The various chapters and ideas in this book have been presented on so many occasions and before so many colleagues, peers, and students that any list of the people who have kindly (and sometimes impatiently) responded to its arguments would no doubt consume several pages. I would like to thank, however, a rather smaller circle of friends and colleagues who have been especially helpful, directly or indirectly, in my continuing efforts to understand revolutions, social movements, and political conflict more generally.

I have been most privileged – perhaps uniquely privileged – to know and to have worked with the two most influential contemporary scholars of revolutions, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly. I want to thank them for their inspiration and encouragement, both that which they have expressed personally and that embodied in their own exemplary scholarship. I also want to recognize several other important scholars of revolutions who have also greatly influenced my thinking, albeit often from a somewhat greater distance, including John Foran, Jack Goldstone, Tim McDaniel, Eric Selbin, and Timothy Wickham-Crowley. And I would like to thank Mustafa Emirbayer and Jim Jasper, intellectual collaborators who have continually engaged and challenged my thinking about a host of issues.

A number of people at Harvard, Northwestern, and New York Universities (many of whom have since moved on to other institutions) have also helped me, more than they may realize, to think more clearly about revolutions and not-so-related issues.