Resurrecting the structure of Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938), Stone attempts a comparative analysis of the upheavals in seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century France, and twentieth-century Russia. Yet, whereas Brinton turned to corporeal metaphors, explaining the course of revolution as advancing “like a fever,” Stone foregrounds the structural similarities in the politics of the three affected countries, seeing each developing from “a dialectical relationship between increasingly severe external and internal pressures on governance” (xi).
Calling for “a modified, carefully nuanced structuralism,” Stone looks to amend the work of earlier generations of historians, sociologists, and political scientists who failed to allow sufficient “voluntarism” into their revolutionary models—Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (New York, 1979) particularly drawing his ire (43, 10). Instead of focusing on deterministic origins, Stone delves into the complex political processes that sparked and sustained each revolution. In 494 pages of text that move back and...