In this talk, James Mahoney discusses a conjuctural theory of revolutions. Political revolutions are defined as rapid transformations of a sovereign territory’s political order, including its national government, political regime, and state institutions. Mahoney theorizes that these events occur as the conjuncture of two different kinds of conflicts at two different levels of analysis: (1) a political struggle at the domestic level involving challenges to a vulnerable regime-state; and (2) an ideational struggle at the global level between competing ideological systems for organizing the state and state-society relations. Mahoney uses this theory to make sense of political revolutions associated with three global ideologies: liberalism, corporatism, and socialism.
Discussant: Javier Perez Sandoval (Oxford)