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Horia M Dijmarescu, Anatomies of revolution, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 2, March 2020, Pages 518–520, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa002
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Anatomies of revolution advances a relational, inter-social and historicist view of revolution. George Lawson convincingly rejects a generalizing approach to revolutionary processes, which completely detaches them from the contexts in which they arise and from interactions among social forces across levels of analysis. Instead, Lawson argues that revolutions are ‘formed by the interaction of entities-in-motion—they are confluences of events that are embedded within fields of action that are, in turn, derived from historically specific conditions’ (p. 249). The book adopts an analyticist framework, which moves between abstract ideal-types that highlight causal configurations seen across revolutionary cases and historical narratives, which are sensitive to how the abstract interacts with singular, context-specific events, processes, personalities, institutions and meanings.
Lawson organizes ideal-typed causal configurations into three temporal categories. The first of these configurations—changes in inter-social relations; vulnerabilities of certain kinds of regimes; and systemic political, relative economic and symbolic crises—relate to the emergence of revolutionary situations. The second group of configurations—levels of elite loyalty, especially from the coercive apparatus; and capacity of the opposition to make cohesive revolutionary moments and unite diverse coalitions—explain the trajectories taken at the height of revolutions. The last group of configurations—the production of melded social orders; the generative capacity of inter-social relations; and ongoing contestation of post-revolutionary orders—organize how we think about revolutionary outcomes. This layout corrects for outcome-centrism in the existing literature and allows the book to make expansive theoretical contributions. Future scholars should note the possibility of identifying other causal configurations if they think about time differently. They might even theorize causal relationships among temporal categories themselves, which might otherwise be occluded by such demarcations.
