ABSTRACT
Theda Skocpol, the author of States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), is a renowned scholar of sociology at Harvard University in the United States. Skocpol won the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2007, and has served as president of the American Political Science Association and as dean of graduate studies at Harvard. She argues that the more reform a newly-revolutionary state needs, the more institutionally strong that state will become. Because revolutions are still a part of the world's political landscape today, what typically happens in any given revolution has important lessons. States and Social Revolutions matters because it was one of the first works to provide important alternative explanations of revolution in place of that proposed by Marxism. States and Social Revolutions has inspired much subsequent inquiry in fields such as the relationship between international forces, domestic institutions, and the effect of both on shaping the future of states.
