John Foran's book draws faithfully from the rich literature on revolutions from the 1970s and beyond and extends this work in useful ways. It presents a well-crafted synthetic argument that finds a nice balance between international and domestic sources of revolution and between structural constraints and political agency. It also examines thoughtfully an extraordinary number of cases in a relatively compact form. The author develops his argument using the tools of Boolean algebra to explain 10 cases of revolutionary success and 29 additional cases of reversed revolutions, unsuccessful attempts, political revolutions that did not lead to social transformations, and revolutionary movements that never emerged despite conditions that might have been expected to generate such movements.
Foran argues that five factors must be present to ensure success. Such revolutions take place in countries experiencing the social inequities of dependent development. They arise in opposition to exclusionary personalist dictatorships and colonial states, or take advantage of the opportunities provided by open democratic polities. They depend on political cultures of opposition that present compelling messages that appeal to broad multiclass, multiethnic, and multigender coalitions. Finally, revolutions take place in situations where economic downturns and a world systemic opening provide a favorable conjuncture within which revolutionary movements can achieve success. He reaches this conclusion by demonstrating that all five factors were present in all successful cases of social revolution and that at least one of these factors was absent in each of the 29 cases that did not end in sustained social revolutions.
Foran's empirical results demonstrate that “world systemic openings” provide the most powerful explanation for why some revolutions succeed and others fail (pp. 248–49). All 10 successful revolutions occurred in a favorable world context. When the United States or other international actors used their power to attack revolutionary movements, they either failed to take power or were overthrown. No other factor plays as clear a role in explaining these outcomes. While many scholars have argued that a permissive international geopolitical context is important for revolutionary success, Taking Power demonstrates this empirically more clearly than other work on this subject.
This important geopolitical argument could be more fully developed. Foran suggests that such world systemic openings are rare, but never explains in detail why great powers like the United States generally oppose revolutions. He also does not provide a systematic argument for why such windows of opportunity do occasionally open, other than to suggest that revolutions have occurred “when powers that would oppose revolution have been distracted, confused, or ineffective in preventing them” (p. 268). If encouraging the United States to allow for revolutionary transformations is crucial for their success, we need a more well-developed theory of American foreign policy that will help us understand under what conditions the United States will allow revolutionary movements to succeed.
Foran makes another important contribution in arguing that revolutionary movements need not rely on violent and antidemocratic means to achieve revolutionary success. He points to the Chilean and Jamaican cases, where elected governments were able to initiate revolutionary projects in their nations without repression or authoritarianism. From these experiences, the author claims that truly open democratic regimes can be as conducive to revolutionary change as personalist dictatorships or colonial states, though for very different reasons.
Despite this optimism, the author's analysis also illuminates the extraordinary difficulties involved in pushing for social revolution using nonviolent, democratic means. He codes 17 cases of successful social revolutions, seven of which were overturned within a decade. All 10 of the ongoing successes came to power through revolutionary violence and stayed in power by creating a single-party regime (pp. 203–4). Six of the seven cases of reversal tried to follow a democratic path, yet found themselves “vulnerable to non-democratic opponents, internal and external” (p. 269).
While Foran focuses on nondemocratic opponents of revolutionary elected governments, democratic opponents and processes may also pose a significant barrier to success. For example, the Manley government in Jamaica, a case Foran touches on briefly, was overturned at the ballot box. More broadly, the democratic regimes that are open enough to allow for an electoral triumph by the Left could also possess institutional characteristics that make it easier for opponents to thwart the revolutionary project from within the democratic process. Whether this is true is difficult to discern, given that the author does not provide a clear definitional distinction between fully open democratic regimes and limited polyarchies, other than through the observation that some democracies have allowed elected leftist governments to take office while others have not.
Furthermore, the second most important factor for explaining why some revolutions succeed and others fail, according to Foran, is that the political cultures of opposition that make it possible to build a successful revolutionary coalition are difficult to sustain once revolutionaries achieve power. The importance of this factor is somewhat more difficult to assess than that of the world systemic context because he tends to treat the strength and coherence of revolutionary coalitions as a continuous variable rather than as a dichotomous variable, which departs from a purely Boolean approach. Nevertheless, an open democratic political process provides numerous opportunities for independent political action and thus probably exacerbates the divisions in revolutionary coalitions that are an important source of failure for revolutionary projects.
Despite these potential barriers to democratic social revolutions, Foran points to the contemporary Zapatista movement in Mexico as an example of how revolutionary movements can mobilize democratic civil society both nationally and internationally in an attempt to accomplish revolutionary goals. While he realizes that it is difficult to predict whether the Zapatista model will succeed in forging revolutionary change through democratic means, he argues persuasively for the need to “speculate as fully as we can about its possibilities” (p. 278). His effort to understand the relationship among revolutionary violence, democracy, and social revolutions represents one of the most important contributions of Taking Power.
