Theorists of revolutions have—until recently—found themselves a little stuck. The much-discussed “fourth generation” of revolutionary theory seemed to have decidedly stalled, and there was—scholars surmised—a need for some deeper thinking about how we might regenerate this scholarly endeavour to take advantage of the novel cases and approaches available to us. Taking up the mantle of such a challenge, Colin J. Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, George Lawson, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and Daniel P. Ritter’s On Revolutions (2022) constitutes an important step toward progress in our field. The book seeks to revisit some of the underlying assumptions and dichotomies that characterize much work on revolutions, and encourage us to think more dynamically about them.
This is a book for two core audiences: first, scholars of revolution who are interested in exploring their theoretical options; second, students of all levels seeking to get a sense of how current thinking about revolutions differs from what they might find in the classic texts that usually get assigned. In both respects, the book is a great success. Scholars will find the book a stimulating read, and an excellent jumping-off point for formulating novel, challenging ideas. Students will find the book an accessible and engaging read that aptly takes them through many of the key debates they may be asked to reflect upon in class. Readers who are looking for a book that will “spoon-feed” them a singular answer to any of these debates, however, would do well to rethink their approach to the text, if not the topic more broadly.
As someone who teaches about revolutions, I think this book will earn an important place in my lectures and on my reading list. It’s a great “capstone” text to bring everything together at the end of a course. As someone who researches them, I found the book to be cautious in its proposals and helpful in its mission, yet also provocative in its premises. In the remainder of this review, I will discuss precisely how I understood and responded to the book’s contents, with the intention that prospective readers will get a better idea of where the book sits in relation to other perspectives.
Part 1 of the book uses case illustrations to problematize five common dichotomies: revolutions as social or political (Chapter 1); as agentic or structured (Chapter 2); as violent or nonviolent (Chapter 3); as successful or failed (Chapter 4); or as arising from domestic or international factors (Chapter 5). The conclusion, in each case, is that empirical evidence shows revolutions are generally a mixed bag. All of these sections were stimulating and persuasive, but most ultimately sought to present an empirically engaged survey of a debate, rather than to fashion novel theoretical implements. I think this is a strength of the book: it engages its reader with the nuances of conventional themes, but demands little compliance from them. One is free to go away and make up their own mind at the end of each chapter. This isn’t just good for students, but is a treat for theorists. I found myself energetically scribbling away in the margins of these chapters, delineating precisely how my own interpretation of a case or debate would accord with or differ from the authors’. I emerged with a novel appreciation these debates, and with my own ideas sharpened and nuanced in response.
In Part 2, the authors chart their preferred theoretical, methodological, and ethical path for studying revolutions, and their aspirations for the future of the field. Here, On Revolutions advances an unabashedly liberal interpretation of its subject matter, contending that “modern revolution and liberalism were born under the same sign, as twins,” and that “it could be argued that the world’s most revolutionary force over the past two centuries has been liberalism itself” (p. 191). I thought that this construction of revolution as a fundamentally liberal phenomenon seemed a little too sanguine. An alternative interpretation is that it is not liberalism, but democracy, that stands as revolution’s historic twin. When we study the 1789 French Revolution—for instance—we do not find crowds clamouring for a consolidated liberal state, but rather liberalizing efforts constantly hamstrung by the democratic element, whose demands for recognition time and again frustrated protoliberal governance, just as they had monarchical authority. During this period, liberalism had not been codified, and its relationship with both democracy and revolution would look quite conflicted throughout the subsequent century (e.g., see Andrew C. Gould, Origins of Liberal Dominance: State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1999).
A consequence of On Revolutions’ pursuit of a liberal vision of revolution is that other normative standpoints get short shrift, being lumped into a singular category of “illiberalism,” one so expansive that it encompasses everything from anticolonial struggles to expansionist conservativism, and from theocratic movements to Marxist revolt. Even deeply participatory movements like Kurdish democratic confederalism seem to be identified as among a set of “new challenges” to liberalism coming from the left—partly liberal and partly illiberal—rather than independent ideological horizons. Firmly embracing the book’s call that we do away with dichotomous thinking about revolution, I would suggest that we might do well to also disaggregate revolutions beyond this liberal/illiberal binary.
Yet, On Revolutions’ normative approach should be understood within its broader political context: a period during which writers were deeply worried about liberal democracies—including the United States—being hijacked by populist rulers and downgraded into autocratic “illiberal” systems. With this in mind, we should see On Revolutions not as declaring the supremacy of a liberal view, but as advancing an impressive defence of revolution’s compatibility with contemporary liberal politics, against an alternative interpretation that would construct it as a necessarily illiberal phenomenon. Here, Part 2 offers us a generous platform, drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, 1963) to flesh out its normative orientation (Chapter 6), carefully expounding on a variety of important methodological questions (Chapter 7), and engaging in a productive discussion of research ethics (Chapter 8).
An important claim running across the book’s chapters, to which it returns in its conclusion, is that a principal objective for future revolutionary scholarship should be to better grasp a “humbler” breed of revolution that characterizes the current age of political transformation. These “small r” revolutions promise “not earthly salvation but the striving for the possibility of radical transformation, of something better, even if that something better will never be fully realized … more concerned with the everyday, the local and the granular” (p. 210). They are the kind of revolutions that unseat dictators, challenge phony election results, and course-correct societies in danger of backsliding, but they are also the kind vulnerable to rapid reversals, counterrevolutions, and authoritarian reassertions. Given their increasing ubiquity as of late, I sincerely agree with the authors that we need to understand them more deeply.
Yet I wonder if the “Revolution/revolution” dichotomy is more useful than the old “Social/Political Revolution” or “Great Revolution/minor revolution” dichotomies. I for one found it more confusing, not least because the categories are indicated exclusively by written capitalization. As with the aforementioned liberal/illiberal dichotomy, I think scholars responding to the book might wish to pursue a more nuanced expansion of the category of revolution, rather than resorting to a new form of binarism.
All in all, I would commend this book to my colleagues who teach or work on the topic of revolution. Though it would be tempting to interpret the latter part of this review as criticism of On Revolutions’ approach to its object of study, I would urge caution in this interpretation. Rather, it was only by firmly embracing the book’s spirit and mission that I was moved to issue such arguments. In gifting the reader a framework for thinking more critically about revolution, On Revolutions provides a service to us all.
