Can anyone summarise for me Theda Skocpol's ideas in her book: 'States and Social Revolutions' please?

Answer 1

Found one at http://adambrown.info/p/summaries/Skocpol:_States_and_social_revolutions but don't know if it is any good (I have included the first few paragraphs as a taster).

Chapter 1 mainly outlines her structural perspective. She argues that voluntaristic theories miss the point--by focusing on how purposive action brings about revolutions, such theories fail to perceive the structural forces that create a revolutionary situation.
Theory

A "social movement" is both a change in state institutions and a change in social structures. See pages 280-1 for a very quick summary on her four key structural variables. In brief: She's got two stages (which correspond to parts I and II of the book).

In Part I, two variables cause a revolutionary situation. These two variables are jointly sufficient for a "social revolution" (which has a specific meaning, laid out in intro) to occur. The key word is "sufficient": this is a deterministic theory. X1: a "crisis of state," often provoked by international factors, such as increasing economic or security competition from abroad. It is a crisis, not merely a challenge, because this is a challenge that the state cannot meet, given its institutional constraint. As a result, elites (and the army) become divided over what to do and loyalty to the regime weakens. A revolution is about to occur. X2: Patterns of class dominance determine which group will rise up (once X1 has created the "revolutionary situation"). Y, then, is a social revolution and who leads it.

Answer 2

Theda Skocpol's first notable contribution was the publication of States and Social Revolutions1 in 1979. The book challenged two competing schools of thought to "think outside the box" and begin to take seriously each other's intellectual claims. These competing schools were behavioralism, which tended to focus on individual actions and overlooked the impact of institutions on political life, and Marxism, which gained ascendency in the 1970s, but was dominated by passionate scholars whose intellectual seriousness was often in doubt. Arguing that behavioralists needed to "bring the state back" into their analyses, Skocpol employed the Marxist idea of "state autonomy" to show how the states in France and China formulated their own interests and acted in pursuit of them. Hard core behavioralists remained skeptical, arguing that people, not institutions are capable of action, but more sophisticated scholars began to recognize the important role states play in structuring political life. The idea of state autonomy was also challenging to the Marxists of the day who tended to adhere to the crude idea that the state is merely the instrument of oppression serving the interests of the ruling class. Marx himself had moved beyond this crude formulation in his later writings, notably the Eighteenth Brumaire,2 and it took Skocpol to remind her contemporaries that what the state does must be the subject of empirical inquiry, not theoretical assumption.