In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Theda Skocpol, the internationally respected author of the award-winning 1979 book States and Social Revolutions, updates her arguments about social revolutions. How are we to understand recent revolutionary upheavals in Iran, Nicaragua, and other countries across the globe? Why have social revolutions happened in some countries, but not in others that seem similar in many ways?

Skocpol shows how she and other scholars have used ideas about states and societies to identify the particular types of regimes that are susceptible to the growth of revolutionary movements and vulnerable to actual transfers of state power to revolutionary challengers.

At this point, Skocpol argues, comparative social scientists have a good grasp on the causes and dynamics of social revolutionary transformations across modern world history, from early modern social revolutions in agrarian-bureaucratic monarchies, through more recent revolutions in certain countries emerging from direct colonial rule, and in dictatorial regimes focused on one-man patrimonial control.