violent, and oppressive regimes at odds with the aspirations of either liberals or socialists.

It is worth noting that I never thought the three great historical cases of social revolution examined in my dissertation and book were the only instances. I always believed additional cases could be studied with the same frame of reference and comparative methodology – and, in fact, I originally considered including the Mexican Revolution. But that social revolution had not been as well probed by historians and lacked the rich secondary sources I found on the others I selected for analysis. (Also, with weird regularity, I usually analyse things in sets of three, perhaps a hold-over from my Methodist Christian upbringing.) Three great social revolutions, and comparisons to several other early conflicts in England, Germany, and Japan, seemed enough for that first project. Soon after, however, I stretched myself and collaborated with co-authors to consider modifications in the framework needed to make sense of the Iranian Revolution and a few anti-colonial guerrilla-led rebellions that turned into social revolutions. Further analyses were included in Social Revolutions in the Modern World, published in 1994 after I had left that area of research altogether.

What has endured for me are core ways of doing research about socio-political change, finding compelling research puzzles, formulating hypotheses, and testing answers. Barrington Moore’s advice to me to read widely in history and look for patterns and puzzles remains as fruitful as ever. My one difference from him, always, has been that I also look for potential answers at odds with previous scholarly or pundit wisdom. As I research alternative answers to important puzzles, I am excited if I can substantiate – or uncover in the historical weeds – causal factors that run contrary to what others have assumed or claimed. Better to argue with other scholars explicitly – and be argued with – than to play it safe and be ignored. This has always been my motto. It was, of course, a risky approach for a young woman coming up in academia and entering the comparative-historical turf only trod before by solo white male dinosaurs. I paid for my audacity with some career setbacks along the way – including a tenure denial at Harvard that took years to reverse, plus additional years to survive the blowback when I won my current post. But in the end, thinking big and arguing with giants paid off for me.

I can see now, as I look back, a few other through-lines in my scholarship. Studying the intersecting causal factors playing out in social revolutionary outbreaks and outcomes taught me always to approach macro socio-political changes as derived from multiple causal forces. That may sound banal, but it is not, because most social scientific theoretical traditions privilege one generalisable factor. In revolutionary episodes as in virtually all political transformations, top-down and bottom-up factors, state-centric and class-structural factors, and domestic and international factors all converge to shape process and outcome. In my studies of right-wing radicalisation in US politics today, I find exactly the same thing. For example, the work Vanessa Williamson and I did on the Tea Party dissected a confluence of elite and populist attacks on President Obama and the Democrats. This frame of reference still works as I explore the radicalisation of the Republican Party in the 2000s.

Finally, my capacity to uncover ironies and unintended twists has also persisted since States and Social Revolutions. My analysis of US politics today seeks to lay bare the myopia of elites in and around the Republican Party, who have imagined they could harness popular ethnonationalist fears for their own ends. They have failed to recognise they cannot do so without being overtaken by voters and movements aiming for very different things than tax cuts for the wealthy, crony profits, and evisceration of government capacities to redistribute economic benefits and regulate business excesses. As for those who thought they could use Donald Trump to sign tax and regulatory cuts and appoint judges, and then just move on from him and his ilk when his usefulness was done – well, they along with all of the rest of us are learning otherwise.

Let me conclude with a word of thanks to the interlocutors here who have taken my work seriously. Although revolutions are no longer my area of concern, I applaud scholars like all of the contributors to this symposium, who are crossing fresh new scholarly frontiers in theory, methods, and studies of revolutions, political rebellions, and other forms of contention. I take heart in observing that many strands from my earliest work continue to resonate in the social sciences, even as they inform my own ongoing research. Even if scholarship always, wonderfully, moves on, that doesn’t mean the overall approaches embodied in earlier fruitful studies cannot inform later work. I appreciate that my first book, in many ways a lonely project at the time, is now part of a steadily growing body of comparative-historical scholarship in the social sciences. Studying socio-political changes of all kinds – including today’s democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond – is best done, as States and Social Revolutions helped to demonstrate, by probing and juxtaposing fully contextualised cases. It still makes sense for scholars to (directly or implicitly) compare historical trajectories, tease out the intersections of social inequalities and struggles over state power, and address the evolving global contexts as local, regional, or national episodes play out. This way of studying political conflict and change is what I believe endures from States and Social Revolutions, as new generations of scholars go far beyond the arguments of that book born decades ago.