ABSTRACT
Most analysts of revolution have long since abandoned the idea that the working class is the decisive agent of revolution, even of socialist revolution. Theda Skocpol has made the strongest theoretical argument that the continued, and sometimes intensified, pressure from other states has been a recurrent condition leading to revolution in the modern world. In States and Social Revolutions, Skocpol argues that a particular type of state or political regime is highly vulnerable to revolution, so vulnerable indeed that the state can collapse even without massive military pressure from foreign wars. Skocpol has made note of, and strongly criticized, various assumptions imbedded in Charles Tilly’s model, as well as his failure to take the state seriously as an autonomous organizational actor pursuing its own interests. Ironically, Tilly’s central revolutionary concept, dual power, was originally produced to understand a revolution whose central defining events do not clearly include dual power.
