The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia

This study aims to update a classic of comparative revolutionary analysis, Crane Brinton's 1938 study The Anatomy of Revolution. It invokes the latest research and theoretical writing in history, political science and political sociology to compare and contrast, in their successive phases, the English Revolution of 1640–60, the French Revolution of 1789–99 and the Russian Revolution of 1917–29. This book intends to do what no other comparative analysis of revolutionary change has yet adequately done. It not only progresses beyond Marxian socioeconomic 'class' analysis and early 'revisionist' stresses on short-term, accidental factors involved in revolutionary causation and process; it also finds ways to reconcile 'state-centered' structuralist accounts of the three major European revolutions with postmodernist explanations of those upheavals that play up the centrality of human agency, revolutionary discourse, mentalities, ideology and political culture.

About the Author

Bailey Stone is Professor of European History and International Affairs at the University of Houston. Prior to his time at the University of Houston, he taught at Princeton University and received his PhD from Princeton University and his BA from Bowdoin College. Stone is the author of two books on judicial politics in old regime France: The Parlement of Paris, 1774–1789 and The French Parlements and the Crisis of the Old Regime. He is also the author of two books on the causes and trajectory of the French Revolution: The Genesis of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1994) and Reinterpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2002). His work has been published in many leading journals, including Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Historical Studies and the Journal of Modern History.