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Title: Over-rated
Review: Skocpol's "comparative analysis" leaves out only one minor detail: people. It seems never to occur to her that social revolutions are ultimately the consequence of human agency--that is, people taking history into their own hands. Marx's famous dictum from the opening of the "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean" that "men make their own history, but they do not make it exactly as they choose," is lost on Skocpol. Rather, such phenomena as socio-economic classes, states, political institutions, etc., exist for her as if they were variables in Euclidian geometry. By comparison, Stalin could pass for Kant, if not Hegel, and Althusser might as well be Lukacs. If you care about this subject, look to Barrington Moore, Jr., E. P. Thompson, and more recent studies of each ofthe three revolutions Skocpol compares.
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