Book Review: Revolutions: A New History by Donald Sassoon

Donald Sassoon, a skilled and erudite comparative historian, has turned his hand to the study of revolutions. The result is a stimulating and highly readable book, richly endowed with provocative judgements and witty asides.

Sassoon begins by discussing some of the ways in which the meaning of the terms, ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutionary,’ have been stretched to absurdity (a prize example – Keir Starmer as ‘the quiet revolutionary’). The ‘revolutions’ Sassoon focuses on are wide-ranging both geographically – Europe, America and China – and over time, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Sassoon takes six cases of revolutionary change, each of great historical significance: the English Civil War; the American Revolution (or, as Sassoon calls it, ‘The Settlers’ Rebellion’); the French Revolution; the ‘National Revolutions’ of the Nineteenth Century; the Russian Revolution; and the Chinese Revolution.

Although Sassoon notes the impossibility of getting agreement on a definition of revolution, the examples he focuses on have in common that all, at one stage or another of the revolutionary process, involved violence. For a concise definition of revolution, there is much to be said for John Dunn's ‘Revolutions are a form of massive, violent and rapid social change’ (Dunn, 1989: 12). Sassoon, however, is concerned with a ‘revolutionary’ process, broadly conceived. In his perspective, it extends over decades, not just the most dramatic moments of forced regime change from below in one particular year. Thus, his chapter on China begins not in 1949 but in 1911 and ends with the leadership of Xi Jinping. On Russia, he ranges all the way from the First World War, which he sees as ‘the immediate cause of the Russian Revolution’ (p. 194), to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. These chapters become, accordingly, brief and lively introductions not only to the revolutions themselves but also to modern Russian and Chinese history.

Sassoon emphasises the non-proletarian origins of the leadership of most revolutions, observing that the French Revolution was neither a bourgeois nor workers’ revolution. The main leaders and important participants were middle-class professionals plus a significant sprinkling of aristocrats (pp. 105–107). In what became known as ‘the Terror,’ Sassoon notes, the number of people guillotined ‘was probably as high as 20,000,’ of whom a minority of about 2000 were aristocrats. He retains a soft spot for Maximilien Robespierre, and notes that killings on a larger scale by established state authorities in many countries, before and since the French revolutionary violence, evoked far less international indignation. Sassoon reserves much more condemnation for Napoleon, who, as a young army officer had been sympathetic to the Jacobins and whose early career benefited from the patronage of Robespierre's younger brother, Augustin. Napoleon, Sassoon emphasises, was responsible for vastly more deaths than the executions by the French revolutionaries, with millions perishing during the Napoleonic wars, while a further ‘100,000 died during the Napoleonic repression’ of the rebellious colony of Saint-Domingue (pp. 118–119). Sassoon highlights Robespierre's critical view of foreign military intervention which he prefers to that of ‘today's “liberal interventionists”’ (United States President Donald Trump's utterly illiberal foreign interventionism occurred too recently for him to be to become an ignominious addition to the ranks of those Sassoon regards as deluded). Noting that Robespierre regarded as absurd the idea that ‘one could simply intervene in another country to change its regime,’ Sassoon quotes him as saying:

The most extravagant idea that can take root in the head of a politician is to believe it is enough for one people to invade a foreign people to make it adopts its laws and constitutions. No one likes armed missionaries (p. 116).

In his discussion of the American Revolution, Sassoon makes the obvious point that while ‘it was ultimately more than a revolt against British rule, it was also far less than the establishment of a society based on the idea that all are “created equal,”’ adding that the American Civil War, too, left that task far from complete. Ethnic cleansing and racism continued, President Woodrow Wilson ‘was a racist even by the standard of the times’ (early decades of the twentieth century) and, as recently as 1995, Confederate General Thomas (‘Stonewall’) Jackson was commemorated on United States postage stamps. For Sassoon, with some hyperbole, this was ‘almost as if present-day Germany had a Goebbels Institute of Cultural Studies and a Himmler School of Human Rights’ (pp. 92–94).

French and Italian sources figure prominently in Sasson's endnotes to the chapter on nineteenth century national revolutions, and his chapter on the French Revolution draws extensively on the rich French literature. It is only when he comes to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions that Sassoon does not have knowledge of the language of the main countries about which he is writing. However, he makes up for it by his impressively extensive command of the Western academic literature on the Soviet Union and China, and not only on the year of revolutionary regime change. Indeed, the chapters on the Russian and Chinese Revolutions are the most copiously documented in the book. Sassoon pays attention not only to leaders’ speeches, participants’ memoirs and major academic books on the Soviet Union and China but draws also on remarkably wide reading of the academic journals specialising on those parts of the world.

On the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, Sassoon makes an important, albeit conjectural, point with which I agree, that ‘it is not absurd to suggest that the more likely alternative to the Reds were not enlightened liberals or progressive social-democrats but odious strongmen comparable to Hitler and Mussolini’ (p. 224). That is far from saying that the Bolshevik seizure of power was a ‘good thing’ or necessarily a lesser evil. In the free election to the Constituent Assembly, held in January 1918, the most successful party was the Socialist Revolutionaries who were less dogmatic, and much more open to co-operation with others, than were Lenin's Bolsheviks. There is at least a possibility that a less authoritarian regime might have emerged had not the Bolsheviks, having lost the election, showed their contempt for the voters by immediately dissolving the Assembly. The subsequent strengthening of their grip on Soviet society went along with degeneration into dictatorial rule by their own ‘odious strongman,’ Iosif Stalin, the party's General Secretary. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin cultivated a façade of modesty, but while privately ensuring that the cult of his personality was no less grandiose than that of his German and Italian counterparts.

Sassoon's judgement that ‘the Bolsheviks failed to establish anything resembling a socialist society’ makes a refreshing change from much contemporary academic discourse on the Communist era in Russia. He makes clear – by adding ‘though they developed an industrial society’ – that he has in mind not just the Lenin years, but those of Stalin's dictatorship and beyond. In the recent and contemporary Western academic literature, what were Communist states and became post-Communist are more often designated as ‘socialist’ and ‘post-socialist.’ Writing on post-Communist states has become increasingly permeated by scholars who grew up in those countries. Even those who disliked the regimes seem to have imbibed the state authorities’ self-attribution that they were ‘socialist.’ The same writers would be far less inclined to describe these countries prior to 1989 as democratic, which their highly authoritarian regimes also claimed to be. Many a book and article were published in the pre-perestroika Soviet Union and in Communist Europe on ‘Socialist Democracy,’ referring to the Communist state in which the author was living. In the West, however, during the actual Communist era, those who described the Soviet Union as socialist, as distinct from Communist, were, overwhelmingly, either Communists and fellow-travellers themselves or right-wing politicians and propagandists who wished to discredit socialist parties of a social democratic type by tarring them with the Soviet brush.

Communist systems constituted a distinctive sub-type among the world's authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Their defining features were: (a) the monopoly of power of the Communist Party, for which the official euphemisms were ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and (a later version) the ‘leading role’ of the party; (b) ‘democratic centralism’ within that ruling party, with the decisions of higher party organs absolutely binding on the lower; (c) non-capitalist (especially state) ownership of the means of production; (d) a command, as distinct from market, economy; (e) the declared aim of building ‘communism’ – in the sense of ‘communism’ as the classless, self-governing and harmonious final stage of social development – which, however fanciful, remained the party's ultimate legitimising goal; and (f) the organisational existence of, and sense of belonging to, an International Communist Movement (Brown, 2009, pp. 101–114).

It is worth noting that the first two of those features – the political institutional components – are the only defining characteristics of Communism out of the six that still apply to contemporary China. Sassoon, indeed, refers to China's Communism in the past tense, writing, ‘When China was Communist, it was accused of wanting to conquer the world; when it became more of a market economy, it was accused of seeking global hegemony. … It is as if Lord Palmerston's famous aphorism – “we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual” – has been transmogrified by the West, particularly by the United States, into something new: “We have no perpetual enemies, but we require enemies perpetually”’ (p. 321).

In a strong concluding chapter, Sassoon notes that if ‘a revolution is simply about the overthrow of the ancién regime,’ all those he has included in his book can be deemed to have been successful. There are, moreover, times when a revolution is necessary and a lesser evil than the status quo. But, bearing in mind that revolution denotes the violent overthrow of the old regime, rather than its peaceful transformation, it is noteworthy that, more often than not, revolution has replaced one authoritarian regime by another, even though the new model may be authoritarianism of a different type.

Along with many apt points, Sassoon's conclusions include a couple of generalisations that have long been made but are questionable in the light of recent developments, some of which will have occurred since his manuscript went to its publisher. The old generalisation that the British Prime Minister with majority support in the House of Commons (an essential caveat) has more executive power than the American President has been strained to breaking point in 2025–2026. Sassoon stresses the United States's greater separation of powers, with the two houses of the legislature elected at different times and according to different criteria, along with the independence and the prestige of the Supreme Court. In his second term as President, Donald Trump has got away with numerous arbitrary authoritarian acts domestically (as well as internationally) which it is hard to see a British Prime Minister surviving if he or she attempted them. The United States Supreme Court may not yet be totally supine vis-à-vis Trump, but it has come close, and Republicans in both House and Senate have been docile (other than one or two planning imminent retirement), even when they disagree with the President, because they are well aware that defiance will lead Trump to mobilise their base against them. British political parties, and the Members of Parliament (MPs) of the governing party in the first instance, are not only able to remove the Prime Minister, but in the past decade they have been making a habit of it.

The other generalisation in the concluding chapter that no longer holds good is that ‘In Britain, as in the US, the electoral system ensures that, in practice, there are only two parties vying for power’ (p. 329). This remains true for the United States, but not for the United Kingdom. I am writing these lines in the first half of May 2026. Throughout the second half of 2025 and thus far in the present year, the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, has been predicted (‘if a general election were held tomorrow’) to win the largest number of seats in the House of Commons. In local elections held in England on 7 May 2026, the two parties which made the most spectacular gains were Reform and the Green Party. Less than two years after winning a massive majority in the House of Commons, Labour fared disastrously in England, as did the other party of the ‘big two’, the Conservatives. The Scottish National Party continued its ascendancy in Scotland, and in Wales this time, the nationalists also acquired power, with Plaid Cymru supplanting Labour as the largest party in the Welsh assembly and its leader becoming First Minister.

Sassoon correctly notes that in the 2024 general election, Reform were already the third party in terms of votes in the United Kingdom, although they ended up with only five MPs, whereas the Liberal Democrats, who got fewer votes nationally than Reform, emerged with 72 MPs, anomalies – or ‘absurdities,’ as Sassoon terms them – of the electoral system. The further advance of Reform since then, under the controlling leadership of populist chancer Farage, has brought them to the point when they, too, can be beneficiaries of the first-past-the-post voting system. A ‘two-party system’ has become a multi-party reality.

This is dramatic change, but not violent revolution. However, Sassoon's restless intellect means that any book by him will not be narrowly conceived and executed. It also shows that even the boldest generalisations about the past are safer for book authors than generalisations about the present. By the time the work is published, they have become predictions about a political future. That is always a hazardous enterprise.