{"title":"Left or centre? Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions from the French Revolution to today","authors":"Hugo Drochon","doi":"10.1177/02633957241245897","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":47206,"journal":{"name":"Politics","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Politics","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957241245897","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
期刊介绍:
Politics publishes cutting-edge peer-reviewed analysis in politics and international studies. The ethos of Politics is the dissemination of timely, research-led reflections on the state of the art, the state of the world and the state of disciplinary pedagogy that make significant and original contributions to the disciplines of political and international studies. Politics is pluralist with regards to approaches, theories, methods, and empirical foci. Politics publishes articles from 4000 to 8000 words in length. We welcome 3 types of articles from scholars at all stages of their careers: Accessible presentations of state of the art research; Research-led analyses of contemporary events in politics or international relations; Theoretically informed and evidence-based research on learning and teaching in politics and international studies. We are open to articles providing accounts of where teaching innovation may have produced mixed results, so long as reasons why these results may have been mixed are analysed.