The fascination of revolutions is one shared by the worlds of scholarship and art and literature alike. For the latter, revolutions appear to hold out hope that a new order will sweep aside the decay, oppression and corruption they perceive as omnipresent in society. For the former, revolutions come tantalizingly close to the holy grail sought by social scientists for two hundred years, offering sequences of events and patterns of interaction that share sufficient similarities across continents and centuries to suggest the possibility of a true science of human affairs, including predictive hypotheses.