Social Revolutions

France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions

'A revolution', writes Samuel P. Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies, 'is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activities and policies'.' In The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin provides a different, but comple...

Technological Revolutions

In skill-biased (de-skilling) technological revolutions learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (de-skilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow(fast-) to fast(slow-) learning workers, thereby reducing the relative and absolute wages of the former. The model of skill-biased (de-skilling) re...

Philosophical Revolutions

Oogenesis: Matrix Revolutions

The mechanism of egg-chamber elongation during Drosophila oogenesis has always been mysterious. A new study shows that the egg chambers spin around their long axis laying down polarised extracellular matrix, which acts as a molecular corset to restrict radial expansion.

Debating the Color Revolutions

In Lucan Way’s insightful, highly structural account of the color revolutions, they had to happen.1 Each was separately determined by the weakness of the authoritarian regimes. As Way puts it, “regime collapses have resulted more from authoritarian weakness than opposition strength” (62). For Way, it is even misleading to conceptualize these events as revolutions; they were authoritarian turnov...