Karl Marx's theory of revolutions was elegant, powerful, and politically relevant because it linked the causes and consequences of revolutions directly to the historical emergence and transcendence of capitalism. Nevertheless, events and scholarship since Marx's time show that there is a need for revised ways of understanding revolutions in relation to the world-historical development of capitalism. In the spirit of furthering theoretical efforts to this end, we propose to do two things in this short paper. First, we shall identify the essential elements of Marx's original theory of revolutions and indicate some important ways in which his ideas fail to square with the actual patterns of revolutions as they have occurred historically. Then we shall suggest some alternative analytic emphases that must in our opinion underlie explanations of major types of historical revolutions and efforts to situate them in relation to the development of capitalism. In doing these things, we shall draw especially upon our own comparative historical investigations of social revolutions in France, Russia and China and of bureaucratic revolutions from above in Japan and Turkey, as well as upon the work of scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Otto Hintze, and Daniel Chirot, who have explored transnational aspects of capitalism as a world system.

Before we launch into critical discussion, let us briefly underline some aspects of Marx's approach to revolutions that are still compelling and which we want to recapitulate in our own approach.

Most historical sociologists know E. P. Thompson as the author of The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. Most have probably read part, but not all, of this book, which they view as a superb work of social history and a welcome departure from a simplistic or economist Marxism. Widely praised for its contribution to the new “history from below,” which in a sense the book itself helped to create, Thompson's masterpiece tells the story of the “blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves” that history usually forgets. Yet, however much they might admire him as a social historian and a compelling literary stylist, most historical sociologists do not see theoretical relevance in Thompson's work. A perceived lack of theoretical generalization and explicit methodology in Thompson's social history has been used to account for his meager impact on sociologists, despite his influence among historians.

Embedded in The Making of the English Working Class, however, is an implicit theory and method that Thompson subsequently has explicated through criticism of, and lively polemics with, other Marxists. The publication in 1978 of four of these long essays in one book, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, facilitates access to Thompson's perspective. The assumptions underlying Thompson's theory and method, however, still make them difficult to assimilate within sociology. Thompson offers a fundamental challenge to the positivism and empiricism that have shaped Anglo-American sociology and that have also influenced a large part of twentieth-century Marxism.