Rethinking Revolutions: Integrating Origins, Processes, and Outcomes

The myth of revolutions treats them as sudden detonations of popular energy and social change. Dramatic acts on a particular day - the fall of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789 and the midnight storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd) on 24 October 1917 - have come to symbolize the French and Russian revolutions. When most people think of “revolutions,” they think of a rapid series of events, taking a matter of weeks or months, during which old regimes fall, new regimes are constructed, and the population accepts (or is forced to accept) the new order. Studies of revolution have also tended to focus on the “explosive” moments of revolution and to dwell mainly on the conditions that led to such explosions.1 This emphasis has led to the “state-centered” theories of revolution, in which the onset of revolution is viewed mainly as a problem of state collapse, to be explained by structural vulnerabilities in certain kinds of states.2 To the extent that such works examined the processes and outcomes of revolutions, these were treated mainly as contests over state power, growing more extreme and resulting in stronger, more authoritarian rule by regimes that had to become tough to seize and hold state power in the face of numerous domestic and international opponents