The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of England, France and Russia. By Bailey Stone (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015) 529 pp. $34.99

Abstract

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 forth thematically between revolutions, Stone attempts a detailed reconstruction of each revolutionary process through extensive interaction with each revolution’s historiography.Stone begins with the three revolutions’ origins, which he largely attributes to each country’s military “geostrategic decline” and its domestic political discontent, which together helped to spark radical transitions through “warning crises (46).” Revolutionary breakthroughs in each case led to short “honeymoons,” which were soon followed by drastic radicalizations. On the basis of his state-structural emphasis, Stone declares that “no realistic alternative” to terror tactics existed for the revolutionaries, given each authoritarian state’s legacies of coercion (393). In each case, the initial round of terror waned, however, leading to “Thermidorian…crises of revolutionary legitimacy,” which caused the common revolutionary path to diverge onto “very different postrevolutionary trajectories” for each country (395, 474).Whether many historians will follow Stone’s return to a structural approach of revolution remains to be seen. Within his loose framework, Stone largely sublimates his own voice to that of the many historians whose work he discusses. Not incorporating primary-source work, he is unable to address the lacunae in each historiography that limit his arguments’ reach. The work does not directly address the glaring differences in state structure and culture that separate Commonwealth England and Revolutionary France throughout their 150-year divide, nor the often-fundamental differences throughout the 120 years between France and Revolutionary Russia.Stone also limits his model to Europe, seeing the three revolutions as specific outgrowths of “European strategic and security issues” (46). Significantly, his stages of progression cannot be easily applied to China or Cuba, much less the largely nonviolent Velvet Revolutions of 1989—which largely avoided terror despite being the outgrowth of an even more brutal European empire—or the complex and divergent outcomes of the 2011 Arab Spring risings. Across Stone’s earlier cases, given the extent to which French and Russian revolutionaries were aware of (and the Russians often obsessed with) preceding revolutions, cultural imitation may well have played at least as strong a role as structural factors.Even those uncertain of Stone’s theoretical approach, however, will find much of use and interest in his nuanced and far-reaching work. Stone’s reading across all three recent historiographies is unparalleled and likely to remain an unmatched synthesis of the three revolutions for some time.