Left or centre? Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions from the French Revolution to today

Abstract

Forty years on, Theda Skocpol’s account of the French Revolution remains remarkably robust. But how are we to think about political change today? Since Louis XVI walked up to the guillotine, we have been used to thinking of a left/right opposition driving political change, but this was not the only division at the time, nor indeed since: during the Terror, Robespierre was supported by the Montagnards, the deputies who sat on the highest benches of the Assembly, while the opposition was located at the bottom, in the Marais or the Plain. Like during la Terreur, today’s politics, from France to the United States, appears more to oppose a centre to an extreme, and this prism allows us to track Skocpol’s own evolution since 1979, from periphery to centre.

Unlike some of the more illustrious members of this special issue (Kalyvas, 2024; Kreuzer, 2024), I did not read Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions while in grad school over 30 years ago. Indeed, I am not even sure I could read 30 years ago! So for me, reading States and Social Revolutions was not an étape obligatoire in my graduate formation. Reading the book today, however, 40 years after its first publication in 1979, and in its new Canto Classics edition of 2015, makes me regret that it was not, as its analysis of revolution, and the French Revolution in particular – the focal point of my undergraduate dissertation – remains as fresh and robust as when it was first published.

For Skocpol, revolutions are both social and political; this is why the book is titled states and social revolutions. They are not simply (social) revolutions in the classic Marxist sense of the term that see a social class replace another – from bourgeoisie to proletariat (Skocpol, 2015: 7) – but they have a political dimension too because the struggle to control the state is a key element of understanding how the revolution will play out (Wolf, 2024). Although Skocpol retains the term ‘social revolutions’, true revolutions, according to her, contain two elements: rapid transformation of social structures, often linked to class-based revolts from below (social revolution), and a change of state structures and the political regime (political revolution). They are different, then, to simple rebellions, like peasant rebellions, that do not affect social-structural change, or political revolutions that might change state structures but not social ones (Skocpol, 2015: 4–5). The real revolutions – those that had both social and political transformations – are the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions (Skocpol, 2015: 40–42).

Inspired by her mentor Barrington Moore’s work (Skocpol, 2015: xv, 6), Skocpol develops a post-Marxist account of revolutions, that grounds revolutions in the form of social-structural change and class conflict but that integrates into that conception a view of (relative) state autonomy, notably through engaging with the famous 1960s–1970s Miliband-Poulantzas debate on whether the state is simply the ‘executive arm’ of the bourgeoisie, from which it took direct orders, perhaps even staffed by its members, or whether it retained a degree of autonomy, even if it served the interests of capitalism, being the dominant mode of production, as a whole, but not its individual parts (i.e. favouring one sector over another (Skocpol, 2015: 24–27)). Skocpol (2015: 29) grants that ‘state organisations are at least potentially autonomous from direct dominant-class control’, concluding that the state is ‘Janus-faced, with an intrinsically dual anchorage in class-divided socioeconomic structures and an international system of states’ (Skocpol, 2015: 32). She would explore the theme of ‘state autonomy’ further in her subsequent edited volume with Peter Evans et al. (1985), Bringing the State Back In.

This is important because, as Skocpol (2015: 164) subsequently explains in States and Social Revolutions, we must understand revolutionary leaders as ‘actors struggling to assert and make good their claims to state sovereignty’, thereby integrating a degree of agency into an otherwise relatively structural account: a point often misunderstood (Goodwin, 1996: 294). And moving away from the view of ideologies as simply a form of ‘false consciousness’, if leaders are actors in the revolutionary moment – they are ‘doing’ something (Skocpol, 2015: 165) – then we need to take their ‘ideology’, in the sense of the vision of society they are trying to achieve, seriously, even if what they often ended up achieving, because of the structures and circumstances they find themselves in, is the opposite of what they originally intended. This is because there are always elements of the old regime that ‘carry over’ into the new, as Skocpol puts it (Skocpol, 2015: 168–171).

The true revolutions, therefore, are the French, Russian and Chinese ones. This does not include, as might have been supposed, the English ‘Glorious’ Revolution: for Skocpol (2015: xiii) the English Revolution is closer to a political revolution, with a landed aristocracy revolting against an absolute power it managed to wrest a degree of power from, and which ultimately led to a liberal-parliamentary regime. Instead, the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions all contained four elements that link them together, and indeed separate out the French from the English one that might otherwise have been connected. These include: (1) an absolutist power that is trying to modernise itself but is behind in the game of international commercial competition (France’s agriculture, for instance, was behind England’s (Skocpol, 2015: 55)). (2) A powerful – and rising – landed upper class that came into conflict with the absolutist state and had a vision of how to reform it. (3) Peasant revolts: this was sorely lacking in the English case, and in truth, a degree of international conflict played a role in the development of these revolutions (Skocpol, 2015: 40) also makes the interesting point that all three countries had never been colonised). (4) The revolutions, which took a life of their own once started – revolutionaries became revolutionaries (Skocpol, 2015: 17) – in the end consolidated state power, a Tocquevillian point, instead of decentralising it as it had been in the English case, with an ‘autocratic and protobureaucratic’ monarchy given way to ‘bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states’ (Skocpol, 2015: 40–42, 161). ‘The new state organisations’, writes Skocpol (2015: 161), ‘were more centralised and rationalised than those of the Old Regime’. In reality, what the revolutionaries were at first looking for, at least in the French case, was a form of constitutional monarchy like in England (Skocpol, 2015: 65), but when they beheaded the King, that is when a social revolution became a political one too (Kalyvas, 2024).

This incredibly rich theory retains all of its analytical purchase, and through exploring the infamous night of the 4 August, when feudalism was formerly abolished during the French Revolution – a key moment Skocpol (2015: 118, 184) examines at length – this short reflection will explore how to think about the left and centre not just in Skocpol’s work, but what it might mean for politics today.

The night of the 4 August

Although Skocpol (2015: 5) qualified her approach in States and Social Revolutions as that of ‘comparative historical analysis’ (Kreuzer, 2024), in terms of the French Revolution her reading of the event might be termed a ‘post-revisionist’ one in the context of the secondary literature: it is ‘revisionist’ in the sense that it gives the individual actors agency within the revolutionary process itself – in particular placing an important emphasis on the role of ideologies, much like François Furet had done (Skocpol, 2015: 168–171) – but it also puts a strong accent on the economic and social preconditions of the revolution (Skocpol, 2015: 13–14). These preconditions, however, are not read through the classic Marxist lens of seeing the revolution as the rise of the bourgeoisie overthrowing the old feudal aristocratic class. Instead, Skocpol (2015: 66) underlines not only how many aristocrats found themselves within the ‘bourgeois’ Third Estate, writing that ‘in fact, some of the key leaders of the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie/Third Estate’ were aristocrats’, but that the aristocracy was also quite divided within itself, between the richer elements who had moved to cities and towns and had adopted the manners of those who live in town (bourgeois originally meaning those who live in the bourg, i.e. the town), and those, often impoverished, who continued to live in the countryside (the ‘hobereau’):

‘Noble fortunes varied enormously’, Skocpol writes,

The poorer nobles were excluded from Parisian high society and comfortable stylist living in the provincial cities, and they had great difficulty in purchasing the most desirable offices in the army or civil administration. On the other hand, commoners who gained great wealth through overseas commerce or royal finance, or who advanced by purchasing successive state offices, could readily gain access both to noble status and privileges, and to high society. In fact, many of the most prominent and prosperous noble families of the eighteenth century seem to have been ennobled only three or four generations previously (Skocpol, 2015: 57).

The ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ included a ‘disproportionate number of nobles who were acclimated by birth and/or regular residence to urban life and culture’ (Skocpol, 2015: 66).

The mixed bourgeois and aristocratic class – the dominant landed class identified in (2) above – shared an economic interest: they detained ‘proprietor wealth’ (Skocpol, 2015: 59). Quoting Taylor’s work, Skocpol (2015) explains: ‘there was, between most of the nobility and the proprietary sector of the middle classes, a continuity of investment forms that made them, economically, a single group. In the relations of production they played a common role’. As Skocpol (2015: 62, 165, 176) points out, the main profession listed by the French deputies of the various assemblies was ‘lawyer’. But these were, in Euguène Hua’s memorable turn of phrase, ‘des avocats pour rire’ (Bell, 1994: 31). They were, if not having a laugh, not really practising lawyers; rather the qualification gave social standing – of most importance during the ancien régime – while most in truth spent their times administering their deeds and living off their rents: ‘wealth and office holding, not simply estate membership, were the keys to success in ancient régime France’ (Skocpol, 2015: 57).

The ‘well-to-do’ members of the Third Estate based their fortunes upon a mixture of ‘rentes, venal offices, real estate, and seigneurial rights’ (Skocpol, 2015: 59). And although ‘proprietor wealth’ was not exactly the type of industrial capitalism of large city factories that dominates the Marxist imagination – it was not ‘entrepreneurial’ in the Marxist sense of a ‘class that appropriates surplus through wage labour and market rents and reinvests to expand capitalist relations of production and industrialisation’ – nevertheless it still ‘appropriated surplus directly and indirectly primarily from peasant agriculture’ (Skocpol, 2015: 56). As such it was not capitalist in the Marxist sense of wage-exploitation, yet it still had a certain capitalist logic to it, focused instead of agricultural surplus. And it had a commercial aspect to it too: it was a ‘commercial, but noncapitalist, agrarian-imperial power’ (Skocpol, 2015: 6). Finally, this ‘unified dominant class’ shared a political interest, in desiring a ‘less absolutist, more representative national government’, along – at first – English liberal-parliamentary lines (Skocpol, 2015: 56, 65).

So what happened on the 4 August 1789? The date is key because it brought to a head the elements Skocpol thought essential for a revolution to arise, namely that ‘state organisations, the military and the bureaucracy, had to collapse in conflict with upper classes before there were openings for class revolts from below’, as she would put it in a later interview about her work (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 4). On the one hand the French bureaucracy and military had reached a ‘crisis’ following the American War of Independence, which had left the French state in a state of bankruptcy – the reason the Estates General were called in the first place, to allow the King to raise new taxes – while on the other hand, there were popular peasant uprisings from below.

Skocpol’s emphasis on the agrarian aspect of the revolution is distinctive (Goodwin, 1996: 294) and may reflect her own background: she was from Michigan farmer’s stock on both her grandparents’ side (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 2). Indeed, during her undergraduate at Michigan in the 1960s, where she was quite taken by C. Wright Mills – who appears in the conclusion to States and Social Revolutions (Skocpol, 2015: 288) – Skocpol was part of a Methodist student delegation that went to teach at Rust College, an all-black college in Mississippi. It was a ‘life-changing’ experience for her, not least because she met her husband, but also because she was teaching students who were the ‘first people in their often sharecropper families to go to college’, and also because she experienced ‘firsthand what segregation and racial oppression in the pre-Civil Rights South were like’, which led to violent demonstrations (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 2–3).

Skocpol (2015: 118, 122) is thus quick to underline that the great night of ‘renunciation’ that occurred on the 4 August was precipitated by the spreading agrarian revolt – her point (3) above – against the seigneurial system, spurred on by the ‘Great Fear’ that ‘“brigands” would attack the ripening grain crop’, meaning there would be food shortages. Faced with mounting attacks against their chateaux, the ‘liberal nobles and Third Estate representatives assembled at Versailles one by one renounced their ‘seigneurial dues, the venality of judicial offices, tax immunities, hunting rights, court pensions, seigneurial justice’ (Skocpol, 2015: 118). They abolished ‘feudalism’, and it is this, Skocpol (2015) explains, that gives the French Revolution the ‘right to be labelled a social revolution – one that went beyond political changes to transform society’, through replacing one economic system with another.

Yet, as we have seen, the French economy had already started to transition towards a form of commercial, agrarian proto-capitalist economy. So what exactly were the deputies doing on the night? Instead of being ‘abolished’, seigneurial rights were being made ‘commutable through monetary payments’ (Skocpol, 2015: 184). Indeed, ‘compensation was voted for economically significant losses’ (Skocpol, 2015). What was happening was that the deputies were transforming what was left of the feudal system into hard bourgeois cash. A lot of ‘medieval rubbish’ was being cleared, as Skocpol (2015: 179) writes. In doing so, they laid the foundations for the capitalist system to come:

The French Revolution was ‘bourgeois’ only in the specific sense that it consolidated and simplified the complex variety of prerevolutionary property rights into the single individualistic and exclusive form of modern private property. And it was ‘capitalist’ only in the specific sense that it cleared away all manner of corporate and provincial barriers to the expansion of a competitive, national market economy in France.

In short, it created a new bourgeois and capitalist centre-ground.

Left or centre? ¹

In States and Social Revolutions Skocpol (2015: 193) has a reflection about what centre-ground politics might have been during the French Revolution, describing the Directory after the fall of Robespierre as a ‘search for stability’. This was developed further with the advent of Napoleon, who drew from Left and Right to establish his regime:

Wielding instead the symbols, rituals, and propaganda of a highly generalised French nationalism, Bonaparte decorated his essentially authoritarian-bureaucratic regime with a hodgepodge of symbolic concessions to the inherited factions: plebiscitary and patriotic ritual for the radicals; consultative councils with restricted electoral bases for the liberals; and a Concordat with the Catholic Church for conservatives (Skocpol, 2015: 195).

Moreover, Skocpol (2015: 166) has an interesting interplay between centre and periphery when discussing the different revolutionary leaders, explaining that many were ‘marginal’ because they tended to come from ‘lesser, provincial urban centres and/or from the lower levels of the former royal administration’. Discussing the radical, centralising, Jacobin ‘Montagnards’ and the more moderate and decentralising Girondins she writes:

The Montagnards tended to come from the administrative centres that had formed the base of the absolutist monarchy, whereas the Girondins were heavily recruited from commercial port cities, that had historically existed in some dissociations from, and tension with, the monarchical state (Skocpol, 2015: 167).

The left/right divide was famously born during the French Revolution. We can even date it quite precisely, according to the French historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet (1997: 2535), to 8 May 1789. Sent to their respective chambers after the opening of the Estates General to discuss the King’s taxes, all three Estates (clergy, nobles, commoners) instead debated whether voting should be done by Estate or by head: the Third Estate had as many deputies as the other two orders combined, and voting by head had been one of the central demands of the ‘cahiers de doléances’.

To help structure their debate, the Count of Mirabeau, himself a nobleman but elected to the Third Estate, suggested that they should organise themselves along Westminster lines, with the benches of government facing those of the opposition. Although that proposal did not go very far, the idea of addressing the President of the session, akin to the ‘Speaker of the House’, was accepted, although this was done from the rostrum, a key invention (Manow, 2010). Indeed, the English influence was strong, with the deputies of the Third Estate rebaptising their chambers, the Communes, in honour of the British Commons. So when on 8 May, 3 days after the opening of the Estates General, the deputies of the Third Estate were invited to arbitrate between competing proposals (from Mirabeau and Malouet) on how to bring the three orders together, they were asked to vote by filing either to the right or to the left of the President of the session, much like at Westminster. But with no government and opposition benches to speak of, the deputies sat back down either to the right or the left of the President, like they had voted. The left/right division of politics was born.

It would be a mistake, however, to think it was the main opposition at the time, or indeed the dominant one: for Gauchet (1997: 2535), the decisive force throughout the Revolution was, in fact, the centre, from supporting the execution of the King, to voting in favour of the infamous Comity of Public Safety that instigated the Terror, to finally deposing Robespierre. ‘The firm establishment of this couple involves a ménage à trois’, Gauchet writes, ‘there is a left and a right, because there is a centre’. There is a ‘centrist reflex’: that the first element is the centre, to which the left and the right react (Gauchet, 1997: 2538).

Perhaps the most interesting opposition during the French Revolution was not the one that opposed the Montagnards and the Girondins, but that which opposed ‘la montagne’ to ‘la plaine’ or ‘le marais’. The Mountain was composed of radical Jacobin deputies – the Montagnards – who sat across the highest benches of the Assembly, to be closest to the galleries and thus the ‘people’ – the first populist moment in history – whereas the Plain sat on the lower benches, closer to the tribune, and were considered to be the most numerous grouping. The Mountain was Robespierre’s strongest support during the Reign of Terror, whereas the Plain was, in short, the centre (Higonnet, 1985: 513–544).

If the Girondins took their name from the fact that many of their deputies came from the Bordeaux area, this geographical aspect is also important for the distinction between the Mountain and the Plain, who took their names from Parisian topography. The Montagnards were drawn from the clerical milieu of the hill-top Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, on the Left Bank, and used to meet in the Cordeliers Convent, whereas the deputies from the Plain and the Marais – the Maraisards – came from the financial milieus of the Right Bank, from the Marais as it is still known today – giving rise to their derogatory nickname the ‘crapauds’ (the toads) – to the flat plains between Place Vendôme and the Palais-Royal, where the stock market was located, and their usual meeting place was the Feuillant Monastery (Maitrier, 1997: 319–351).

What is most noteworthy of the Mountain is that they composed the majority of the Committee of Public Safety during la Terreur, which in effect ruled France from 1793 to 1794. Having voted in the Committee of Public Safety, the centre-ground, understood as the government, had in effect moved from the bottom to the top of the assembly: it had moved to the extremes. The extremes, in this configuration, had become the new centre: they were the government. After the fall of Robespierre and the onset of the Thermidorian reaction of 1794–1795, many of the Montagnards were either executed or purged from the Convention. But unlike the Jacobin left that was left disserted (no pun intended), the Mountain remained in a much-reduced form known as la crête (the ‘crest’) (Brunel, 1997: 385–404). The Plane, needless to say, continued and regained its power as the government of the time.

This moment shows us that sometimes it is not left/right that is the main opposition driving political change, but instead a form of centre/extremes, where even the extremes can become the centre-ground of politics or government. So instead of a left/right horizontal axis, what we have here is more akin to a top/bottom – or indeed bottom/up – vertical axis, with the centre in the middle: it is important to remember that during the French Revolution the Plane was not simply battling the radical Jacobins within Parliament itself, but was also trying to put out uprisings throughout the country – think of the Vendée – and indeed external enemies at its borders (Britain, Austria, Prussia) (Skocpol, 2015: 188). Paris, then, the top – which in this instance brough together both the Mountain and the Plane – was opposed to the countryside (bottom), and foreign powers (out): there is always more than one extreme.

Can the centre hold?

Today’s France sees the return of a centre/extreme opposition at the national level, opposing Emmanuel Macron to Marine Le Pen. Both reject the traditional left/right divide, oscillating between saying they are ‘neither left nor right’, both at the same time, or going beyond it. Macron’s most famous line is ‘en même temps’, offering positions that are left and ‘at the same’ time on the right, while claiming the old French left/right divide between the Socialists and Republicans was passé, and a new synthesis was needed. Marine Le Pen has coined the neologism, borrowed from her father, ‘UMPS’, sending back-to-back the older right-wing UMP party (Jacque Chirac’s Union pour un movement populaire) and the Socialists (Parti socialiste), yet claiming she is also ‘neither left nor right’ (Lorimer, 2019).

From a sociological point of view, both can claim to have voters on the left and on the right. Macron garnered the ‘centrist’ voters from the centre-left through to the centre-right, from the ashes of the old socialist and conservative parties, who have yet to fully recover. Le Pen had for her the traditional far-right who had voted for her father, namely the anti-tax, anti-elite, anti-Parisian, anti-Parliament, antisemitic and anti-immigrant small southern Catholic shop-keepers who had emerged during the short-lived Poujadist movement of the 1950s, when Le Pen senior first cut his political teeth, and the ‘pieds noirs’, the white European settlers who had been forced out of Algeria during the war of independence (Chapman, 2018: 75–108).

But since taking over the party from her father and ‘de-demonising’ it, formally expelling him from the party in 2015 over his Holocaust denial and expunging skinheads and any other types of extreme groups from party rallies, she has been able to rally the old communist vote in the north, where she first got her political break, serving in the regional council in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the old mining region that has suffered so much from deindustrialisation. There, she saw the opportunity to expand the FN (Front national, since re-baptised the Rassemblement national) vote: while immigration remained the main platform in the south, in the north, she would marry it with economic nationalism. This has been highly successful, and the RN now records over 30 per cent of the working-class vote, much to the detriment of the Socialist Party (Judis, 2016: 131–153).

Instead of left v right, both candidates presented new political cleavages. For Macron, it is progressives v conservatives; for Le Pen, it is patriots v globalists. Previously, candidates mutually recognised each other as being on the left or on the right, but here, in a complicated language game reminiscent of Nietzsche’s (2017) revaluation of ‘good and bad’ into ‘good and evil’, each side refused the pejorative connotations the other attempts to attribute to them. So Macron refuses the ‘ultra-liberal’ globalist tag Le Pen tries to pin him with, presenting himself instead as the progressive, pro-European candidate, and Le Pen rejects the ‘reactionary’ label Macron tries to ascribe to her, claiming instead she is the only candidate who wants to truly ‘conserve’ the French values of secularism and social welfare in the face of international finance and migration.

What is noteworthy here is that both candidates claim to be defending the middle ground against an extreme: Macron focused on the conventional European centre ground against the far-right nationalist extreme, while Le Pen portrays herself as fighting for the French middle ground against the perceived extremes of the EU. (Note that the other ‘extreme’ at play during the election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France insoumise, finished third in the latest French Presidential election of 2022, was within a whisker – less than five thousand votes – from finishing second).

Coming from their respective vantage points, both of these positions seem plausible. As Dominic Cummings, the director of the Vote Leave campaign during the EU referendum, pointed out in an influential – and extremely long – blog post, subsequently reprinted in The Spectator, explaining how the Brexiteers won, outside the Westminster bubble many policies that offer themselves as mainstream can be perceived as extreme. Free movement of labour even for criminals: extreme. The bailout of banks: extreme. Financial deregulation: extreme (Cummings, 2017). If Le Pen’s policies can be described as extreme, so can the centre’s (Ali, 2015).

The same might be said of Brexit, which started off as a marginal position in UK politics, supported by figures like Nigel Farage, who was never a UK MP – ironically owing his political position to the EU as an MEP – or, again, the Conservative MP Mark François (why is it that leading Brexiteers have French surnames?) to cries of ‘saboteurs’ directed to anyone who opposed their form of Hard Brexit. Here, the extreme has become the new centre-ground of UK politics.

Conclusion

Why is this important? The original discussion upon which this special issue is based took place in February 2020, when Trump was still in power (Skocpol, 2024). Here again it seemed like an extreme – Trump – had captured the centre of US politics – and the state –, to cries of ‘drain the swamp’. The question for Skocpol is then whether the type of social revolution she described over 40 years ago – ones that Skocpol, quoting Crane Brinton, describes as ‘rare’ – which combined not simply a political revolution of a change of ruling class but also a deeper socioeconomic change, are not only possible but desirable today? Can Trump’s rise be seen through the lenses of social revolution, with a strong state trying to modernise in the face of rising competition from China; a changing socioeconomic structure based on social media such as Twitter and Facebook leading to a rising and new dominant class; popular uprisings like January 6; political leaders who become more radicalised – the growing polarisation of US politics – ultimately leading to an even stronger state?

It is worth remembering that if the French Revolutionaries all started with a unified opposition to the absolutist state, over the course of the Revolution itself divisions appeared within the visions of what should take its place, as we saw with the Girondins and the Montagnards (Skocpol, 2015: 182). With Trump, we see an outside elite – Trump is, after all, a member of the economic 1% and a powerful media figure from his time at the Apprentice – challenging the ‘DC Establishment’ in league with reactive forces in the provinces who have a ‘great fear’ of being replaced.

Would Skocpol welcome such a revolution? States and Social Revolutions was an insurgent’s book, frustrated with the fact that the US had not experienced a social revolution à la française (Dunn, 1982). This is why the American Revolution is notably absent from her work, described simply as the ‘war of independence’ that precipitated the French Revolution (Skocpol, 2015: 63). As a student at Michigan Skocpol (2007: 654) was actively involved with the antiwar movement – although not the more violent groups – and the Civil Rights Movement (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 2), and the political point of her book was that the state needed to be captured to effect political change: ‘in future revolutions, as in those of the past, the realm of the state is likely to be central’ (Skocpol, 2015: 293). That was her message to her fellow companions. Only through the control of ‘coercive organisations’ can historical progress occur, and Marx’s vision, as Skocpol (2015: 293) writes in the last lines of her book, of ‘“an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” and in which the state is transformed “from an organ dominating society into one completely subordinate to it”’ be brought about.

What would Skocpol say today? One would imagine she would want to defend the institutions of liberal democracy, and she is known to have studied – and been sympathetic to – anti-Trump ‘resistance’ groups (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 11). So ‘welcome’ would certainly not be the appropriate term. Instead, she would have wanted to defend the centre ground of US politics, showing an interest in Michael Bloomberg’s original presidential bid (Bloomberg quickly dropped out of the Democratic Primary and endorsed Biden). Perhaps this maps onto Skocpol’s own career, notably following her storied return to Harvard – the centre-ground of US academia – in the 1980s, having originally been denied tenure there on gender grounds (Skocpol and Schickler, 2019: 13). In fact, Skocpol is known to be an avid fan of the New England Patriots (Walsh, 2019) – how centrist is that?!

Forty years after its publication, States and Social Revolutions remains as fresh and pertinent as when it was first published, helping us both think about the French Revolution and about politics today. If there is one thing we can say for certain, it is that in 2059 – in 40 years’ time – it will remain as fresh and pertinent as it did when it was first published in 1979.