ABSTRACT
In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, Theda Skocpol intended to explain one of the important political phenomena of the modern age—revolutions—as the products of structural factors in a society, such as social class and the nature of the nation's economy. She was engaged in a project of identifying trends, one in which extreme methodological rigor would have been unlikely to have improved her argument. "Iran's dominant class", wrote Skocpol in a paper that sought to explain the revolution, "consisted of state bureaucrats, foreign capitalist investors, and domestic capitalists closely tied by patronage and regulation to the state", meaning the royal family. Iran was a state dependent on oil exports in which a small elite gained conspicuous wealth and the armed forces were lavishly funded. The sociologist Barbara Geddes argued that Skocpol's theory in States and Social Revolutions is limited by case selection, which introduces an inherent bias into the argument.
