Cambridge University Press advertises George Lawson’s new book as “a novel account of how revolutions begin, unfold and end.” That is a major claim, but it is not a wholly unwarranted one. This book is destined to be required reading for students of revolution and contentious politics and those who work in the tradition that Lawson describes as “a global historical sociology of revolutionary change” (p. 10). If the book is not quite all that, it comes pretty close. It is a major contribution to “the fourth generation of revolutionary scholarship” and may even lay the groundwork for a “fifth” one, if other scholars have the courage to take up his challenge.

Lawson works in the tradition of the late Charles Tilly, adopting the Tillian conceit that revolutions are more like “traffic jams” than “solar eclipses” (p. 58). Starting from particular revolutionary episodes, he orders these episodes into clusters of social action that yield causal configurations that reoccur across time and place” (p. 9), in contrast to approaches that search for underlying similarities in revolutionary logics. Lawson calls his approach the search for “configurational causation,” based on “a concern for the ways in which events and sequences are ordered into causal complexes” (p. 59).

Four steps underpin his claim: identifying “events” (singular historical happenings); identifying “sequences” (how events are linked to other events); “ordering” them (showing how event complexes are given meaning and, thereby, stability and coherence); and constructing “configurations” (hazarding causal explanations of episodes generated by the logical ordering of events and their application to other cases). What results, if Lawson is right, are “robust, enduring interactions between sequences of event-complexes that reoccur across diverse revolutionary episodes” (pp. 59–60).

Lawson’s approach is harder to carry out than the more common claim that revolutions are a particular class of phenomenon, guided by similar attributes that recur across time and space. Revolutions, he argues, are a set of “entities in motion” (p. 10). This takes him to a “relational approach”—highlighting the causal mechanisms that explain why certain sequences of events occur and reoccur. If this sounds Tillian, it is no accident (for example, see Tilly’s Stories, Identities and Political Change, 2002), but it is also similar to “meso-level history,” which recognizes the specificity of particular historical conjunctures while noting the propensity of causal mechanisms to recur in diverse historical settings (Daniel Little, Causation in Meso-History, 2001).

True to this roadmap, Lawson lays out a demanding agenda: first, examining the sequences that revolutions take; second, assembling them into analytical narratives; third, abstracting from these narratives the causal configurations through which revolutions proceed—what Tilly called “superior stories” (“The Trouble with Stories,” in The Worlds of Higher Education, 1999); and fourth, assessing how these configurations can be used to explain revolutions in multiple settings. Like Tilly’s European Revolutions (1993), this makes Anatomies of Revolution a hard read, but it is well worth the trouble.

In Chapter 1, Lawson uses the Haitian revolution to introduce a broad set of questions concerning the conjunction between domestic crises and international turbulence in revolutionary emergence and dynamics, the intricacies of revolutionary events themselves, the nuances in revolutionary struggles, and their contradictory outcomes, including the interplay between the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution. The Haitian case also shows that even revolutions that have not been remembered as “great” go through a similar set of variables and processes as the “great” ones. He completes the chapter by raising an even broader set of questions circulating around one broad query: Do revolutions need revolutionaries?

Chapter 2 is a synthesis of the four generations of revolutionary theory, addressed more to adepts of that tradition than to the general reader. But general readers should not pass it by, in part because of Lawson’s mastery of that tradition, and in part because his approach promises to expand into a fifth one with firmer links to the broader tradition of contentious politics. He starts from the simple premise that events that take place in one location are both affected by and affect events elsewhere (p. 69). No surprise here: after all, Skocpol’s theory was also heavily international. But Lawson goes beyond the “fourth generation” by insisting on “the ways in which relations between people, networks, and states drive revolutionary dynamics” (p. 70). “Revolutions,” he insists, “are inter-social all the way down” (p. 71).

Chapter 3 adopts the traditional trilogy of revolutionary dynamics—revolutionary situations, trajectories, and outcomes—in a largely descriptive mode. This is not to dismiss the effort; after all, good description is always superior to bad theory. Lawson mobilizes a formidable battery of secondary material to show both the variations and the similarities in revolutionary dynamics through these three phases. Within each one, he weaves his favorite trope of “inter-social relations,” sometimes obviously— as when he shows how revolutionaries borrow from one another, “sharing ideas, slogans, and tactics across borders” (pp. 84–85)—and sometimes less so, as when he argues that some regimes—particularly sultanistic and neopatrimonial ones—are more vulnerable to changing transnational configurations than others.

It is in Part II, where Lawson draws a series of ambitious paired comparisons, that he hits his stride; he compares revolutionary situations in seventeenth-century England and late twentieth-century Chile; examines revolutionary trajectories in mid-twentieth-century Cuba and apartheid-era South Africa; and looks at revolutionary outcomes in Iran in the 1970s and Ukraine in the early twenty-first century. These may seem like unlikely pairings to readers accustomed to the logic of most similar cases, but not if we recall Lawson’s method: not to trace similar outcomes to similar combinations of causal variables, but to identify commonalities between distinct revolutionary processes—particularly when he turns to his old friend, inter-social dynamics.

The cases in Part II point to two key commonalities for successful revolutions: low levels of elite solidarity, especially in the state’s coercive apparatus, and the capacity of oppositions to generate a cohesive revolutionary coalition. Although the first remains a robust constant, the second has changed markedly with the decline of “adhesive revolutionary ideologies” that can act as binding agents for a new social order. Lawson sees contemporary revolutionary movements as diffused rather than centralized in character.

Part III takes on the issue of contemporary revolutionary movements and the futures of revolution. In the first of two chapters, Lawson highlights the “negotiated” revolutions that produced fundamental changes in East-Central Europe and gestures more tentatively toward the “negotiated” character of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Though no expert on the Middle East, I found this expansion of the scope conditions for the “negotiated” model to those more recent events a bridge too far, particularly because they created opportunities for the anything-but-negotiated character of brutal repressions and militant revolutionary Islamism.

In his final chapter, Lawson extends his pluralistic focus even further to such groups as Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, DiEm25, and even to “post-modern work.” All of these movements, with some foreshortening, he sees as unified by “moral outrage.” And in a refreshing departure from much contemporary armchair theorizing, he thinks that recent advances in information and communication technologies “do little to disturb existing revolutionary trajectories” (p. 201).

Lawson’s evocation of such contemporary movements as Occupy and Syriza as part of the revolutionary tradition results from his general premise that revolutions are not “A Single Thing.” That premise helped him understand a wide variety of revolutionary episodes without descending into pure case-by-case description. But extending this logic to such phenomena as Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, postmodernism, and even contemporary populism reveals the peril of pluralism: if such a broad range of movements, parties, semi-movements, and cultural phenomena are all revolutionary, then the boundaries of the concept may disappear into the ether.

Lawson is aware of this danger when he points out, first, that these phenomena often lack a clear sense of the collective and, second, that their results are disappointing (pp. 232–33). But leaving aside the risks of excessive theoretical spread, Lawson’s inter-social, historicist, and relational approach to revolutions promises to launch a new family of revolutionary theory, one that may potentially merge with and contribute to the general field of contentious politics.